Yorktown, Cortlandt and surroundings

It was an exciting morning at Peekskill Middle School as students greeted former Yankees manager and current L.A. Dodgers manager Joe Torre with rousing applause.

But Torre wasn’t there to talk baseball. Instead, he opened up to the beaming crowd of 6-8th graders about his own unhappy childhood. Torre was raised in an abusive household, he said, one where his father beat his mother. His father, he explained, never laid a hand on him, but it still left him scared and frightened to go home.

The experience, he said, left him struggling for a long time with issues of guilt and self-confidence.

In 2005, through his Safe at Home Foundation, Torre started schools program, Margaret’s Place—named after his mom—to give kids a place to talk to counselors about violence-related issues. The program is in partnership with Westchester Jewish Community Services (WJCS) and is currently in four Westchester County schools.

At Peekskill, the program launched in May and has been a success, officials said. To learn more about Safe at Home, visit their Web site here. To learn more about WJCS and its programs, go here. For more on the story, check out lohud.com and The Journal News tomorrow.

In the meantime, here are some photos I took of Torre’s visit.