One Happy Old Priest

By Thomas K. Sullivan

In One Happy Old Priest, Father Thomas Sullivan looks back on his eighty years as a catholic, a life that includes both family and scores of fine seminarians, priests, nuns, and parishioners. With an honest and rollicking writing style, Father Sullivan recreates moments that stand out in his childhood, seminary education, priest training, and life as a foreign missionary and pastor stateside. One Happy Old Priest is one mans look at how the church has cultivated, preserved, and navigated decades of sometimes unwelcome change. The volume includes photographs of family, priests, nuns, and parishioners. An appendix lists Columban Fathers mentioned in the text, a testament of the many who dedicated their lives to the service of the church. The epilogue draws attention to the man Father Sullivan believes represents the best of what the church has to offer, then and now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781465328823

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Copyright © 2010 by Thomas K. Sullivan.

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Contents

Foreword

Part 1

My Childhood

The Cathedral Latin School

Third Year Student

A Boarding Student

A Spiritual Year, 1946-1947

Philosophy Studies, Omaha (1947-1949)

First Two Years of Theology Studies

3rd and 4th Theology Years

Off To Korea

Crossing the Pacific

Arrival in Seoul

The Servants and the Chaplains

Part-Time Chaplain

Language Study

Men of the Cloth

Saying Goodbye to the Korean Staff and Getting Our Parish Appointments

Father Jack Lynch and Father Pat McGowan

A Church with Siege Walls

Peduru and Robbie

Part 2

Visiting My Church

The Typhoon

A Feast Day Party

Our Catholic Villages

Starting in Yang Yang

Bishop Quinlan

The Christmas Party, 1955

Nuns from the West and the East

My First Assistant

Visitors from Home

We Find Each Other Amusing

Sister Stephanie

Building Chapels

The Big Snow

Our Expanding Clan: Converts

Nicodemus

Flour from America

An Independent Man

The Ivory Tower

Central Heating

Getting Started on the Convent

John Chang and Korean Politics

The Summer of 1960

Part 3

Home Leave, 1961

The End of Home Leave, 1962

Mike and Joanna

Father P. J. McGlinchey

A Busy Springtime

Pretty Polly Pak

The Tractor

Jack Lynch and Phil Crosbie

A Little Seminary

Friends in Kangnung

Confirmations

The Principal’s Funk

Marriage Cases

Assistant Priests

Sick Calls

Market Days

Another Time of Change

Father Gerry French

Seoul

My Motorcycle

A Teenage Retreat

A New Bishop

Working in the Bishop’s House

The Church in the Modern World

1967

Part 4

Sunday Night Bridge

Two Funerals

Family Matters

Joan

St. Louis University People

Professors at St. Louis University

The Chain of Being

Finishing Up at St. Louis University

The Old and the New

Enjoying Wisconsin and Our Students

The Writers Workshop

I Like Being a Priest

St. Patrick’s Day with Outsiders

Connecting with Bishop Tanner

The Korean Center

San Jose’s Priests, Sisters, and Dogs

Teaching Religion at Bishop Kenny

Becoming a Diocesan Priest

Nunny’s Priest

The Teachers Lounge

Summer, 1975

Crescent City

Part 5

Cursillo

Fernandina Beach

A People’s Parish

First Look at St. Paul’s

The Parish Council

Teaching

Sidney Simmons

Renovations

Personal Things

The John Dialogues

Father Kelly and Father Corry

Our Catholic Identity

Class Plays

Retirement

Epilogue

Appendix, Columban Fathers Mentioned

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Priests are supposed to observe silence during their annual retreat, but one evening we talk away in the kitchen until someone says, We’ve solved the Church’s problems, lets get to bed. Of course we haven’t solved the Church’s problems; that’s just our yearly joke.

In this book I hope I have come up with a way for identifying our problems. I set myself to give an honest account of the eighty years since I found myself a two-year-old boy in a Catholic family. Enlightened by its hind sights, my book might show us ways to solving our problems.

With my account turning up eight decades of problems, it has also turned up much that delights. I am referring to stories that have me laughing. I refer as well to stories about great priests and nuns. It is my earnest prayer that their good name is not tarnished by recent scandals.

Part 1

Education and Seminary Years

My Childhood

The Depression came in ’29 as I was turning two. I have early memories of sitting on the back porch keeping homeless guys company while they shoveled in plates of congealed cornmeal that we called fried mush. Fried mush was a family joke with us. Our Dad, baptized Francis Michael, and signing himself F.M. Sullivan, used to say the F.M. stood for fried mush. He liked letting on that the family treated him like a dish you’d serve on the back steps.

Along with the homeless, I had men friends like Mr. Shafer who lived ten doors down from us. One day he came out when I called, O, Mister Shafer! Sitting down on the step next to me he put three caramels into my lap. I was looking at the treasure when he reached for one caramel, and bringing it up to his left eye, he said, Tommy, I think you have a very special caramel here.

What is it?

I think this is the kind of caramel that will turn into an all-day sucker if you leave it in the icebox for two hours.

Let’s try it.

Okay, I’ll put it in Mrs. Shafer’s ice box and you come back after you have your nap. After a hurried nap I came back, and when we opened the icebox we actually found a wonderful all-day sucker. For years I never unwrapped a caramel without first checking if it were the kind that turns into a sucker.

