Even after a Jan. 12 blaze gutted his Bronx apartment, his family members escaping with only the clothes on their backs and landing in a Harlem homeless shelter, custodian Ralph Nelson reported to work at his Flushing middle school, just as he had for 39 years. 

Like the three-alarm fire that began in a restaurant on the first floor of the apartment building, word spread quickly throughout the IS 237 community. School community members mobilized efficiently and extravagantly, as though they had waited for a concrete reason to shower Ralph Nelson with affection. 

Roseanne Kiviat, the chapter leader at IS 237, and her counterpart Gloria Nicodemi at East-West HS, whose schools share a building in Flushing, began collecting clothes, pots and pans, coats, anything and everything the family with an 11-year-old boy needed simply to leave the shelter. 

“Ralph attended school here, then became a paraprofessional and then, finally, a custodian,” says Kiviat. “This is a man who when I left and returned to the school 13 years later, remembered me and greeted me by name. He is like that with everybody. It was our chance to show him we love and honor him.” 

The generosity did not go unnoticed. “I’m a proud man and I don’t like to ask for anything,” says Nelson, 57, whose family just resettled in a three-bedroom apartment in the same building, albeit a section untouched by fire. “I’m still overwhelmed by what everybody’s done.” 

Ben Sherman, the principal of East-West, went to the shelter and took the family on a $700 shopping trip for emergency clothing. He also began a Go Fund Me page that has raised more than $14,000 — and is still growing. 

IS 237 music and chorus teacher Peter Valentine was among the first to notice something was wrong with the normally smiling Nelson — and to get him help. 

“Ralph’s a real mensch,” says Valentine. “He’s stoic. I would have been whining and complaining till the cows come home.”

Summing up the outpouring of good will in the aftermath of the disaster, Valentine said, “If he didn’t know it before, he knows it now: He is loved!”