Love of research still courses through history teacher 10 years after retirement
Just like hobos traveled the nation to find work in the 19th and 20th centuries, Steve Cicero travels Butler County to find audiences for his historical presentations and trivia games.
Cicero’s nickname of the “History Hobo” is not just a funny bit of alliteration — it describes his continued drive to work, despite being retired after a long career teaching history in schools. It also grabs people’s attention.
“The first two people after I retired who ran into me said, ‘What are you up to now?’ I said, ‘I’m the History Hobo’ — they just cracked up,” Cicero said. “If merely the name makes people laugh, it gets their attention.”
Cicero was a teacher in Butler Area School District for 38 years, and retired from his job at Butler Senior High School in 2015. Even before retiring, Cicero had a reputation for elaborate classroom design, as well as for incorporating costumes — hats, in particular — that related to the topic he was covering with his students.
As he described it in the lead-up to his most recent talk — a presentation on Western Pennsylvania that includes trivia questions — the History Hobo persona is his “second act” in teaching history in Butler County. His second act allows him to expand his audience, he said, giving him almost endless topics to cover with various groups of people.
His topics now can also cover events that took place within his audience’s lifetime that, with time, have become well-known historical events.
“It occurred to me that retirement communities have a need for programming, and a lot of people who are older enjoy hearing about the good old days,” Cicero said, “the things that are memorable enough, or recent enough that people can recall them.”
On Feb. 9, Cicero hosted trivia at the Butler Area Public Library, where he wove questions into a presentation that chronicled significant events that took place in and around Pittsburgh since the city’s founding.
That presentation was built mainly around significant people and places. Much of the information came after Cicero posed a question to his audience. The audience wrote their answers on paper to multiple-choice questions like “Who invented the polio vaccine?” and “What journalist traveled the world in 80 days?” Cicero would then reveal the answer, and give more information on the people and what made them significant not just to Pennsylvania history, but to the world.
Although his questions pressed the significance of Western Pennsylvania to the world, Cicero normally ties all of his presentations to the area, in some way or another.
“Whatever the topic was, I would try and find things that have a local connection,” Cicero said. “A subject in eighth grade is from Civil War, and it took you as close as you can get to the present. There’s a lot of Butler history in that time frame.”
Cicero doesn’t just talk the talk — he walks the walk when it comes to being involved in local continuing education. He said he is a member of “almost every one of the historical groups in Butler County,” and promotes their programming every way he can.
“I’m a proponent of lifelong learning,” Cicero said. “I still do a program now which my colleagues grant me the privilege of doing. I go back to the now-intermediate high school and talk to them.”
Mackenzie Herold, executive director of the Butler County Historical Society, said Cicero has given broad talks, but he has also honed in on specific eras of Butler history, or Butler locations that lend themselves to historical exploration. She said he has been a member of the society and has supported the organization for longer than most people remember.
“He has done the history of Route 8 for us, which was really, really fun,” Herold said. “He has done a lot of presentations on the Little Red School House in Butler.”
Cicero said that although he retired from public school teaching, it wasn’t because of a lack of passion for the job. He said he continued to enjoy his job until the day he left it — which is evident by his continued engagement with county history, and also in his personal life, in which he spends a lot of time researching for his presentations and trivia events.
“I’ve probably learned a lot more about local history after I retired, but that’s because you don’t have the time to delve in,” he said of his teaching days.
Cicero’s life in the classroom was more than just a job, he said. The work got him out of bed in the morning.
“I don’t remember ever getting up and thinking ‘I don’t want to go to work today.’ I just loved what I did,” Cicero said.
Even during those public school days, Cicero used popular culture and local familiarity to draw students into his lessons, which he said was the first step in getting young people interested in historical topics.
“Either play music as the kids were walking into the room, or wear something that relates to what I was teaching,” Cicero said. “Most of the time it was hats. It gets their attention. Just bits and pieces that get people’s attention.”
A young man at the library trivia session Feb. 9 said he took Cicero’s history class when he was in high school. He commented to the people in attendance that he remembered his hats and outfits.
Herold said Cicero’s presentations have received good feedback from people who have seen him at the historical society.
“What hasn’t he done?” Herold said about the variety of Cicero’s presentation topics. “He’s just really passionate of making sure that the history of Butler gets out there in whatever way he can.”
Cicero said people can prepare for his trivia games by just reading about Butler and Western Pennsylvania. They don’t have to search too long before coming across a historic first or significant event that took place in the region, he said.
“History is all around us in Butler, you just have to know where to look,” Cicero said.
Cicero has a website containing information about him and his presentations at thehistoryhobo.com.
