I Studied English as a Foreign Language: Bob Cousy

Somewhere in the discussion of diversity at Holy Cross, we've lost track of Bob Cousy growing up as a native French speaker, and child of poor immigrants.   He described himself as "the originally socially deprived shy ghetto kid."  He grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in New York City's Yorkville neighborhood, a melting pot of races and culture.   Cousy's roommate on the Boston Celtics was the first African-American drafted by the NBA,  Chuck Cooper.

The Callahan Tunnel

Reba McEntire the country western singer reminds me of my mother, except my mother had black hair, a reserved manner, and a very dry Irish sense of humor that you'd miss if you weren't paying attention.

Mom was smart, too.  The Navy picked her for its first elite class of women officers.  She was joined by the mothers of my classmates Mark Doherty and Bob Henry.

She was a tremendously kind and sensitive person, and even though she disliked dogs, when we prevailed on her to let us have one and then neglected it, she took care of the dog and treated it like a third child.

She regretted having been young and at times unkind and kept repeating the story about the Callahan Tunnel.  She'd been fixed up with a young soldier named Callahan for a night out with friends.  She was tall, he was short and she refused when he asked her to dance.  Callahan didn't survive the war.  Later she couldn't have regretted more refusing to dance with him.

Great Moments: The Pianist

My favorite Holy Cross football moment occurred at the end of a Friday freshman practice.  The coaches were having a last say before letting us go.   The first game was a week away and there'd be practice Saturday.  Anything else?   Fran Parkin asked: Coach, I have a piano concert tomorrow, is it all right if I miss practice.  Coach Donaher (who the juvenile among us called Ding Dong), jumped all over this.   Piano concert! Piano concert!  Football players don't give concerts!   The head coach, Carlin Lynch, stopped him, and dryly said:   Coach Donaher, the great NFL quaterback Otto Graham played the violin and was a concert pianist.  Fran, knock 'em dead at your concert tomorrow.  We'll see you Monday.

Dr. King's Dream

Even when I'm in the foulest mood, dropping my daughter off at the Rose Lane School in central Phoenix never fails to bring a smile to my heart and brighten up my day.   So many smiling happy children.   When did kids start wanting to go to school?   One thing their parents -- and there are a lot of them taking their children to school these days --  have in common is completely unabashed love for their children, regardless of their size, shape or color of their skin.   At least early in the morning at a grammar school somewhere in the urban wilderness of the vast Sonora Desert there is a small hope for the world.

The Mission: Father Culleys Guarani

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Robert Bolt's film, The Mission,  opens with Guarani tribesmen tying a Jesuit missionary to a cross

and throwing him into the water above the falls on the Iguazu River.   His brother Jesuits recover the body below the falls and consider who will go next.  Though others volunteer, their leader Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) says it's his duty.   He makes his way above the falls and is captured by the

tribesmen who martyred his Jesuit brother,  but before he too is cast into the river he captivates them with music played on a simple flute.   The story of the Jesuits and the musical accomplishments of the Guarani is great stuff.   If you've made it this far you can look it up for yourself on the Internet.

Thomas Culley, SJ, may have been chagrined when the Society of Jesuit ordered him to leave Brown University and ascend the Blackstone River to teach music at Holy Cross.  If he was, he didn't show it.  Jesuits have been ordered to worse fates.   Of the many things Father Brooks did for his Guarani at Holy Cross,  giving them "Music in the Baroque Period" is the least appreciated.   Gentlemen I encourage to listen to the Brandenburg Concertos in the lab this week.   Identify the contrapuntal interactions... or if you like just listen and try to enjoy the music.   I tried hard to enjoy the music, and did to a point, but Bach wasn't the best for napping.

One day father announced that he was moving across campus.   Back then there was a Jesuit  assigned to each dormitory floor, though you rarely saw them.   I need help moving my harpsichord.  It's not every day the Guarani get to move a harpsichord.   He had plenty of help.  No Bachs, maybe, but plenty of strong backs.

The Raid Upon Vinh, Remembered at Marjerle's Bar and Grill

Daddy, have your ever cried?

*    *    *    *    *
Too often now after forty
and the third or fourth drink of the day
I remember the raid upon Vinh.

Large ships silently, swiftly
race from the dark Gulf of Tonkin
and into the day
and the bay before Vinh.

Far from the shore
out in the bay
small open boats with their fishermen
already at work in the morning
away from their homes here at Vinh.

Puzzled men stop to observe us
and stand as they brush past our sides
in our haste we can barely avoid them
as we rush on our way in toward Vinh.

Still far out in the bay
old coast guns start to range us
tall gray palms start to grow near the ships
the line turns port for the mission
and our guns come to bear upon Vinh.

From the cruiser black orange volcanoes
great bullets that can almost be seen
rapid fire joined by destroyers
blast the troops and the trucks in the convoys
as they make their way south here at Vinh.

With age you should fail to remember
what it was that was long in the past
the men in their boats
the shock and despair in their eyes as they watched us
and the smoldering City of Vinh
their smoldering City of Vinh.

The Black Angel

Years ago a black man knocked on my grandmother's door. 
Are you Ms. Josephine Cain?
No, I'm her sister, Ellen?  What can I do for you?
I work in the insane asylum in Connecticut.
There's a man there who says he's a friend of Miss Josephine Cain.
His nephew had him committed, but he's just old.   Sane enough to me.
He asked me to go find Josephine Cain and ask her to help him.
Thank you, Ellen said, I'll see what I can do.
The old black man lifted his hat, nodded his head and was gone before she could say another word.
She grabbed her own hat and umbrella and headed for the train to Hartford.
When she got there she went to the governor's office and sat in the waiting room until someone would see her.   They released the old friend to her custody and she took him back to New York where she and Josie found him a comfortable place to live out his life.

Crusaders in Oregon

We were 50 miles from Nowhere
and when you got to Nowhere
all the girls had gone to the beach for the summer.

The old hand told us boys
the summer help
Don't worry about them cows
they won't bother you.
Just don't get between a cow and her calf
or a cow and a dog.

He was right
most times those sweet, dumb animals
wouldn't let you near them
they'd just drift away if you tried
unless you had a sugar cube
then you could walk right up to one
and scratch her hard black head
while a big pink tongue slopped your hand
and took the sugar.

Then one day while we were moving irrigation pipe
a dog hopped merrily into the pasture.
An old cow spotted that dog
and lit out after him like an angry brahma bull
chasing a hapless rodeo clown.
She'd have got him too
except her milked filled udders slapped against
her hind legs and slowed her just enough
so the dog could make his getaway under a nearby barbed wire fence.
Pretty funny sight to see
unless you were the dog.