Along with old men friends I had little girl friends like Iggy who boarded across the street with the Lee family. Her mother had left her there saying, I’m going to Chicago. That’s all Iggy and I knew about it: her mother was going to Chicago, so week after week we’d sit in the grass saying, She was going to Chicago. I wonder if she’s there yet. The Lee family and Iggy moved out, and some people named Randall moved in. Mr. Randall was really crabby, but he kept Snookie Laser and me in ice cream money. He was giving Snooks dimes for something nasty he had her do.

My boy friends were Billy Robbins and Jimmy Bryant. Billy Robbins was irreligious, always ramming people with his tricycle. Jimmy Bryant was a regular at Dr. Frye’s Methodist Church. We played there on weekdays, chasing each other in and out, and banging the church’s screen doors.

My sister Peggy was in all my memories. My mother bathed us together in the sink, rubbing her knuckles into our skulls. Even in the sink like that, Peggy and I were enemies. It took a long time for me to see her side of things. When she came along as the fourth girl our brother Frank wouldn’t look at her, but I arrived and was an instant favorite. Our oldest sister Kay bought me a toy sailboat with her first salary at Nugent’s. Frank got me football pants and shoulder pads. They all spoiled their little brother, but not their little sister.

When I started kindergarten our sister Joan was in the eighth grade, and she was so good looking that the rest of us were just Joan’s brothers and sisters. That was a steady heartache for the next girl, Prudy. But for all Joan’s fame, my only clear memory of her is seeing her on stage with her class singing, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. Prudy was more of a presence. Along with Peg, we walked to Epiphany, skipping backwards down Odell to buck the cold winds. We would tug at our cream colored stockings that didn’t stay up with the garters mother cut from a roll of elastic.

Long before my school years I have a memory of the three of us on a Sunday morning. I was in my highchair while Prue and Peggy were eating toast and jelly and talking about movie stars at the kitchen table. The toast was burning, and when Prudy got it with two fingers, and rushed over to the sink I knew what was coming. When she had scraped most of the black off she dropped it on my tray, saying its okay, honey.

Flipping the tray over my head and slipping to the floor, I ran for the front door with Peg after me. I got the door closed between us and turned to find Prudy who had sped around the house, scaled the front steps, and was getting her hands on me. As she lunged for a better grasp I twisted, and as I spun backwards I plunged through the full-length window next to the front door.

Peg got the door open, and finding me on the porch, covered with glass and blood, she stood there moaning, Oh, honey, oh honey. But Prudy knew what to do. She rushed upstairs, and came back with a quarter she had hidden in her underwear drawer. Pressing it into my fist, and bringing her face down to mine, she hissed, Never tell.

For high school Prudy boarded at the Ursuline Academy in Arcadia, Missouri, only getting home a few weekends a year. One Sunday Peggy and I missed seeing her before she went back. The two of us had gone to the afternoon movie at the Columbia, carrying nickels to ride the bus home to see Prudy one more time. With our being too little to be noticed at the bus stop in front of the Columbia, three buses passed right by. And remembering our grief at not seeing Prudy again, I understand the depth of feelings kids can have for each other.

When I turned five in January 1933, mother put me in public school kindergarten. I was clumsy at making paper chains that linked colored loops of paper with paste, getting paste all over everything. They didn’t hit you at the public school; that was to come at the Catholic school. In September mother transferred me to Epiphany. I thought the reason I couldn’t stay at the republic school was because we were Democrats.

I wasn’t mature enough for first grade, so they put me back in their kindergarten that they called Primer. I’d sit on our side of the room filled with awe of the first graders. Once, Sister Teresita called on Tony Valente to spell gas. He stood up and said, Gas: G-A-S. Gas. He sat down, and I said to myself, I’ll never be able to do that.

I had no idea what I was doing wrong, but sometimes Sister Teresita made me sit in the wastebasket. I tried not to cry, because I knew it looked bad to cry in the wastebasket, but I just couldn’t help it.

In first grade we had recess with the big kids, and before going out we could buy penny candies from a painted cake tin Sister kept in her desk. With no salary the Sisters sold those penny candies to buy things like paper and stamps for letters home.

In catechism we learned, God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next, but I heard it as, be happy with him forever in the nest. I’d sit there looking across to a tree in the convent yard, wondering how I could be happy forever in a nest in that tree.

Second grade with Sister Anne Vincenta was horrors. We had wooden pens we bought for a nickel and nibs that were three a penny. Every desk had an ink well you had to dip in and out of without blotting your paper. Sister had three degrees of punishments: a simple slap for an ink blot, a ruler across your knuckles for stuff she really didn’t like, and a trip to the principal for back talk.

The principal, Sister Rosalie, had a red face. When she asked me, What did you say to Sister? I said, I didn’t say anything to her. Sister Rosalie hit me hard, saying, You don’t call Sister ‘her,’ you call her ‘Sister.’ You can’t use pronouns for nuns.

I did the smartest thing ever once when Sister Anne Vincenta sent me to see Sister Rosalie. Standing outside Sister Rosalie’s room, scared to death, I noticed the front door of the school was open, so I walked out and wandered home, with no one ever asking about it.

On a Saturday in February when I was in the second grade, I went down a hill on a sled hitting a tree, and I was unconscious till Monday evening. Our mean grandmother, bending her face into mine woke me up. She was saying, That’s what you get for not warshing your face. A bad thing in the hospital was the man next to me groaning, and then dying. Another bad thing was lying on a stretcher waiting for an X-ray in the hospital basement. A man with a red beard stood staring down at me. He walked on, but he kept coming back in my dreams. The good thing that happened to me in the hospital was that I got forty-seven Valentines.

