Inducted in 2015
Musician
Composer of "The RAM"

He never attended Fordham Prep or the Second Division of St. John’s College as the school was still sometimes known in his day. He never taught a class, nor did he ever serve on the Prep administration, staff or Board of Trustees.  As far as we know, he never coached a Prep team — not on the gridiron nor in the oratorical arena.  And since he would never have the chance to marry or have children, no sons’ or grandsons’ names would ever grace the school’s rosters. He laid no Prep cornerstone; he built no Prep building; his name is enshrined on no list of benefactors. 

And yet, what this young man gave to the Prep during his short life would be an enduring gift beyond all reckoning — he gave us “The Ram.”

John Ignatius Coveney was born on July 29, 1885 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, today a neighborhood of Boston. His father was James Sheehan Coveney, a carpenter and contractor from County Cork in Ireland. His mother, Mary Punch Coveney was a devout homemaker with a great devotion to Our Lady who directed various groups in the local parish. James and Mary were also involved in local real estate. 

John, who seems to have often gone by his middle name, Ignatius, and sometimes by the nickname Nace, grew up with nine brothers and sisters: Nora, Dennis, Philip, James, Mary, Daniel, Matilda, Charles and Patrick. As was all too common in those days, another sister, Margaret, would die in infancy. He attended the grammar and high schools of Boston College, and stayed on for part of what we would consider his college years — like Fordham, Boston College was still in the process of formally separating and defining its divisions in the early 1900s. 

During his school years in the South End, Coveney was a footballer and a debater and was involved in the spiritual life of the school. A self-taught musician, John Ignatius had also begun to stretch his musical wings, composing “The Class of 1903 March” and “The Boston Americans March (Two Step)” commemorating the victory of the Red Sox (then the Americans) in the first World Series. 

In 1904, John Ignatius and his brother James came to Fordham: Nace to continue his studies on the college level, and Jimmy to complete what we would call high school. In fact, James Coveney is considered a member of the Prep Class of 1905. 

With his handsome smile, confident charm, and many talents, the broad-shouldered John Ignatius Coveney was soon as big a hit in the Bronx as he had been back in Boston. Straightaway the young Bay Stater began to make friends at Rose Hill.

In the words of his friend, Stanley Quinn, Class of 1908:

Dreamer, worker, artist and artisan, at once practical and idealistic, John Coveney's character was one of agreeable contradictions. He would work for hours over some problem of the classroom with careful, methodical perseverance until the matter was solved. And then he would while away an evening by himself over the strings of his guitar. He would don his football togs and spend an afternoon in the hurly-burly of the gridiron, and then sit down to compose a triolet for the Monthly or a melody for a song.

With Quinn, Coveney would write A College Complication, a musical comedy that premiered on St. Patrick’s Day of 1906 in a newly dedicated Collins Auditorium. By all accounts, it was very well received.

But of all the poems and tunes he would pen at Rose Hill, it was his 1905 composition that would link the names Coveney and Fordham forever. That year, late at night, in his dorm room in Dealy Hall, named for fellow Hall of Honor inductee, Fr. Patrick Dealy, SJ, John Ignatius Coveney composed Fordham’s fight song, “The Ram.”

Some years before, at an Army-Fordham game in 1893, the students had come up with a cheer, “One dham, two dham, three dham — Fordham!” However, because of objections by school authorities to its similarity in sound (deliberate or accidental) to the word damn, the shout was changed to ram sometime in the early 1900s — "One ram, two ram, three ram, Fordham!" And so the Fordham Ram was born — apparently without a single ewe in sight. 

Coveney took the simple, vaguely vulgar cheer that in time, perhaps, may have passed from institutional memory, and he elevated it into something exponentially more powerful. “The Ram” would become a stirring rally cry, an expression of Rose Hill pride, an immortal Fordham mantra, and an indispensable part of school culture on both the Prep and University levels.

“The Fordham Ram” was debuted on May 1, 1905 at Carnegie Hall at an evening of Fordham music and drama. Coveney himself conducted, changing school history forever with the wave of his baton.

Of John Ignatius Coveney, it has been written that in his own way he had done as much as several generations of Jesuits to give Fordham what any school needs to carry on: a unique spirit and an identity. He had struck the right chord at the right moment.

To echo Coveney’s famous lyric, for Old St. John's College in Fordham, New York, the early 1900s was a time “to do or die” as Archbishop’s Hughes’ quaint little boarding school in the country was figuring out what it was going to be in the 20th century as the city grew up all around it.

After his 1906 graduation from the University, J. Ignatius Coveney stayed in New York to pursue a career in music. He did not go on to write “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” as the old campus stories go, but he was an orchestra leader for a time with one of Charles Frohman’s companies — Frohman was a major American theatrical producer of the day.

“The Ram,” however, has remained his great musical legacy. 

John Ignatius Coveney died of a fever on November 6, 1911. He did not live to see his 27th birthday.  Fordham lore has sometimes connected his passing to the Spanish Flu, but 1911 would have been a few years before the terrible pandemic.  

On June 13, 1931, on the occasion of their 25th reunion, John Ignatius’ classmates from the College Class of 1906 presented a bronze plaque in his honor. It hangs today in the Rose Hill Gymnasium where Coveney’s song is triumphantly sung by every newly-minted Prep graduate during the recessional at Commencement.

Hail, men of Fordham, hail!
On to the fray.
Once more our foes assail
In strong array.
Once more the Old Maroon
Wave on high,
And sing our battle song —
We do or die!

(Let us cheer)
With a Ram, a Ram, a Ram for loyalty.
(Let us cheer)
With a Ram, a Ram, a Ram for victory.
(Let us off) to the fight, the fight,
To win our laurels bright!