On the other hand
the dog had been around a while
knew just how fast an old cow could run
and exactly how far it was to the barbed wire fence.
I'd allow since the dog was 50 miles from Nowhere too
and couldn't go to the beach for the summer either
he was drumming up a little fun
to break up the monotony of another day on the farm.
50 miles from Nowhere.

Greatest Moment in Holy Cross History

Without doubt, the greatest moment in Holy Cross History was passage of the Vinson-Walsh (Two-Ocean) Navy Act in July, 1940. Sponsored by U.S. Senator David I. Walsh, HC 1893, the act increased the size of the U.S. Navy by 70 percent, including 7 battleships, 18 aircraft carriers and 15,000 aircraft. The United States Navy saved the world and democracy from fascism during World War II.

*   *   *   *   *

It was a closely kept secret at the time and even less known today, but Holy Cross College was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1960s.   Thanks to Walsh's influence the Navy placed an officers' training program at the college during World War II and an at the time coveted ROTC unit.  During the war and in the 1960s, ROTC scholarships and the Navy ROTC unit helped keep the college financially afloat.

*    *   *    *    *
The rival for the Greatest Moment is when the Healy brothers, slaves according the laws of Georgia, walked onto Mount St. James at Holy Cross for the first time.  Michener called them America's most remarkable siblings next to the Adames.

James Healy -- First Valedictorian at Holy Cross,  first Catholic bishop in America of African descent, pastor St. James Church, South Boston
Sherwood Healy -- First African-Ameican to earn a doctorate, Director Troy Seminary, Rector Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston
Patrick Healy -- President of Georgetown, who transformed a small college into a major university
Hugh Healy -- died at 21 in New York City
Michael Healy -- Captain of the Revenue Cutter Bear, real life hero of Michener's Alaska, inspiration for London's The Sea-Wolf.  Commissioned by Abraham Lincoln as a Third Lieutenant in 1864.

Desiccant and the Battle of Dong Hoi Gulf

The old chief had me scurrying all over Southern California

picking up parts to make his radar work

the last box of stuff just kept things dry

what’s going on

… I just don’t want to go back, Sir

I can’t tell the Commodore that, Chief

Fix the damn radar so we can deploy.
 

  *  *  *  *  *
 

The jets burst from the shore cover

they were on us in an instant

in the blink of an eye

the Lenah S. Higbee was burning and sinking

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

“I'd rather become a good husband than a bad priest”
-- St. Thomas More


Frank Mininni knew more about Friedrich Gogarten than anyone in America.   Karl Barth called Gogarten our "dreadnought."   This had something to do with Lutheran theologians and dialectical theology, or secular theology.  Don't ask me what that means.   I still don't know.   I took the course because it was the only theology course open and I needed to meet the theology requirement.

A Navy friend of mine liked to recollect having a class with Henry Kissinger  at Harvard.  He went in one day and asked for an appointment to discuss his term paper with the professor.   The secretary thumbed through the appointment book and then stopped, remembering something she needed to ask.  Awkward pause.   Are you a graduate student?   No.   I'm sorry.  Professor Kissinger doesn't meet with undergraduates.

You could walk into Frank's office anytime he was around (for that matter the office of any Holy Cross professor).  He didn't even have a secretary to guard the door.   Mr. Mininni I don't understand this Gogarten guy.   HELP.   I understand, Jim.   Gogarten's ideas are complex, and very difficult to translate.   They make more sense in the orginal German.

(Jesus, Frank, I grew up with women who were native Gaelic speakers, fiercely anti-English, and deeply religious.   They said the rosary daily and would tell you that every act of your life was a prayer.  And you want me to learn German to understand somebody explaining religion in a world without religion?   For heavens sake, Frank, as far as we're concerned English is a foreign language.)

Wasn't Gogarten a Nazi?   Frank explained that Gogarten never joined the Nazi party.

None of that mattered.   Frank was a rock star as far as I was concerned.   He'd left the Jesuits to marry a gorgeous, tall blonde German woman named Erika.   I timed my visits for the end of the day, hoping I'd be there when Erika dropped by to escort Frank home.   One smile from her could carry a young man through an entire lonely, celibate week at Holy Cross.

The Tire King of Long Island

My grandmother liked to announce to her friends that her oldest son was going to be a priest and her youngest a doctor.   This was fine with my father until he was old enough to notice girls.  He started to get very uneasy about disappointing his mother, who was, shall we say, formidable.   Then came the party for the sons of a friend who were young Jesuits bound for the the missions in the Philippines.   It was a proud day for the Carnegie Hill Catholics, young men marching off to do the work of Christ.   Grandmother introduced my father and his brother to the young Jesuits with her routine introduction:  "This is Tom, my youngest son.  He is attending Notre Dame and is going to be a doctor.  This is Jim, my oldest son.  He attends Holy Cross and is going to be a priest."   The young Jesuit abruptly interrupted her.  Something only a Jesuit would dare to do.  Something only a Jesuit could survive.   "Eleanor, my child, the vocation to be a priest is the boy's decision and the boy's decision alone."   My father gave a silent prayer of thanksgiving.   My grandmother never said another word about the priesthood.   Perhaps if there'd been more Jesuits around to counsel ardent Catholic mother's the Church would have had less trouble with priests who chose the wrong vocation.

Jobs were hard to find during the Depression.   My father found one working in a garage pumping gas and fixing flat tires.   He worked out a way to change a flat truck tire in 5 minutes when it usually took 30.   He was happy working with his hands.   His mother wasn't.   One day she announced you're starting at Fordham Law School next week.   I never applied to any law school, says my father.  I've taken care of it, said his mother, and of course she had since she played bridge with the dean's wife.   My father said he was never happy as a lawyer.  Who knows, he said, if I'd have stood up to mother, I might have been the Tire King of Long Island.

Boston College Minority Recruitment

Boston College’s motivations for recruiting black students were both internal and external. The externals included a visit in May by four investigators from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, looking into whether the University was dispersing its federal money in harmony with provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This followed a 1967 letter to U.S. Jesuits from their beloved superior, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, insisting that “American Jesuits cannot, must not, stand aloof” from the claims and demands of “the Negro.” Arrupe specified that Jesuit universities would need to assist blacks in meeting entrance requirements and provide them with “special scholarships.”

Boston College’s Black Talent program was up and running by the fall of 1968. The program sprang from a “Negro Talent Search” launched earlier that year by outgoing president Michael P. Walsh, SJ, with a $100,000, four-year commitment to scholarships and recruiting—a substantial sum for a University that routinely found itself strapped financially. (A year’s tuition then amounted to $1,600.) According to varying official accounts, the Negro Talent Search yielded between 34 and 48 new black students for that September.

-- Boston College Magazine
http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2009/features/power-of-the-people.html

The Sands of Iwo Jima

Mike Quinn had a snapshot that hit the back of the net
from 50 feet out in the blink of an eye.