I stayed home sick the rest of the second grade. They let me into third grade and it was a snap. The pastor’s sweet niece was our teacher. Once at lunchtime when some kids were chasing me, I ran into the church. Seeing Miss Coleman there praying, I knelt by the votive candles and after lighting one I made a lot of noise dropping two pennies in the slot. It worked, because that afternoon Miss Coleman told the class she had seen something beautiful at lunchtime.

I had missed first Confession and Communion, but Miss Coleman said I was ready for Confirmation. It was at noon on Sunday. When Martin Powers, my sponsor, gave me a half dollar I took off in my white suit and red tie. At first I bought an all-day sucker, but it was going too slow, so I turned to ice cream cones. After dark, when they found me sitting on a curb, I was soiled all over with chocolate ice cream and orange ice.

I know we had Sister Anne Frances for fourth grade, but I can’t remember a thing we learned. Now, when I forget something I tell myself, Not to worry! I don’t remember anything from the fourth grade, and I still got by.

From fourth grade on, mother and I spent a lot of time together. I am reminded of this when I page through her diaries, noting how many movies we took in.

When I was in the fourth grade the whole school was practicing for Holy Thursday, and I was feeling great walking the aisles and singing the Pange Lingua. Out of nowhere, Sister Rosalie appeared and slapped me, asking, Who told you that you could sing? At home my mother, sitting on the piano bench with her feet not reaching the pedals, would call me over. Come on Bozo Butts, let’s get you singing. And I would bellow out songs.

After my fourth year at Epiphany, Peggy got us transferred to the public school where she had friends. The folks didn’t mind saving a dollar a month tuition on both of us. I remember one morning in May at public school, lined up behind Norman Block. I pulled back his waistband for a peek, and I asked, As hot as it is how come you’re still wearing underwear? That got me a lot of abuse: Dirty Irish Catholics don’t wear underwear.

The worst thing about being in public school was going once a week to Epiphany for religion class. My parents would commit a mortal sin if I didn’t go, and going there felt like a mortal sin to me. Sister Anne Celestine turned that around with a smile. It’s always so nice seeing you, Thomas. Her kindness prompted me to go back to Epiphany after Peggy graduated.

As kids we were always at Mass on Sundays, and I remember thinking about it once when we were playing hockey in the alley. We played on roller skates, whacking at a crushed tin can with old broomsticks. Anyway, a question suddenly stopped me in mid-play: What would happen to someone if they didn’t go to Sunday Mass? I couldn’t find an answer, so I got back in the game.

Dad and Peggy and I often walked to Mass together. Before going into Mass, Dad would give Peg and me nickels for the collection. Then after we came out he would give each of us a Sunday nickel to take to the corner store. Coming out from Mass one Sunday we walked down Smiley and were cutting through a vacant lot when we stopped and asked Dad for our Sunday nickels. He said, What I gave you for the collection—that was all I had. We couldn’t believe our dad could be so stupid, giving his only nickels to the church.

Sometimes the older girls would walk to church with us, giving Dad and Charlie Stevens a chance for their joke: Charlie, you’ve got the prettiest daughters in the parish. No, no, Francis, you’ve got the prettiest daughters in the parish. When the girls all came we would stop on the way home for cold cokes. I was proud of my sisters.

When I was eleven, coming down Smiley from Mass one Sunday, I said to Dad, I listened to what Father said at Mass. It was pretty good. Probably other kids under eleven never listened either. Another Sunday after Mass my brother Frank was with us, and I asked him, If Jesus was so good, why’d they want to kill him? I remember the speed with which Frank came back with: It was jealousy, nothing but jealousy.

Father Curtin came to Epiphany when we were in the seventh grade, and he had us learning the Latin answers for Mass. Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis. May the Lord receive this sacrifice from your hands. I don’t think priests today have the clout to make kids memorize two pages of a foreign language. Often after setting up the altar for early Mass I’d stand in the doorway to the sanctuary, saying over to myself the words I was taught to say after setting the table: Bread, butter, salt, pepper, sugar, cream, napkins.

For Father English’s Mass I had to set the alarm to be there at six. Once in winter I set the clock wrong, getting up and out at four instead of five. After running through the snow to a locked church I squatted against the door until Michael Cashin, the Irish janitor, found me. He scooped me up, setting me into his chair in front of the furnace where I slept until midmorning.

We had some trees we called stink-heaven trees that started out as eight-foot spikes we could break off for pole vaults. I was rocking one of them when it snapped, splitting my scalp. The boys half-carried me to Doctor Abel, who pulled the sides of the gash together with staples, crowning his work with a big white patch. I couldn’t serve Mass like that, so after getting into my cassock and surplice, I put on one of my Dad’s felt hats. Pulling the brim down like a detective, I went around to the priest’s sacristy where Father Curtin said, No way, kid.

Tommy Stack and I often served together, and we’d fight over who held the paten for Communion. The girls raising their faces for Communion were so beautiful. From the first grade, I was in love with Fay McDonald. Maybe it was more shame than love. Her high white shoes made me ashamed of my shoes with cardboard showing through holes in the soles.

I’m surprised at my memories of shame. It had me doing things that angered my Dad. One morning when I was seven he came in crabby from working nights, and he found me cutting off big tufts of my ugly hair. Another time, when Dad was keeping us while mother visited cousins in Indiana, I was ashamed of my shoes and I threw them down a sewer. For once I heard Dad curse. For Christ’s sake, Tom!

