I reached John Cavalletto by phone on a recent afternoon, when John and his wife Connie were sitting outside in the sun, watching the birds. He was 86 years old and had just celebrated a birthday. He sounded like a man at peace with everything he'd built.

As we spoke, it became clear that that peace is earned.

A product of Sesser, Illinois — where his father worked the coal mines at Waltonville and his mother's family had deep roots — John Cavalletto came to Salem in 1980 after 12 years as head basketball coach at Mater Dei High School, where he'd taken a team to fourth place in the 1974 state tournament. He arrived as the school's full-time athletic director, stepping into a role that had been left open by the passing of Bob Eller. It was the beginning of 46 years in Salem that neither he nor Connie ever expected to last quite so long — and neither would trade.

It wasn't long after arriving that John noticed something missing. Salem had produced exceptional athletes and graduates who'd gone on to represent their community well. There was no formal way to honor them. He brought the idea of a Hall of Fame to the board.

"I said, I think we should honor those people," he recalled. "The ones that are good kids and have done well and represent the community."

But from the beginning, he was clear about what the Hall of Fame would not be. It wasn't a record book. Nominations triggered a quiet investigation — conversations with community members, questions asked around town, a collective accounting of who a person had become after the final whistle. "I wanted to make sure we didn't put somebody in the Hall of Fame who'd been in jail or prison or something like that," he said. Character and integrity had to come first. Athletic accomplishment was the floor, not the ceiling. The committee he assembled — longtime Salem sports followers like Harold Blank, Annie Lou Eller, and Mr. Larimer — knew the community well enough to know the difference.

The same philosophy shaped everything about how John worked. As the school eventually moved him from athletic director to assistant principal to principal, his approach to students rarely changed. When a kid landed in his office, John wanted to hear their side first. He treated them like adults. He corrected rather than punished.

"I was a weak Italian, I'll tell you the truth about it," he said, with a laugh in his voice. "I didn't really like to punish a child. I tried to correct them."

He talked with kids, not at them — his own phrase, said twice and clearly meant. And somehow, over the years, fewer and fewer students found their way to his office. He doesn't remember sending many away. The ones he does remember, he mostly remembers not seeing again. Now, when former students spot him around town, they often approach to introduce themselves. A lot of them say the same thing: I was never in your office. John's response is always the same: Well, I don't remember that you were.

It's become a small badge of honor, on both sides.

The decision to become an educator crystallized at a summer camp at Little Grassy Lake near SIU — the same camp where John and Connie, classmates in Sesser, first really got to know each other. A coach they both admired recruited them to help work with children with disabilities. The pitch included the promise of basketball practice. "Once we got there," John said, "we never saw basketball. We were busy feeding mouths and wiping butts and carrying kids here and carrying kids there, canoeing." He came back the next summer. And the next. Eventually, he ran the camp himself for five or six summers.

After retiring from education, he ran for the Illinois House of Representatives — losing the first race, running again with the backing of Frank Watson and Dave Luechtefeld, and winning. He served ten years, from 2008 to 2018. The accomplishment he and Connie are most proud of from those years: a $10 million building on the campus of Kaskaskia College that had sat empty after the state moved a disease lab to Decatur. John crossed the aisle, pulled every string he had, and got it transferred to the college for one dollar. Governor Quinn signed it over. It's now called the John D. Cavalletto Agriculture Center.

His son John Jr. — who graduated from Salem in 1988 — was inducted into the very Hall of Fame his father founded, twice, for his play on the football team. John had nothing to do with the selection; he'd already handed off the committee by then. He seems to find this quietly satisfying.

All three of his sons live within 20 minutes of Salem. The two great-grandchildren — Harlan, five, and Hutton, one and a half — are close enough that John and Connie see them at least once a week. Connie notes they have a hard time keeping up with them.

"Life is a big bowl, and there are a lot of things inside of it," John said near the end of the conversation. "You stir it up every day — in the classroom, on the athletic field, at home with your mom and your dad and your friends. And I think that's what makes a Hall of Famer."