The big fella didn't get to die upon the Sands of Iwo Jima
some noble last words upon his lips.
He was blown to smithereens
somewhere outside Da Nang
by a rocket manufactured in Kiev
brought in by sea from Vladivostok
and lugged down the Ho Chi Minh trail
lashed to a bicycle seat.

They buried what was left of him on a gray day in Charlestown
The Marine honor guard in their dress blue uniforms
white hats and gloves
folded the American flag that draped his coffin
into a neat triangle
and handed it to his mother for her trouble.

Four years too late
they mined Haiphong harbor.

The Black Pope

From:
Thy Honored Name: A History of the College of the Holy Cross, 1843-1994
-- Anthony J. Kuzneiwski
In 1947, William Healy was the only clergyman to attend a State House hearing on a Fair Education Practice Bill.  He endorsed Branch Rickey's experiment of integrating professional baseball and sought the integration of Holy Cross, writing, "No boy will ever be denied admission to Holy Cross because of his color."  Ten years later, William Donaghy used the athletic program to promote equality by prohibiting competition against segregated teams.  But favorable policies could not, by themselves attract qualified African-American applicants.  In 1965, Father Swords reported that minority enrollment stood at twelve.  Although he wanted to do more, he conceded that "some very sad [academic] experiences... cause us to be cautious -- maybe too cautious."  Then, slowly, the civil rights movement altered circumstances.   In 1968, about 700 students marched to a local demonstration following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.;  the following year, Holy Cross became the first large school in the country to join Project Equality, an organization that urged the boycott of businesses that discriminated against minorities.... 

This movement recieved a tremendous boost on Jesuit campuses in November of 1967, when Pedro Arrupe [28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus, aka the Black Pope] issued a letter on the racial crisis in the United States.  Linking blacks and Hispanics together as victims of "racial injustice and grinding poverty," he pointed out that American Jesuits had a mixed record in opposing racism: "It is embarrassing to note that, up to the present, some of our institutions have effected what seems to be little more than token integration of the Negro."  This weakness, Arrupe argued was connected with an erroneous view of human nature, a tendency to accept stereotypes, to be isolated from the poor, and to accept prevailing attitudes uncritically.   The result was "our past failure adequately to realize, to preach, to teach, and to practice the Christian truths of interracial justice and charity, according to our Jesuit vocations."  To remedy the situation, Arrupe set forth ten new policies, including renewed efforts to increase minority enrollment....

*  *  *  *  *
Father Arrupe, to a degree, was guilty of anachronism.   Most Jesuit schools until recently served regional communities in the North where there were few Hispanics and blacks.  Moreover,  this was still an America where a serving Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  Black had made his Alabama political bones in 1921 by successfully defending E.R. Stephenson for the murder of Father James  E. Colye.   Colye's offense was marrying Stephenson's daughter to a colored man.   Though he'd renounced the KKK, to his dying day Black was a committed anti-Catholic.

By the 1960s, however, demographics were no longer an excuse.  By then the great Black migration had peaked bringing millions of African-Americans from the South to the northern cities of Chicago, Boston and New York.    Jesuit schools, notably Georgetown, were establishing a national presence.

Father Arupe had been a missionary to fascist Japan where in days gone by Catholic missionaries, including members of the Society of Jesus, had been martyred by burning and beheading.   At Hiroshima Father Arrupe had had the atomic bomb dropped on his head and afterwards ministered to the casualties in the ashes of the first nuclear holocaust.   What Jesuit could look him in the eye and say that he was afraid of being lynched in Mississippi or Alabama... or South Boston.

Don't Join the Army Son

No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
And chromium steel.

When I turned 18 and became eligible for the draft, my grandmother who was aloof to say the least looked me in the eye and said: "Don't join the Army, son. They'll use you for cannon fodder."

Never mind Tammany Hall. The most powerful political constituencies in New York City were women's clubs like the Catholic Daughters of America. St. Patrick's Cathedral was built by the pennies and nickels of Irish servant women. The Jesuits' opulent St. Ignatius Loyola Church at Carnegie Hill was built by and for Catholic women whose mothers may have been cleaning women, but whose fathers had been wildly successfully in the iron business and played poker with JP Morgan and Andy Carnegie. (Carnegie was a Gaelic speaker, by the way) The Sacred Heart sisters educated the daughters of the most successful. After Otto Kahn died the elegant sisters set up shop in his mansion, Palazzo Della Cancellaria style (Papal Chancellery). The Kennedys and Mara (as in football Giants) weren’t even on the social radar for women like my grandmother. If they were acknowledged at all it was Kennedy the rum runner and Mara the bookmaker.

The women's political power rested on three pillars: votes, money, and the prestige of the Union army. Ellen Ewing Sherman was Queen Bee in the New York City after the Civil War. She was as ardent a Catholic as they come. How could Mrs. Astor refuse an invitation or request to donate to Irish relief from the wife of General William Tecumseh Sherman? The general resided in New York City after the Civil War until his death in 1891. These days the New York Times feigns complete bewilderment when it’s accused of being anti-Catholic. What totally and permanently pissed off New York’s Catholic women was The Times stationing a reporter outside the door of the Sherman house while the general was dying. Incredibly they were on the lookout for the comings and goings of Catholic priests. When they caught one, The Times published the “sordid” revelation that the great general had been given the last rites of the Catholic Church (certainly against his will), creating a minor scandal. Sherman’s brother had to publicly explain to The Times that, although Sherman wasn’t a Catholic Christian (just baptized and married so), Catholic sacraments were welcomed by the general because they greatly comforted his family. 
 

The women had their own priorities. It wasn't accepting "gratuities" that ended my grandfather's good friend Jimmy Walker's political career. It was taking up with showgirl Betty Compton and publicly leaving and divorcing his wife that was the end of Jimmy. In the category of strange but true, you’ll find Representative Joseph Gavagan addressing the Catholic Daughters of America on why the Bible had to be kept out of the public schools: the King James Bible is a Protestant plot to seduce Catholic children. Crazy as it sounds this was a hot topic for Catholic women in the 1930s because even into the 1960s the old Irish were telling stories about per-Civil War New York when the city nearly went up in flames over whose Bible, if any, would be taught in the public schools.

While many New Yorkers like to march with the original Fighting Irish, the 69th New York Infantry (aka, the Irish Brigade), my grandmother and her friends wouldn't have been caught dead anywhere near a St. Patrick's Day parade. When she was a young girl, the pirate Dan Sickles still hopped up and down 5th Avenue, a living testament to the horrors of war. Sickles, who'd been married to the “natural” daughter of Mozart's librettist by Archbishop Hughes, had had his leg blown off by a cannonball at Gettysburg leading the city's famous Excelsior Brigade. (Sickles life playbook was Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte farce about soldiers and fiancé swapping. After philander Sickles shot his wife’s lover, his attorney Thomas Meagher, 1848 Irish rebel and Irish Brigade commander, got Sickles acquitted of murder based on a then unprecedented plea of temporary insanity. Like Spencer Tracy, Sickles remained within the women’s Pale because he never left his wife).