I disobeyed my Dad. He was always complaining about people not putting the scissors back in the door of mother’s sewing machine in the kitchen. This time he was standing there by the sewing machine, fuming over the scissors not being there. When I found them for him he kept standing there. Okay, Tom, he said, See that concrete block I put out there for your mother to stand on to stretch up to hook up the clothes line?

Yes.

Well, now, get a hammer, and put the scissors on that block, and bust them.

Why?

If I knew we don’t have any scissors I won’t waste half my life looking for them.

By the eighth grade my feelings for Fay had become an obsession with romance itself. We had great dances in the basements of classmates, with Fay’s father always bringing her to the dance and picking her up afterwards. That being so, I was in seventh heaven when I had asked Fay to be my date at one of the parties, and she not only said yes, she also suggested I walk her home.

It was the most romantic experience of my youth. I was walking with this wonderful girl, skipping along in a dream. Then from twenty paces back, I heard Fay calling, Its okay, Tommy, you just go on ahead. I’ll catch up when you get to my porch.

The Cathedral Latin School

It was September 1942 when I started at the Cathedral Latin School, a renovated three-story mansion with some of the priests living on the third floor. Our classrooms were on the second floor. A grand stairway descended from the classrooms to the library and chapel, but that stairway was for the priests. We kids rattled up and down dingy steps in the back.

That first day we were crowded in the noisy second floor hallway when a guy called to me, Sullivan, you’re on the list for One B. You go in that door. I pushed my way into a long classroom that had once been three adjoining bedrooms. There was a row of desks by the windows, with another row against the inside wall, and there were ten pairs of desks down the middle of the room. The desks had tops that lift up, letting you get into them. Seeing guys claiming desks, I slipped into the second of the double desks from the front, patting the place next to me, and I called to Len Kopsky from Epiphany, Hey, Len! Hey, Len! Here.

Len brightened up, and headed toward me, but an odd-looking boy pushed into the seat, sticking his hand out to me. I’m Wenceslaus Nollick, from St. John Nepomunk. Hey, know what? We’ve got higher IQs than the guys in One A.

That was it. Thirty-seven of us with IQs over 120 were put in One B. Thirty-seven kids with IQs under 120 were put in One A. Johnny Wurm, the only one of us to become a bishop, started in One A. (Years later, John, on his way up the Church’s ladder, was serving as principal of a high school we had for bright girls, and he told me, I’ve got the lowest IQ in this school.)

Through our Epiphany years Len Kopsky was our fastest runner and our top student, and he came to me when he heard I was going to the seminary. Say, Tom, I have a serious question. It’s this. When did the Holy Spirit call you to be a priest? I told him that nothing liked that happened. You can just go to the Latin School if they’ll take you. Our house had been a place where young priests dropped in for a bridge game or for a song at my mother’s piano. I chose the seminary because I wanted to be like them. When I assured Len he didn’t need a definite call, he came along, but he was never convinced you could be a priest just because you wanted to be.

Wenceslaus hadn’t been next to me an hour before he pulled a favorite stunt of his. He lifted his desktop, pulled a pickle from his lunch bag, and chomped on it. He was scrooched down, full of his cleverness, when Father Poelker came in.

Listen, you guys. Starting here at this first desk on the inside row, I want each of you to stand, give your last name, your parish, then sit down. The second year kids had told us about Father Poelker, how he liked coming up behind kids, whacking them on the head with his knuckles. After the nuns with their high voices, the boys liked our manly teachers. Father Poelker had been a great soccer fullback. You could see it in his huge thighs.

The first kid on the inside wall stood up. Cahalin, St. Margaret’s.

Then, Kohler, Blessed Sacrament.

Hoffman, St. Englebert’s.

Boyle, St. Barbara’s.

Many of the kids were soccer players too. They had battled each other for the honor of their inner city parishes. I was a weakling from the suburbs.

Mullen, St. Margaret’s.

Capizzi, St. Ambrose.

From the very back we heard, Ross, of Holy Ghost.

Father Poelker said, Stand up, Ross.

Ross said, I am standing, Father.

John Ross was to serve many years as a Marist priest. Joe Capizzi once gave me a pair of U.S. Navy double-ply socks. He was drowned as a navy chaplain. Pat Boyle has been a Trappist monk in Utah for maybe sixty years.

Soccer was my big concern my first year at the Latin School, and that was odd, since I couldn’t play the game. At recess our soccer stars took up the whole playground kicking a beach ball around. I’d wait for it to come to me, but when I’d take a swipe at it, someone would shout, Hey, Sullivan, girls kick with their toes, boys use their insteps. My instep, I guessed, was the inside of my foot. Evenings, in the bedroom I practiced twisting my leg to kick with the inside of my foot. My Dad came in.

What-a-ya doin?

Nothing.

I was trying to be manly, but I had a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, and four sisters who were pushing me the other way. I could dance, but I couldn’t kick with my instep.

The Latin School was just a two-year school, and there were no other ones like it, but on Saturdays we always had some school to field a junior varsity against us at Fairgrounds Park. To get there, I’d take the Tower Grove bus into where the Sarah Avenue streetcar turned around, and I’d wait there for the kids from St. Margaret’s. Seven boys from the eighth grade class at St. Margaret’s had entered the seminary. Some of them might say, Hi when they got on the streetcar, but then they’d leave me alone across the aisle. Wanting to be like them I put up with the streetcar’s hard cane seat and would stand for hours on the freezing sidelines at Fairgrounds Park.

