Jon C. Whalen inherited his mother’s house in upstate Auburn after she died in 1987, and shuttled back and forth so frequently he eventually made his hometown part of his permanent address.
The former Manhasset High School English teacher reconnected with old friends and enjoyed the small-town environment, his son Bernard Whalen said, attending Auburn Doubledays baseball games and taking his boat out on the Finger Lakes.
And until he died July 12 at Auburn Community Hospital to congestive heart failure at age 79, Bernard said his father was a “voracious reader,” always with a book in hand, be it the classics to how-tos and sports.
“He liked the small-time thing,” Bernard said. “He enjoyed that, say, more than Yankee Stadium, all that a small town offers.”
An army veteran and former state corrections officer, Jon Whalen first taught at Fulton G. Ray Bodley High School near Oswego before a 26-year career at Manhasset High School from 1970-96 as a teacher and administrator.
He taught literature, writing and journalism classes at Manhasset, and served as faculty advisor to the school’s student newspaper, Indian Ink.
Then a College Point, Queens resident, Whalen brought his three sons, Bernard, Frank and Michael to school with him, and his students would often gather to hear tales of his correctional days.
“He wasn’t a fresh-out-of-college, 22-year-old teacher. He had a lot of life experience by the time he got to Manhasset,” said Bernard, of West Hempstead, a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. “The toughest kid he was going to come across was nothing to what he was dealing with in the maximum-security prisons.”
Upon graduating from Central High School in Auburn in 1954, Whalen joined the 3rd Armored Cavalry and was sent to the Bavarian town of Bayreuth at the border of East and West Germany, where Bernard said “if there ever was going to be an attack, it would be there.”
Whalen met and married his wife Vera in Germany, where Bernard was born, and the family moved back to the United States in 1958 following Jon’s discharge.
From 1960-66, Whalen was a corrections officer at the Auburn Correctional Facility and earned a degree in English literature from the State University of New York at Oswego.
According to an obituary from the Whalen family, becoming a teacher was Jon’s lifelong dream.
“I think he really left his mark on Manhasset,” Bernard said. “I’d posted news of his death on a few websites and to see alumni post stories about my father, just hundreds of comments about the kind of teacher he was, it was really special.”
Following his retirement, Whalen and Bernard co-authored two books, a novel called “Justifiable Homicide” and, more recently, “The NYPD’s First Fifty Years: Politicians, Police Commissioners and Patrolmen.”
The father-and-son duo split writing duties on the latter title, released earlier this year by Potomac Books, with Bernard using his access to department records and Jon taking on the bulk of copy editing duties.
“We worked very well together, and we agreed on just about everything in our weekly or semiweekly meetings on what we were going to do,” Jon told Blank Slate Media in early June. “There wasn’t really any friction because we had it all mapped out, and [Bernie] was very instrumental, because he is a cop, in getting the police procedure down, so everything was real.”
Bernard said he thinks his father was proud he joined the police department, and that Frank and Michael also went into public service, with the United States Postal Service and New York City Fire Department, respectively.
“Had he stayed [in corrections], I have no doubt [Jon] would have been a warden,” he said. “He scored very highly on his certification exams. He would have done very well in the corrections system.”
Whalen is survived by his three sons, five grandchildren, a great-granddaughter and several nieces and nephews, having been predeceased by his wife, daughter-in-law Karen, and sisters-in-law Mary and Lois Whalen.
He was buried with full military honors at St. Joseph Cemetery in Auburn.