My grandmother came of age when even more of the Fighting Irish were maimed and died, in what was a savage, bewildering, utterly pointless First World War. Two generations later and yet another war, the sleepy child who nestled against her bosom in a taxi one rainy night on a ride through Washington Square and up 5^th Avenue  had grown into a man.  Would the Tiffany mosaics and cold Carrara marble of St. Ignatius Loyola Church be of any consolation if she again were wearing black?
 

In 1969 anti-war demonstrations led by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) broke out at Holy Cross College, a Massachusetts outpost of New York’s Irish. Black students led by Supreme Court Justice to-be Clarence Thomas staged a walkout. Charles Horgan who was the head of the Holy Cross trustees told the college president he’d support him in whatever decision he made regarding disciplining the black students and the SDS. Horgan was also the law partner of Felix Muldoon, the Democratic lieutenant who'd told Flynn to back Roosevelt in 1932: we need a Dutchman not a Catholic [Smith] to deliver our message [Rerum Novarum]. Muldoon was also the husband of my grandmother's friend from her schoolgirl days with the Sacred Heart sisters, the formidable (ferocious) Agnes Muldoon. There were two birds on Horgan's shoulder. He didn't even need to tell the college president what they were saying:
#1. "We have worked long and hard to pry the Black vote out of the Republican grasp. Don't screw this up."
#2. "The friends of Agnes Muldoon want to send a message about the war. Your SDS aren't the only ones who want to use the Blacks to deliver it. For God's sake save me from Agnes Muldoon!"

 

Evangeline

This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers—
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

*    *    *    *    *
In the House of Representatives [Massachusetts], September 10, 1756

Voted that thirteen of the French Inhabitants [Acadians] now residing in Gloucester be removed to Wenham and that the other eleven now at the Said Town be removed to Methuen and that the Town of Gloucester be at the charge of their removal.

Sent up for concurrence, T. Hubbard, Speaker.

In Council, September 10, 1756, read and concurred, Thomas Clarke, Deputy Secretary - Consented to, W. Shirley
--  Lucie LeBlanc Consentino
http://acadian-ancestral-home.blogspot.com/2010/10/acadians-exiled-to-massachusetts-1755.html

Is folamh fuar e teach gan bean

It's a cold house without a woman.

Who Saved the Hubble Space Telescope

Phase retrieval determines the phase error or aberrations of an optical system.  James R. Fienup established the use of phase retrieval in the early 1980’s to determine the aberrations in the Hubble Space Telescope.  [Fienup's methodology] is especially useful for optical systems in space, where direct testing cannot be used.

-- Phase Retrieval for the Hubble Space Telescope and other Applications

    Stephanie Barnes, University of Arizona

Lou Massery's perfect Math SAT and Matt Likavec's acceptance at Harvard Medical notwithstanding, Jim Fienup was probably the smartest person at Holy Cross 1966-70.   I was his bodyguard and was under orders to make sure none of the wild football and ice hockey players in the Mulledy dormitory ever bothered him.  The Dean of Men gave me the job because I was the light-heavyweight fisticuffs champion of the Queens-Nassau Junior Hockey.  Queens-Nassau became the Metropolitan Hockey League, which is renown for sending Hall of Famer Joe Mullen to the National Hockey League.   I called Mullen up when he was a senior at Power Memorial and asked him if he wanted to go to Holy Cross.  He said where's Holy Cross.   Pause... you've got a point there kid.  It will be a while before Holy Cross is on the big time hockey map.   You need to try for a place like BC (the Worcester Arena isn't for you).   I knew he was going to be good, but not that good.

Are you people really that gullible?  Fienup really did help save the Hubble Space Telescope and I really did ask Joe Mullen if he was interested in Holy Cross.  But nobody, but nobody, needed a bodyguard at Holy Cross.   The dormitory hall I supervised as an RA was usually so quiet you could camp out on the dorm hall floor and get a good night's sleep.
 

Nessun Dorma

What did we think about sleepless in the darkness
cruel princess
waiting for the dawn and a battle we might not survive
some already dead
They didn't ask for volunteers...
Would tomorrow be the worst day of my poor mother's life...
Nessun dorma

Dilegua, o notte...
Tramontate, stelle...
All'alba vincerò!

The Ghost of Roger Casement

What gave the roar of mockery
That roar in the sea's roar
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating at the door.
-- William Butler Yeats

Did Christ Know He was God?

Subtitle: “Who the devil is Rudolf Bultmann.”

Demythology,  Exegesis, Hermeneutics, the Historical Jesus. Sister Mary Ancella sure didn't use words like that in catechism class and they didn't make it into our high school New Testament courses, either.

Carter Lindberg was a bona fide Lutheran minister. He didn’t nail Luther's 95 Theses to the classroom door (something Luther, in fact, never did himself), but the gloves were off. His treatment of the New Testament was jarring.  Who was Christ?  Did God the father create the Son? Arius thought so and that dispute tore the Christian church apart in its early days. Did Christ know he was God... and when did he know it? We were travelling country not permitted before Divino Aflante Spiritu hit the streets, allowing modern Catholic Biblical scholarship, and we were going places where we might need a visa.

Father Brooks was busy diversifying the faculty in the 1960s, too. In part out of necessity. Vocations were down and it was hard to find Jesuits to fill all the faculty posts. Holy Cross also needed to keep up with the competition.  With diversity becoming a watchword for the Ivies, the Jesuits were losing their monopoly on bright Catholic students.   The Cross needed a more modern less rigidly Catholic education. Adapting came naturally to the Jesuits.

Something was lost in the process, though. At Holy Cross in the late 60s, Jesuit tradition and influence was slipping away. What inspired Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier?  Why did the Republic of China memorialize Matteo Ricci with a postage stamp? Who knew that Jesuit astronomers gave us the modern Gregorian calendar (Christopher Clavius), the Big Bang Theory (Georges Lemaitre) , and the spectral classification of stars (Angelo Secchi)?  What role did the Guarani Republic, portrayed in Roland Joffe’s The Mission,  play in the suppression of the Society of Jesuit in the 18th century?  How do we reconcile the scientist, Teilhard de Chardin, who helped discover Peking Man with what he wrote on evolution:  "In one manner or the other it still remains true, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross."

Today if we can't find Father Brooks and Holy Cross following in the steps of Loyola, Xavier, and Ricci, then what's the point of there being a Holy Cross.  It's just another  liberal arts college with a progressive cachet and elite aspirations, catering to the latest whim and mere enthusiasm.