That winter, seven of us had all A’s on our report cards, and our names appeared in the diocesan newspaper. Len was one of them. Harold Voelker from Louise de Marillac was another. There was Jerry McLaughlin, a neat dresser from St. Barbara’s, and Jim Cahalin, one of St. Margaret’s soccer players. We were not a group that hung out together. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1943 Harold Voelker and I got together for a fine day. We’d heard that the guys with Irish names out at the Prep Sem were playing soccer against the kids with German names. With a large student body to choose from, both my Irish team and Harold’s German team could be strong. Harold had a ten-mile ride through town to my house before we could pedal the five miles out to the seminary. Harold was tall and blond. He had what seemed to be a slight speech impediment, but it was only his hesitancy at expressing his views.

The diocese owned a wooded section of St. Louis County that was so huge that the major seminary and the minor seminary campuses on that tract were more than a mile apart. The major seminary was named for Archbishop Kenrick who led the opposition to the declaration on papal infallibility at Vatican I. While Kenrick’s massive yellow brick buildings hid themselves in the tall oaks, the prep seminary’s golden dome towered over all of St. Louis County. It was such a wonderful sight for Harold and me that Paddy’s Day! We stood up on our pedals, blasting away with America the Beautiful.

We had the schedule wrong. When we glided down the seminary drive we were spotted by Lou Kertz, a fourth-year college guy from my parish. He let us know that the big game had been played earlier. Nails, that’s what we called Lou, shouted, Hey, Sullivan, you Irish lost another one.

Easing our way to an outdoor hotdog stand set up for the holiday, we were greeted by Larry Schierhoff from Epiphany. Look who’s here! Who’s that you got with you, Tom? Then, Come on, both of you. We’ve everything that goes with hotdogs. Between Larry and his friends, and the hot dogs, buns, and relish, the clerical world was opening its arms to Harold and me.

With all seminary classes at capacity in 1943, we had a happy student body, giving promise of a happy priesthood. There was a publicized study in the 1940’s that saw the Catholic Church as the country’s most efficiently managed big organization. Staying that way would call for a large number of students.

It’s much like the need for a critical mass of uranium to bring about atomic fission. There, when something breaks up a few uranium atoms, they send their parts busting around, breaking up other atoms. Those breakups, in turn, release further pent-up energy. If too few atoms are involved in the breakups, the process fizzles. In the same way, we have to have a sufficient number of seminarians interacting with one another to keep us supplied with energetic priests.

Today our diocese in Florida might have three older men preparing in Wisconsin, two boys in Indiana, and others studying in Washington. Those young men will come together for final years at Florida’s major seminary, but they won’t be together long enough to gel. And the hope of maintaining a cohesive body of clergy becomes more remote when priests from different countries with different ways come to make up for our shortage in priests. Our priests will find it hard to support each other through the years.

Having a large number of seminarians back then allowed faculties to set high standards. From the start, all seventy-four of us in my original seminary class knew that only one third would make it to ordination. The faculty would pick over us, turning away boys who were poor at Latin or at attending Mass. Tom Stack, a boy from our parish who entered with Len and me, had to leave when he couldn’t see the sense of Latin declensions. He’d ask, Why couldn’t those people just talk like we do?

In the Latin School we knew we needed to work if we wanted to be kept on, but Wenceslaus Nollick didn’t get that. He was smart enough, but he didn’t do homework or prepare for tests. Oddly, it didn’t worry him. Pushing his wide face right up to mine, Wenceslaus would say, Listen, Sullivan, these priests have to forgive me seventy times seven, that’s what Jesus said.

The priests knew what Jesus said, but they knew as well that Jesus wanted them to protect congregations from priests who didn’t know their stuff. They let Wenceslaus go at the end of his first year. After Wenceslaus left, Len Kopsky and I sat side by side. We always left school together, lugging our books up to Sarah Street for the streetcar, but we’d take a streetcar to Grand Avenue on days when we needed to visit the Jesuit’s College Church to take advantage of there being five or six Jesuits hearing confessions. When we were serving Mass, people liked seeing us going to Holy Communion. That meant we couldn’t have any mortal sins, and either Len or I would be worried about giving in to the dirty thought we woke up with.

Those side trips to the Jesuit church ruined our afternoons, but we never would have gone to confession to any of our priest teachers. For History we had Father Charles Helmsing who was to serve many years as a great bishop for Kansas City. As a young priest, with uptight notions about grooming, he’d work with a tuft of hair on the top of his head, dampening it, and parting it. He wore trousers that folded two inches over his shoes. In 1943 a pencil-thin Frank Sinatra was being pictured with a standing mike that he had to cling to for support. So, when Father Helmsing began making radio broadcasts, it had me at the blackboard, chalking a caricature of him. The hair and the trousers were pretty good, and he was clinging to his mike. I had just added the Roman collar and stepped away when Father came in. With his back to us, he stood, looking at my work. Turning back, he said, Our artist emphasized the same things God did. Open your books, boys.

Father Helmsing used History class to give politics a Catholic slant. He said, I am proud to be an American, and I vote in every election, but boys, for the Church’s mission, a benevolent monarchy might be better than a democracy. He made us think favorably of both Portugal’s dictator, Salazar, and of Spain’s pious Francisco Franco. When he spoke of Leo XIII’s condemnation of the heresy of Americanism, he said the criticism wasn’t entirely fair, but it deserved the respect due a papal pronouncement.

