Vincent Frattasio, 73; teacher, painter generous with time, work

When longtime Boston Latin Academy art teacher and free-lance illustrator Vincent Paul Frattasio displayed his watercolors in South Shore galleries, he had one goal in mind -- to not sell a single piece.

"He would post ridiculous prices on purpose," said his son, Christian, of Boston. "The idea wasn't to sell them. He just wanted to show his work. He wanted to eventually give them to friends and family."

Mr. Frattasio, longtime Boston Latin Academy softball coach and a Boston Golden Apple Award winner, died Tuesday at Massachusetts General Hospital after a fall last week in his Squantum home. He was 73.

The son of Italian immigrants, Mr. Frattasio grew up in Hyde Park, one of 10 children. Early on, he found quiet and solitude in a bustling house through painting and drawing, his son said.

Mr. Frattasio graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and received a master's degree from Boston State College.

A teacher for nearly four decades, he began his career at Hyde Park High School, where he taught art. After a brief stint as art director for the Boston school system, Mr. Frattasio began teaching at Boston Latin Academy in 1974.

While he was an advocate for perspective drawing, Mr. Frattasio made it a point to work a range of media into his curriculum, including projects that resulted in a 20-foot, paper-mache whale or a scaled-down replica of his students' three-decker Dorchester homes, said John Lavey, a longtime friend and colleague at Boston Latin Academy.

"He put his whole heart and soul into everything," Lavey said. "He wouldn't take a day off. He was all for the kids and all for the faculty."

If Boston Latin Academy were holding a fund-raiser, he would be the first to contribute his services, Lavey said. "In the fall, he would paint faces on a couple of hundred pumpkins, to be sold," he said. "He would spend his own money on the kids."

In 1991, he was one of 15 teachers to win the Boston Golden Apple Award.

Mr. Frattasio also was active in Boston Latin Academy athletics, most notably coaching the Boston Latin Dragons softball team for more than 25 years. The squad won a number of Boston City League championships during his tenure.

Standing at just 5 feet 1 inch, Mr. Frattasio liked to refer to a Smithsonian museum exhibit he had once seen that listed that height as "on the tall end of short," Christian Frattasio said. He always knew he had to work a little bit harder than others, he said.

"He never let any of that [his height] get in the way, and that was the approach he had in coaching and in teaching. It wasn't just about the athletics. He was teaching his kids, and specifically the softball girls, about life," Frattasio said. "He loved coaching. He saw it as a challenge. He wanted to coach these girls to prove that they could do anything that the guys could do."

Mr. Frattasio had eight sons and one daughter with Janice Frattasio, whom he married in 1959 and later divorced, and he enjoyed imparting his love for art to them, said his son, Noel, of Hanover.

Each year, he would help his children make kites for the Boston Kite Festival and they occasionally took home top prize, Noel Frattasio said.

A freelance illustrator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Mr. Frattasio also worked several other jobs, including carpentry and masonry, to help support his large family.

"He was a man universally talented," Christian Frattasio said. "He could do anything and he worked several jobs over the summers. But everything he did was with that artist's eye."

Hindered but not halted by a series of health issues during the past two decades, Mr. Frattasio continued to teach and coach until he retired in 1999.

In 2001, he married RuthAnn Wetherby of Squantum.

While his health problems continued until his death, Christian Frattasio said that education remained important to Mr. Frattasio and he was so impressed by the work done by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital that he decided to donate his body to Harvard Medical School.

"Education was always important to him from the get-go. He was always teaching, even in the end."

In addition to his wife, and sons, Christian and Noel, Mr. Frattasio leaves six other sons, Marc, Adam, and Damian, all of Pembroke, Christopher of San Diego, Calif., and Jonathan and Seth, both of Hanover; a daughter, Mara of Norway; sisters Anna Holmes of Stoughton, Lola DiScuillo of New Seabury, Louise Saluti of Sandwich, and Theresa Lynch of Kingston; brothers Alfred of Halifax and Daniel of Port Charlotte, Fla.; two granddaughters, and five grandsons.

A funeral Mass will be said at 11:30 this morning in Sacred Heart Church in North Quincy.