Anna Maria Moggio: The First Woman at Holy Cross

There is a misconception that women arrived at Holy Cross in 1972.   In fact the faculty went co-ed before that.   Dr. Anna Marria Moggio, PhD, Fordham taught French history and politics there beginning in 1968-69.   After teaching at Holy Cross Dr. Moggio was Adademic Dean of Rosemont College in Pennsylvania for many years. "Dr. Moggio lived an exemplary life devoted to academic excellence and enthusiastically committed to Catholic higher education. She left many friends and colleagues; and cousins in Italy, Australia and Argentina."

The WAVE and the Black Men in Her Life

 

My mother was one of the first women chosen to be an officer in the United States Navy, a WAVE.   We're very proud of that.  Before long while serving during World War II, she was watch commander in charge of Navy communications in the eastern Atlantic U-boat and convoy war.  She said the mothers of my classmates  Mark Doherty and Bob Henry also served with her as Navy officers.  

People at Holy Cross who insulted the Navy or ROTC might as well have been insulting my mother.  Next to her husband and her children the Navy was the best thing that happened to her, although there were times I suspected I didn't rate as high as the Navy.

It was very unlikely that the Navy selected her for this important distinction.   The program was run by a patrician Yankee from Radcliffe.   My mother was from a blue-collar Cambridge family who didn't own their home.   Both her parents were Irish immigrants.  Her mother and sisters worked as cleaning women.   Her father was a union organizer who worked for the MTA back in the days when they derailed trolley cars to make their point, and often came home thoroughly beat up for their trouble.  



Her Uncle Ned immigrated to America after doing time in a British prison for being a captain in the Irish Republic Army (there were no privates).  He worked on the Boston docks and belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, aka Wobblies.   After Uncle Ned arrived in America my grandfather stopped coming home beat up.  Ned was one of what they called the "hard men."  No pretend revolutionaries in our family: Ned was the real deal.   The Navy's security checks must not have been very thorough back in those days. 



Their lives weren't all union brawls and drudgery, though.   By the time my mother became aware of the people around her,  Cambridge had settled into peaceful co-existence... to hear her tell it.  In a largely segregated America many of the children who attended school with her were Afican Americans.  Felix Frankfurter pitched in to help grandpa with union arbitration, Harvard started giving scholarships to smart neighborhood kids, and my mother's brother with "The Right Stuff" went there to play baseball.  Jack and Joe Kennedy sat behind Grandma Honoragh, the farm girl from Lisdoonvarna, at the baseball games and cheered for "Shanty" Regan.   Sounds nasty, but people then didn't take offense as readily as today.  Mom's brother joined the Navy ROTC at Harvard and after Joe Kennedy got into flight school, he said if that bum Kennedy can do it so can I.  He flew at torpedo plane, an ensign killer, in the Solomons and won the Navy Cross for sinking a Japanese ship at Rabaul.  After the war he qualified as a test pilot and was among the first to fly jets.

Avery Dulles like Paul on the road to Damacus had an epiphany while walking past my mother's Cambridge church when he heard the people singing, converted to Catholicism and joined the Society of Jesus.   The Portuguese fisherman's family down the street kept goats in their front yard.   Did Avery Dulles remember the goats?   Years later in Arizona completely by accident I met and married the great-granddaughter of that Portuguese family.  There are some coyotes in our neighborhood but no goats.

My mother's Aunt Kathleen went into business with a Yankee woman and a black man.  The ladies baked cakes and the black man delivered them to customers in Cambridge.   My mother would watch the women bake and listen to their stories.   When the black man arrived for his next delivery, he'd give her a smile and say,  "Mark my words, Miss Mary, you're going to Smith College some day."  He might as well have said she was going to be the first woman on Mars or the first woman officer in the US Navy.

Towards the end of high school my mother asked her father for career advice.   He said, be a teacher.  It's a worthwhile job and you have the summers off.   So she commuted by train each day to Lowell State Teachers College.  She'd arrive back home at  Cambridge late at night and waiting for her at the station would be her an old black neighbor man, waiting there to walk with her and make sure she got home safely.

Teaching jobs were hard to find during the Depression, but they let her substitute at the Cambridge schools.   When war broke out they closed the schools for a day and had the teachers work on distributing ration cards.   The principal told my mother she had to work, too, but the powers that be wouldn't let him pay her.  He hung his head and said sorry.  "I quit!" says she.

The General Electric plant at Lynn needed a cost accountant to replace a man who was about to be drafted.   My mother got the job and became a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.  

On lark a she and her friends also applied for a Navy program.  She did well on the aptitude test and the next thing you know she was on her way to Smith College to train to be an officer in the US Navy.   The man she was supposed to replace turned out to be 4F and didn't get drafted.  The union treated her like every other service man and sent her cigarettes and chocolate every month throughout the war even though she was assigned to the communication center in Boston for the duration.

 

My mother repeated the stories about the black men in her life over and over during the years.  There was a point to the retelling.  And if you don't get it then you're not as wise as the black man who told a little girl with Gaelic speaking, cleaning lady aunts that one day that she'd grow up and go to Smith College.

Dumb Jock Story: Confessions of a Knockout Mouse

If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it.
--  Marcus Aurelius

When my otherwise saintly schoolmates sinned, at the top of their list was the epithet "dumb jock" followed somewhat closely by references to ROTC and dumb ROTC students.   My third year roommate, who had many fine qualities, had a very patricain Wellesley distain for "dumb jocks" and in particular his hulking lab partner who was on the football team.   Years later at dinner during a visit to Seattle I was stunned to learn that my roommate's life had been changed by taking up marital arts and kendo...he should have given his lovely Japanese-American wife some credit, too.

Here's my dumb jock story.

During a summer session before our freshman year I volunteered to spot for Bill Moncevicz when he was lifting weights...this story is not about Bill who went to U Penn's school of dentistry, but, hey, if you can deal with the possibility that your dentist might find out you think any dumb jock can be a dentist, go for it.  Bill's father had been a three-time All American tackle on the great Holy Cross teams of the 1930s, and Bill was on a Vision Quest a la Louden Swain to live up to his father's legend.  I got caught up in Bill's Vision Quest and started lifting weights, too. 


One day after a session in the weight room, Bill says I've got to see the coach.  We go upstairs to the  freshman coach's office, Carlin Lynch and Bill talk for a few minutes, and then Lynch looks at me and asks:  "Are you going to play football for us in the fall."   You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I'd grown a lot in the last year, but hadn't played football in high school.  This was an exciting question.   Holy Cross had played in the Orange Bowl,  I'd seen them play Syracuse and Ernie "The Express" Davis.   I might even get to play against Floyd Little.   I already believed I was going to play in the NHL or be a Navy pilot like my Uncle Rob, one of the NAS Paxtuxent test pilots Tom Wolfe wrote about in the "The Right Stuff."  So why not.   Anything's possible when you're 19.  Bill and I were chasing legends.