Our Religion teacher, Father Glen Flavin, who was to become the right-wing bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, was the most priestly man I ever knew. He was tall, and he had blue eyes that looked through you. In my boyish way, I saw the black hair down the back of his hands as the priestliest thing about him.

Oddly, that conservative man had something to do with my becoming more liberal. Like most priests, Father Flavin was fond of definitions. He’d say, Boys, you’ll always be on solid ground if you can define your terms. The definition for Catholic Action that he gave us was, The participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy. Catholic Action was a youth movement conceived by Father Daniel Lord, a livewire Jesuit who had millions of us singing a marching song.

"An army of youth, flying the standard of truth,

We’re fighting for Christ our king.

Heads lifted high, ‘Catholic Action’ our cry,

And the cross our only sword."

One day I was in the Latin School basement eating lunch alone, when I looked up to see Jerry McLaughlin, a major brain, taking the chair across from me. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Jerry had the looks and vivacity of a young Danny Kaye. He wore Threadneedle shoes from Boyd’s, and he never smudged the toes. He asked, What d’ya know?

What did I know? I wanted to make an impression on Jerry, but like a goof all I could come up with was Father Flavin’s definition of Catholic Action. I thought Father Flavin’s definition of Catholic Action was neat. You know: the participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy.

You got it right there, Sully, but did you hear the other definition going round?

The other one?

Yes. ‘Catholic Action is the interference of the laity in the inactivity of the hierarchy.’

I was stunned. A top student was making fun of the hierarchy. Didn’t top seminarians go along with everything? Little by little my shock gave way to a smile, and I saw that Jerry was smiling back. Our souls had touched. Still, even after joining Jerry in laughing at Father Flavin, I nourished my dream of being priestly like him. Being priestly meant a lot to us back then.

Two young priests dropped by our house a lot, leading to comparisons. We saw Father Joe Murphy as being more priestly than Father Harry Roberts, even though we loved Father Harry. One evening when Father Joe dropped by, two Protestant friends of my sister Kay were with us for a penny-a-chip poker game. Father Joe got into the game, and having fun with the girls, he was insisting that the two of them keep separate stacks of chips. One of them, Marjorie Turner, separated the chips, saying, Okay, Father, but her friend Harriet preferred teasing Father Joe. She kept taking chips from Marjorie’s stack, explaining, Sorry, Father. You know, us black Protestants can’t do things right.

With my brother and my sisters’ boy friends off in the war, and with weeks passing and no word from them, we needed those fun evenings. But that night things turned sour. A storm came up, battering our windows, and bringing us all to worry about Father Joe and the girls. His was the only car, but he never bent the diocesan rule against priests giving rides to women under fifty. With the game over and all of us moving to the front hall for goodbyes, Father Joe reached for his black hat off the piano, and with a quick Pardon me, pushed out the door. We could see Father Joe’s headlights turning out into the sheets of rain as the girls were backing out with open umbrellas, needing to catch their streetcar. Harriet had said, Don’t worry folks, we know all about Catholics.

As we came away from the door Mother said, Well, it shows how Father Joe is really priestly. Dad asked, I wonder how Father Harry would have handled the situation. Father Harry was known for two things: he was a whiz at math, and he was generous to a fault. Once when he was taking his Mother and his Aunt Maggie on a trip to California, he ran out of money in Nevada. After parking his old ladies in a motel he couldn’t pay for, he went and earned the cash playing bridge with Las Vegas sharks. So, what might Father Harry have done about the Protestant girls on that stormy night? We figured he wouldn’t have broken the diocesan rule. He would have given the girls his car keys, and gone out and held the door for them. Then after coming in soaked, he would have called a cab. While he waited, he would have had a drink.

With my friendship with Jerry McLaughlin growing, I gave up the Saturday streetcar rides to the soccer games. In place of them, I was taking two buses and a streetcar to meet Jerry at the north entrance to Forest Park. He lived half the city north of there, while I lived half the city south. We had fifty-cents-a-week passes for both buses and the streetcars that came every few minutes. With Jerry and me meeting three times a week, I was getting good at blowing smoke rings while Jerry worked at scat singing. Mostly we squatted on a curb, eyeing girls.

One night we took a stroll around the park grass, with me pointing out the Big Dipper, and Jerry, always better, showing me Cassiopeia. Wandering along, we came on an old man sitting in the dark, crying. Jerry got the story. The old guy was trying to earn five dollars by turning off the sprinklers on the greens of the nine-hole course, and he didn’t know their lay out. Hey, Sully, you know this course. Lead us around, and I’ll help with your good deed. So, even though we got wet dancing around the sprinklers, the old man stayed dry, and he got his five dollars.

There were places north of the park to which Jerry introduced me. We went skating at the Winter Garden where Jerry sometimes subbed as a skating guard. Afterwards, we’d go over to Garavelli’s restaurant where old Joe Garavelli sliced the ham beneath a sign that read, Joe says don’t talk to the motorman. Over and over I’d heard my sisters talking about evenings at the Winter Garden. Here I was, friends with a guard who could skate with perfect scissor strides.

We became Friday night regulars and got to know six girls from the Ursuline Academy. It was alright, I figured, for us seminarians to talk with girls, as long as we didn’t hold hands with them skating. Then, one night Jerry was there ahead of me, and spotting him bending over tying his laces, I headed toward him. Getting close, I saw he was sharing a bench with Susie Keough. At the same time, it struck me that lately Jerry had been humming that song, If you knew Susie like I know Susie, oh, oh, oh, what a girl!

