For more than 20 years, Fred Vautour worked at Boston College. For about fifteen of those years he worked in the night shift as a caretaker, cleaning bathrooms, corridors and floors while most of the campus slept. Behind that work there was also a project that would change the future of its five children.
His name was Fred Vautour and worked as a custodian at Boston College.
He began working for the university in 1994, first as a cook and later as a night caretaker. That job also offered a very important advantage: the children of employees could take advantage of the exemption from university fees, provided, of course, to be allowed.
Fred had five children.
And all five did.
The first was Amy, who began his career at Boston College in 1998. In the following years, the other brothers arrived, until Alicia, the youngest, who graduated in May 2016.
For almost two decades, then, something special happened on the same campus.
At night Fred could find himself cleaning corridors, bathrooms and floors while one of his children slept in a university room not far away. Then he came back to do it the next night. And then again.
He wasn't looking for awards. He just kept coming to work, year after year.
In the end, five children obtained five degrees, benefiting from the exemption from the contract for the children of employees. Other university costs remained, partly covered by scholarships.
The total value of the fees that the family did not have to pay was estimated by CBS News in almost $700,000.
But reducing this to that figure would mean losing the most important part.
Fred had identified an opportunity and transformed it into a family project over 20 years. His work could not guarantee admission to his children: that they had to conquer it.
But he could make sure that, once he entered, the cost of studies did not become the burden that would condition their future.
Five children entered Boston College.
Five came out with a degree.
And behind those five studio titles there was also a father who, for years, had crossed the same campus when the classrooms were empty and the lights of the dorms began to turn off.
Sometimes a huge sacrifice doesn't look like a heroic gesture.
It just looks like someone who takes a mop and goes to work once again.