Reality set in fast.   Reality was Richard Krzyzek, junior starting right side linebacker for the Holy Cross varsity.  Reality was a one-on-one drill with Krzyzek.  And that seemed to happen every practice.  In high school I hit the star player for Long Beach high so hard with a clean check during an ice hockey game that he was out cold for five minutes.  Oh, my God!  He's not moving.   I was scared to death I'd killed him.  I hit Krzyzek and nothing happened.  Trying to block him was like running into a brick wall that hit you back.   What does getting your bell rung mean?   It means your brain slaps against the inside of your skull so hard your ears ring.  My ears are still ringing.  The frightening thing was Krzyzek did this absolutely without malice.  There were no histrionics.  He never said a word.   I thought, whatever you do don't make this guy mad. 

At the class of 70's twentieth reunion there was a slide show after  the class dinner with pictures from our days at Holy Cross.   Midway through the show up pops Krzyzek.  In a football helmet he looked like Maximus Decimus Meridus, the Gladiator, ready to personally lead the legions of Marcus Aurelious into the forests of the Macomanni during the Bellum Germanicum.  In the darkness, from the back of the room someone shouted, I'M STILL SCARED OF THAT GUY! 

Sophomore year Father Maurice Riedy, who help coach freshman football in additon to teaching history and being a trustee of the college, stopped me on the way to class.   How are you, Jim, we miss you on the hill [the football practice fields above the dormitories].   Thank you, father, but I need to spend more time with my studies.   (I'm scared to death of Krzyzek and want to take a shot at being a Navy pilot while I have a few brain cells left.  Who knows. I did well in calculus, physics and probability, I might even have a shot at being an astronaut like Joseph Kerwin, MD, Holy Cross '53.   Anything's possible when you're 20.)  Come to think of it, though, Father Reidy also coached lacrosse and that's where he missed me.  I'd scored two goals against the Harvard freshman.   I was a pretty miserable football player.

I confess to this freely.  As soon as I got my first Holy Cross alumni directory, the first thing I did was look up Krzyzek, hoping to discover he was janitor someplace.   What I found was Richard Krzyzek, PhD, director of microbiology research and development, seriously high tech company.  Not bad for the son of a postal worker and teacher... no offense to teachers and the post office.

"Specialists in cell signaling have also learned to take advantage of new research techniques as soon as they become available. 'RNA interference has so many advantages over knockin and knockout mice. It enables you to modulate the amount of knockdown,' Richard Krzyzek [VP Research] says. 'Phosphorus specific antibodies have become immense tools. And single cell methods are starting to gain a lot of popularity.'"

I sure wish old Krzyzek had figured out that stuff about saving knockout mice before he experimented on me.

Brother Rat

So who was the informer who fingered the black students and triggered the black student walkout at Holy Cross.  It was one of my classmates, brother of a now celebrity talking head.  He confessed years ago.   He was the head waiter in the dining hall and the blacks students worked for him.   He was mortified.   He had no idea they were the only blacks, allegedly, at the demonstration.   Why'd he rat them out.  Understand that this young man was the perfect boy.  He didn't swear, drink (at least not much), or use politically incorrect epithets (anachronism but accurate), and was a commander in the ROTC unit, winner of an ROTC scholarship as coveted as an appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.  If a Jesuit had told him to carry black student leader Art Martin's books to class, he'd have responded:  what time do I need to be at his dorm room, Father.  He did what was expected of him.  And, oh yeah, there was a thing going on between him and the Black Student Union's resident provocateur who worked for him in the dining hall. 

Much as I don't want to sympathize with informers (note elsewhere in this blog my reference to a real, not let's pretend revolutionary, my great uncle the IRA captain) like Brother Rat or the college authorities who involved him...honestly... Brother Rat and the college got sucker punched.

BSU resident provocateur and some very smart white underclass activists positioned the black students so that their presence would complicate the administration's response to the 1969 demonstration that disrupted GE recruiting.

Ironically, the smartest conspirator of them all, a white student, went on to become a very successful and highly placed insurance executive who's now a contributor to conservative Republican presidential hopefuls.  The black student leader Clarence Thomas is now a conservative Supreme Court Justice and Ted Wells is an aggressive prosecuting attorney for the NFL.

Remember the Titans

This in one of my favorite sports movies.   It's a mostlytrue story about the integration of a Virgina high school and its football team.   The hero is Herman Boone a black man who takes on the unenviable task of coaching a group of young blacks and whites who don't like each other and turning them into a team of people who respect one another... and of course win the state championship.  Boone's played by Denzel Washington (a graduate of my grandfather's Jesuit alma mater Fordham).   Did I mention that virtually none of the white people in town like Boone and most want him to fail, though he quickly, sort of, wins over the white coach whose job he's taken.

My favorite scene is when a white Marine colonel drives up to practice and tells Boone he wants his son to play for him.   "What position does he play.   Quarterback.   Sir, I already have a quarterback.  Why don't you try another school where he can play.  You don't understand coach.  I have young black and white men fighting together and dying together [in Vietnam].   Those other schools don't have any black players.   My son's going to play for you even if he has to sit on the bench."   In the end the starting quarterback gets hurt and the colonel's son becomes the hero.

Another good sports movie with a racial bent is Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela the South African President who uses rugby as a vehicle for uniting South Africa.

Father Brooks, the hero of Fraternity, was a saintly man.  One thing he was not at Holy Cross was Herman Boone.   And Ted Wells, the leader of the Black Students Union, sure as the dickens wasn't Nelson Mandela. 

Holy Cross: Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

The puzzling thing about finding Art Martin portrayed as one of Father Brooks Fraternity proteges is that Art arrived at Holy Cross when I did a year or two before Father Brooks began his crusade to increase black enrollment at the college.   I remember a gathering of students where Art was asked to brief us on "What's it like to be black at Holy Cross."   This was in probably in 1966 or 67 when we were sophmores, and he said "it's really not so bad."  Then he added politely that he had to field some unusual [well meaning but dumb questions] like
"Why do you wear a stocking cap on your head at night." 
"Easy, I have wiry hair and if I don't keep it under control it will stick out."  
This was the year before long hair and afros came into fashion.   There were three strange dudes at Holy Cross with long hair then.   It seemed like half the student body came back with long hair and mustaches the next year.

What changed as far as the black students were concerned?   It wasn't just about Holy Cross.  My wife tells me that a few years later at Yale she observed the blacks circling the wagons and self-segregating.   Her friend, a lovely Irish redhead from Seattle, had a black fiancee who ignored them completely in the dining hall and sat with the other black students.   He's a great guy; they're still married after all these years and their two daughters are graduates of Jesuit colleges.  His thing now is to dress up in a kilt and hang out with people celebrating their Scots heritage.