Jerry looked up and said, We’ll see you on the ice. With that, he and Susie skated off hand in hand. An academic would call it a symbolic act. I wondered if Jerry was winding up his seminary days. Right enough. He told me he had been accepted at St. Louis U High, an elite school where they said the prayer before class in Greek. I’ll say this for Jerry: with all our fooling around, his grades remained high, while mine slipped. With our partnership breaking up, I took to rebuilding my study habits, finding it hard to get good habits going again.

One evening when Jerry was still at the Latin School my mother called me. Tom, there’s a young lady on the phone for you. Back then girls didn’t call guys, not seminarians, anyway.

Tom, this is Susie Keough. I have to talk to you. Tom, Jerry never calls me anymore, and I can’t stand it. I love him so. Did he tell you what I did wrong? Oh, talk to him for me.

Well, Susie, I don’t know. We aren’t close the way we used to be.

Really? Well wait, Tom, my cousin Jane wants to talk to you. Susie’s cousin Jane was a serious girl who was interested in serving the poor. Not needing any social life, she only skated for the exercise. On the phone Jane pleaded with me to do what I could for Susie.

In the last two weeks at the Latin School, Jerry and I often passed one another without talking. One day I grabbed his arm in the lunchroom, and with guys all around, I whispered to him about Susie and her phone call. Yeah, Sully. I guess she’s never heard the expression, ‘All’s fair in love and war.’ So that’s the way it was: dating could be as bitter as it was sweet.

I thought our friendship was done with, but late in June Jerry called. His dad had bought a 1934 Chevrolet for him to get to St. Louis U High. He wanted us to meet at our old place north of Forest Park. Reassured by his friendly tone, I was sure he’d let me drive his car. In my bus seat I practiced steering the Chevrolet. I stood on the curb watching, and when I spotted a square little Chevy coming down D’Baliver, I stepped off the curb. Then I stepped back, because I saw Susie’s cousin Jane sitting in the front seat next to Jerry.

Hi, Tom, Jane said, pushing open the door to let me squeeze behind her into the back seat. In getting over her I looked down at her tanned legs and her flowered cotton shorts. As we drove into the park Jerry was doing the trombone sounds from Glenn Miller’s In the Mood. Jane, not at all her serious self, was doing the drumbeat on the dashboard. We circled around the lakes and the pavilions left from the 1904 World’s Fair. Then as we rolled into an empty parking lot, Jerry said, This should do you fine, Janie.

She grabbed the door handle to get out and go around to the driver’s seat, but Jerry said, Don’t get out. Just slip over me.

Jane got over him, and fitted herself in behind the wheel. I think I’ve got the pedals right, she said. Jerry took hold of the old gearshift that came up from the floor, brushing Jane’s legs as he worked it. When Jane had circled the parking lot, and pulled the car to a stop, she looked to Jerry for approval. Good, he said, Let me show you how the choke works.

When he leaned over for that, I took the chance to push by him out his door. I didn’t want them to see my face, so I waved back over my shoulder. In passing the zoo it seemed to me that the lions were loud for mid-afternoon. I crossed on to Oakland, and walked south on Hampton, then to Southwest, Clifton and home.

Third Year Student

The psychologists refer to teen years as a moratorium. They say it is a time when kids, not knowing what to make of themselves, do nothing. For me, that third year of high school was my year out of gear. Needing to wear a coat and tie, most mornings I missed breakfast searching for a clean shirt. After two bus transfers I had a fifty-minute walk to the seminary, and I wasn’t looking up at the gold dome singing America the Beautiful. Trudging along those mornings all I could think of was getting the homework off someone.

After school, dragging back to the bus was worse. Along with being loaded with homework, I had chores to do at home. Tending to the furnace involved shoveling loose coal into our Fairbanks-Morris stoker, clanging open the furnace door, then reaching in with tongs to snag the hard ring of cinders called the clinker. With other things on my mind, I’d frequently forget to tend to the furnace before Dad came home.

Did you tend to the furnace?

No. I’ll do it now.

Too late.

I’d follow him down the basement stairs, watching him drag on his overalls, begging him to let me do the job. But, he’d just repeat, It’s too late now.

I’m sorry, Dad.

Stop saying you’re sorry, and stop doing things you’re sorry for.

In that third year most of us were turning seventeen, and we knew we’d be facing the draft if we left the seminary. Many stayed after they had stopped dreaming about being priests. Along with the draft dodgers we had lack-luster kids who stayed on because their mothers wanted them there. Claude Kern was one of those. As a reward for staying in the seminary, Claude’s mother gave him a blue Oldsmobile. On my way down to the bus after school I’d have to step into weeds to let Claude speed by. Then one afternoon he pulled up, saying, Come on, hop in. With that I became one of Claude’s regulars.

Along with favorites like me there were kids Claude would let stand on his running boards. They’d cling tight with fingertips while Claude had his fun brushing them against bushes along the sides of the road.

In those days you didn’t hear profanity as you often do now. But one afternoon I got an earful when Claude’s group stopped at a pool hall. There had been no new civilian autos in the four years of World War II, and now there was talk of new cars coming out with no clutches. Guys at another table were arguing about that. Let me just tell you for the tenth time. You can’t drive a car without a clutch. What stunned us was that the guy never just said car or clutch. They always modified it with the f word.

With Claude and the draft dodgers I took to grabbing a smoke in the five-minute breaks between classes. We puffed under a lintel that had the inscription, Teach me science, discipline, and holiness. One day the dean, Father Denis Dugan, stepped out, and after looking over the twelve of us, he said, Sullivan, you haven’t the willpower of a snake.