What changed was some jerks shot Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Pather Party came into vogue.  Cassius Clay and Lew Alcindor, who'd attended Catholic grammar and high school in New York City, changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam.  Even white pre-medical students at Holy Cross were reading Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Tom Wolfe provides a perspective on this in his book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which examines "white guilt and armchair agitation becoming facets of high fashion" and  "hapless bureaucrats (the Flak Catchers) whose function was reduced to taking abuse, or "mau-mauing" from intimidating young Blacks."   The cynical might say that Holy Cross deserved a chapter in Wolfe's book, but to be honest the Black Students Union only had one member who might have rated a paragraph.  Wolfe's essays do, however, provide a nice backdrop for understanding the black student walkout that took place at Holy Cross in 1969.

Yale: No Irish... or Italians Need Apply

"In the early 1950s, Griswold [Yale President] zestfully attacked mass education, castigating the public schools as the 'rotten pilings' of the American educational system. He argued that the reason liberal arts colleges and preparatory schools [Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, and St. Paul’s] enrolled predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants was that immigrants to this country and their descendants, 'through lack of previous opportunity. failed to comprehend liberal education and therefore failed to support it.' African Americans were equally 'beyond the pale, so to speak, of the liberal arts.'”

"Even a seemingly innocuous aspect of the admissions process, considering the physical characteristics of the applicant, was part of a larger preference for the average, "all-around" boy who fit the traditional 'Yale type.'"

-- Birth of a New Institution, Yale Alumni Magazine
http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_12/admissions.html

In the late 1960s under President King Brewster Yale began a concerted effort to change its admission process and student demographics.   Was Father Brooks part of movement or a leader?   Yale's efforts were focused more on bringing bright public school students who were Jewish and Catholic into the fold.  Brooks of Holy Cross was a leader who focused on inclusion of African Americans (in fact Brooks, SJ, was acting in response to Pedro Arrupe, 28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus).

But even in 1970 when a very bright classmate of mine was turned down by Yale Medical School,   Holy Cross was told it was because the student wasn't Yale's type of person.   He was an Italian American and had nothing in common with Robert Redford or Indiana Jones.   My friend wowed them at Dartmouth Medical School (a two year program) and finished up at Harvard Medical School.

By the way the expression "beyond the pale" used above refers to parts of Ireland (An Phail Shasanach) not under control of the Anglo-Saxon English (Shasanach) in the late Middle Ages.

Gay Holy Cross: David I Walsh

You'd think that David I. Walsh might be the most celebrated graduate of Holy Cross College.   He was governor of Massachusetts and the United States Senator who oversaw the build up of the two ocean United States Navy prior to and during World War II.   Walsh's Navy was America's shield against fascism in the Pacific and Europe's lifeline to liberty in the Atlantic.  Walsh vocally supported the appointment of his friend Louis Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court,  denounced The Birth of A Nation in no uncertain terms when it was shown in Boston,  and demanded that the Democratic Party explicitly renounce the KKK in its 1924 platform.   So where's Walsh at Holy Cross today.   Nowhere to be found.  The Navy ROTC unit, which was Walsh's gift to the college,  celebrates Father Joseph O'Callahan, the Jesuit chaplain who won the Medal of Honor for heroism during the Battle of Okinawa.  Perhaps Walsh is on the backburner because he wasn't enthusiastic about US involvement in WWII before Pearl Harbor, but in that regard at least he was consistent in opposing imperialism and foreign wars thoughout his life.  In another time he might have been a Berrigan.   I think the real reason Holy Cross keeps Walsh in the closet is the 1942 scandal manufactured when the New York Post accused Walsh of being taken in by German spies and of being a homosexual.    The spying charge didn't stick, but Walsh was forever tarred.  

My wonderful schoolmates, and I mean that sincerely, weren't perfect.  Though I never heard an unkind word about the blacks at Holy Cross,  perverts were a different story.   Questioning someone's sexuality or calling them a queer might have been considered rude, but it wasn't taboo.   Is the "new and improved"  Holy Cross far enough beyond that now to acknowledge Walsh.

Santiago, Matamoros, y Cierra Espana

St. James the Moorslayer, one of the most valiant saints and knights the world ever had ... has been given by God to Spain for its patron and protection.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote



St. James,  Moorslayer, and Strike for Spain!   It's curious as the dickens that the first Catholic college in the heart of Puritan New England is named Holy Cross and that they named the hill they built on after the patron saint of Spain.   All the other Jesuit colleges in the US have benign non-sectarian place names like Georgetown, Fordham, and Boston College or are named after obscure saints.   Perhaps it has something to do with Puritan resistance to the college in the first place.  In your face Brahmins!   The Brahmins wouldn't allow a Catholic college in Boston where a mob had burned the Ursuline Convent in 1834.   The inspiration for that debacle was a series of sermons by Yale-man Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was promoting his viciously anti-Catholic A Plea for the West.    Beecher claimed there was a Catholic conspiracy to take over America spearheaded by Catholic education, and, by the way, you need to contribute to the seminary I'm building in Cincinnati.   Beecher would also inspire another college with a famous connection to African Americans:  Oberlin.   Unlike daughter Harriet,  old Lyman was against mixing races,  silent on abolition, and intent on sending free blacks back to Africa.   His students at the Lane Seminary  revolted against this, seceded and helped start Oberlin College, which openly welcomed African Americans.

Moor on St. James.  Although Othello, the Moor of Venice, is often portrayed as a black African, the word Moor has no real ethnological value.   The Umayyad Muslims who conquered Spain in the 8th century were primarily white North African Berbers led by an Arab elite.   At its pinnacle the Umayyad Caliphate would extend from the Indus River through Persia and Arabia across Nothern Africa into Spain and Southern France.   This was not a peaceful conversion.   For better or worse, Western Civilization as we know it was saved on the battefields of France and Spain, where the legendary apparition of St. James led a Spanish army to victory over the Islamic invaders.

Spain's troubled relationship with North Africa pre-dates the Umayyads, though.   Doesn't everyone with a good classical education know that?   Long before Christ and St. James, Celtiberian Spain was conquered by Carthage, the powerful Phoenecian city-state established in Tunsia by colonists from what is now Lebanon.   The culture we call Hipsanic today is rooted in the alliance between Spain's Celtiberians and the Romans led by Scipio Africanus, who defeated Carthage and its famous general Hannibal at the battle of Zama on October 19, 202 BC.  One can only wonder if Scipio's Celts played ceol baeg on their gaita as they marched into battle.  They'll see the Fighting Irish are the Fighting Irish, yet!