We lost some of Claude’s group when we took the Religion exam at the end of third year. Our professor was Father Nuelle, pronounced Nelly, and he taught us from a Latin catechism written by Cardinal Gaspari. None of our group had enough Latin to make much of the book, and going into the final exam we were worried some. Father Nuelle made it easy for us. After going to the board, and writing three questions from the Latin catechism, he left the room. Before the hour was up, Father Nuelle came back, collected the papers, and sat down to check them. Looking up, he said, Robert Tilly, you give me three very good answers on your paper. Come up to the board, and write the answer you have for the first question.

After Robert got up there, he let his hand with the chalk hang down. He looked at the board, then after a bit he turned around, grinning widely. Well, thank you, Robert, Father Nuelle said, You needn’t come back next year.

Father looked down at the papers in his hands. Then he said, Now, Kenneth Ashe, you have the answers down perfectly. Would you please come up here and write the answer you have for the second question. I was sorry to see Kenneth Ashe pushed away. He was sleeping through his adolescence, but I felt he would do good things when he woke up. Father Nuelle spoke up. Thomas Sullivan, would you please come up here.

The bell rang, ending the period, just as I stood up. I picked up my books, and as I was making for the door, I got a little smile from Father Nuelle. I really should have been expelled, so I told my Dad I was giving up on the seminary. I wanted to try being a newspaperman.

Dad said, Whoa, you scamp. You’re not leaving without giving it your best! Coming from my kindly father, You scamp! stung. He was a self made man. His father died in 1895 when little Francis was eight, and he got on as a delivery boy at Grone’s candy store. The store had maybe the first player piano in St. Louis. When my dad wasn’t delivering fancy boxes of chocolates, he’d sit behind the piano pumping out tunes. The customers, seeing his spiky black hair over the piano top, would say, What a talented boy!

One day Mrs. Grone was serious with him. Francis, we will have to let you go. And you know why, don’t you? He didn’t know, but afraid to ask, he said, Yes, Ma’am. He went home. At ninety he was wondering why she let him go.

Dad’s easy ways never left him. Evenings at six he’d come through the back door asking, What’re we doing tonight? One evening those same two Protestant girls were with us for poker. After we cashed in our chips and had moved to the hallway for our goodbyes, Harriet Kelley noticed a small hole in Dad’s shirt. She put her finger on it. Fran, you’ve got a hole here. The other girl, Marjorie Turner, said, Let’s see. Then, in leaning over, she caused Harriet’s fingernail to catch in the hole, opening a rent.

Hey, wait, Dad laughed, covering himself, but there was no waiting. Giggling, my sister Prudy reached in, and ripped a strip of Dad’s shirt clear to his waist. After that, we all fell on the poor man, ripping front and back. At last, with him in just his collar, tie, and undershirt, he was bent over laughing, and we were all lost in laughter, delighted by him.

A Boarding Student

Seminarians began to board the fourth year of high school, but first they had to come up with three hundred and sixty dollars tuition. Summers before that I had filled orders at a warehouse, and I had tried selling magazines door to door. That summer, needing more money, I got a job as a lab assistant at a steel mill. I had to report the temperature of the molten steel that gushed from the back of the furnaces. To do this I peered at the hot steel through a scope with a frosted lens. With the lens taking on the color of the liquid steel, I could see a thin line of another color slicing down its middle. By turning a knob I could change the color of the line until it merged into the color of the frosted lens. By turning that knob I’d bring an arrow on its rim to point at the exact temperature of the fresh steel.

It surprises me now to recall what responsible roles they gave a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. I drilled steel filings for the chemists to analyze. In another test I swung a pendulum against a narrow neck of steel, severing it, leaving me to measure the height the pendulum reached after breaking through. Another apparatus had a titanium ball that, with a ton of pressure behind it, made a round indentation on a sample of the steel. I then measured the diameter of the indentation. Such tastes of technology from summer jobs gave me an appreciation for the trades our parishioners today are engaged in. The conversations with other workers opened my eyes to people’s values and lack of them.

When we lab boys at the steel mill were eating sandwiches on Mondays, one of the boys, Milton, would talk about his Friday night visits to a place of prostitution. Another seventeen-year-old boy, Henry, who had lost his teeth through neglect, was wild to hear more about what a woman did for Milton. Then Milton asked me, Are you too stuck up to talk to us?

No.

So, what do you want to know about that stuff I was into Friday night? Foolishly, I came up with a question. What did you and the woman talk about?

Talk? Milton asked. Don’t you know, if she’d even looked at me, I’d have killed her?

We sat on the shady side of the foundry on our twenty-minute breaks while the steel hardened. A black guy brought the crossword puzzle from the Post Dispatch, and I brought the one from the Globe Democrat. We’d do them, pausing to watch baseball pitchers working out on the railroad tracks. There was one guy from a Negro league, along with Bob Moncrieff, who that year had a thirteen and two record for the St. Louis Browns. Using his mill job as a draft deferment, Bob only pitched home games. At the workouts on the tracks the catchers said the black guy had better stuff. That was a year before Jackie Robinson broke in with the Dodgers.

In 1945 the war had ended, and my brother Frank came home from three years in Africa and Europe. Shopping with his severance pay, Frank bought a gray suit with a thin red stripe. The salesman said it was made for Johnny Mize, the Cardinal first baseman who was hitting 400. Frank must have been shell-shocked to fall for that line. I had to be nice to Frank, because afterwards he was