While most of us think of Fidel when we hear the word Castro,  a Castro is in fact a Celtic hill fort, a la Numantia, the legendary stronghold above the Duero, northeast of Madrid.  Voila Mount St. James above the Blackstone.   Or should I say, helo aqui!


The Last Days of Numantia -- Alejo Vera

The Desperate Battle for the Dong Ha Bridge

They walked the rounds in on us

methodically adjusting the range

just like we'd been trained to do.

Death hunting the unlucky.

TANKS!  Sweet Mary! Mother of God!

They have TANKS!

 *  *  *  *  *

A Russian-built T-54 main battle tank
36 tons of fire-snorting green painted steel
made a mistake
popped out from cover among the palm trees
for a better shot at us
1000 yards away.

Instantly it's flattened
by a 70-pound-high-explosive bullet
travelling at  2650 feet a second
fired from
a 5-inch Mark 42 cannon.

*  *  *  *  *

A crazy marine named Ripley

slung himself from a rope

and wired the explosives

that blew the Dong Ha Bridge

and stopped the TANKS

for a while

in the violent spring of

Quang Tri Province

1972

Jesus, Mary, get me there.
Jesus, Mary, get me there.

Clarence My Man!

In the late 1960s the militancy of Eldridge Cleaver replaced the non-violent activism of Martin Luther King.   At Holy Cross you needed to be very careful with what you said and how you said it to avoid a sharp rebuke from some of our black schoolmates.   Enter my roommate Lou Massery.   Sunny disposition would be an understatement.   He allegedly had a perfect score on the Math SAT, but at Holy Cross instead of being a grind -- monkish students who did nothing but study -- Lou launched a four year campaign to make everyone his friend.   You'd think this might be a challenge at a school filled with the children of tribal New England since Lou was an Arab American, but that didn't him slow down one bit.   Lou's passion was Palestinian rights.   He was the first person to tell me "don't believe everything you read in the New York Times."  The black students didn't have a clue on how to pigeonhole Lou.  Is he one of us?  Or one of them?   To a black from rural Georgia a bushy haired dark skinned person talking Palestinian rights must have seemed like a space alien.   I remember Lou, ever the great smile, greeting Clarence Thomas one day.   "Clarence, my man!"   I cringed waiting for the inevitable:  "don't call me that [white boy]."   The then wiry Thomas eyed Lou suspiciously and said nothing.   Lou didn't miss beat.  He just smiled, shook Thomas's hand, and kept on talking nonstop.

The Finest People I've Ever Met

My father told me when I was young that the people at Holy Cross would be the finest I'd ever meet. In the years since I graduated, I've travelled the world and met many people, including someone who wanted me to help him run ENRON's financial systems (maybe my Holy Cross education helped me dodge that bullet, but I'd credit my Navy and Alaska sea daddies with teaching me to recognize wild sea stories). Whatever warts Holy Cross might have had, I am certain now that my father was right. This includes not only those like my mathematics professor Peter Perkins, but also my wonderful NROTC mentor who introduced me to Dr. Perkins (read forced me to take calculus).  And many others including football stars like Pete Kimener and Ralphie Lilore who treated even walk-on scrubs with the respect and decency you'd expect from a Holy Cross athlete.

Fraternity-Throwing Holy Cross Under the Bus

There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.
-- Galatians 3:28, James Healy, Bishop of Portland

I allow for the folly of youth as much as anyone, but after all these years can’t we have honest discussion of who behaved badly at Holy Cross College in 1969 during what the Worcester Telegram calls “tumultuous days of integration at Holy Cross.” 

Fraternity, a recent book about those days elevates the Jesuit priest, Father Brooks, who brought Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and prominent attorney Ted Wells to the college, to the status of civil rights hero.   This is done at the expense of the Holy Cross community at the time by portraying it as hostile to Brooks and his young black proteges.   Coverage of the book carelessly claims that Brooks integrated New England's first Catholic college.

First of all, Father Brooks did not integrate Holy Cross. It was never segregated in the first place. There were already black students at the College when Thomas and Wells arrived there. Indeed the college’s first valedictorian in 1847 was James Healy, a slave according to the laws of Georgia. His mixed ancestry was well known to his church mentors and the congregations he served in Boston and Maine as a Catholic priest and bishop.

Moreover, the school’s “white” student body was remarkably diverse compared to its "elite" New England, still predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant, cousins. Most of the Holy Cross students were the children of German, Irish, Italian, and French immigrants, but some of us had roots in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Remarkably thanks to the infinite wisdom of the U.S. Census, my family is now Hispanic.   The school was founded in Worcester because Boston's city fathers did  not want a Catholic school after the Ursuline Convent in Boston had be burned down by a mob in the 1830s.

There was little heroic about the work of Father Brooks, though it may have been difficult and saintly at times. Holy Cross wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama. Worcester wasn’t South Boston. This was the Holy Cross of Michael Harrington (The Other America),  Philip Berrigan (Josephite Father and peace activist), Joseph Califano (LBJ's special assistant for domestic policy), and David I. Walsh (the Massachusetts Governor and Senator who denounced The Birth of a Nation and demanded that the Democrats explicitly renounce the KKK in their 1924 platform).  

Thomas and Wells never encountered someone barring the schoolhouse door. No rocks were thrown at little or big kids arriving at the college by bus or any other means. Father Brooks wasn’t the only Christian in the Holy Cross community. Most of the Holy Cross students were children of devout Catholic families, like the saintly and kind parents of Worcester prosecutor Lawrence Murphy, who truly lived their faith. The majority of the college’s students, faculty and administration, if not the vast majority, supported what Father Brooks did. He may not have opened the door to Holy Cross, but he did actively invite people in, setting a needed example for everyone, including our "elite" New England cousins.

As far as the tumultuous days go, things would have been far less so, if a few student activists including the Black Student Union’s resident provocateur had been less confrontational. I remember very vividly, for example, having my ancestors gratuitously denounced by this young man [as an amused Ted Wells looked on] for what they’d done to his people. I am still puzzled about what ancestor of mine he had in mine. My great uncle who spent three years in a British prison for being a captain in the old Irish Republican Army? My grandfather who persuaded Bob Wagner to run for the U.S. Senate and helped elect him? Remember Wagner, father of Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act? Wagner also helped Walter White with the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign and giving the Tuskegee airmen an opportunity to fly. I didn’t need a pat on my back for the good deeds of my grandfather and his friends, but at least before denouncing them someone ought to have asked who they were.

If the Holy Cross administration made some mistakes by allegedly disproportionately punishing blacks among student demonstrators in 1969, the administration got a lot of help making those mistakes from some very smart young black and white activists who did a very good job maneuvering the College into a situation where it looked bad. At long last it would be some consolation to hear at least a little remorse from those who damaged careers and a college’s reputation with their juvenile behavior.