Fiddler on the Roof

By far the favorite bus song for our daily ride to Chaminade High School (Bill O'Reilly's alma mater) was Jewish.  Picture a bus full of Irish, Italian, German and Greek Catholic kids thundering down Old Country Road to the tune of Hava Nagilia, led by Richie Segal, grandson of a Jewish Cantor (musician who leads the congregation in songful prayer).

And believe me,  if Richie could have figured out a way to climb on the roof of the bus to lead the choir, he would have.

Partly Cloudy On a Planet You Don't Live On

My 11-year-old daughter and I were trying to understand a science article for Arizona's amazing Large Binocular Telescope.  The story was about Arizona scientists looking at a planet  a bazillion miles away:  Non-equilibrium Chemistry Patch Clouds Model.   What does that mean she asks.   Before I could answer (as if I could) she said:  "I get it!   Partly cloudy today on a planet you don't live on...with a chance of rain!"  


"Directly Imaged L-T Transition Exoplanets in the Mid-Infrared"
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2085

H8799 b, c, d, e

Even Marx Believed in Hell

We went to Ireland on our honeymoon.  Everyone was very pleasant and helpful during the trip. Even the poor old Irish nun who sat next to us on the plane ride over and asked my wife "Why are you visiting Ireland, you don't look Irish?" said it in the most innocent well intentioned way. 

 

My grandmother Honoragh would say "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."   This expression is sometimes attributed to Marx.  Although she was very fond of the TV show "You Bet Your Life", she certainly never read Das Capital where the quip appears.   Maybe she picked it up from her brother Ned, the IRA captain who joined the Wobblies after the British released him from prison and he came to America.   "The Road to Hell" probably originated with St. Bernard of Clairvaux who preached the Second Crusade and was gravely saddened by its failure and the great loss of life.  No doubt Marx had some regrets, too.   Interesting to think that even Marx believed in Hell.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Grandma Honoragh's favorite TV shows:

You Bet Your Life -- Groucho Marx
Life is Worth Living -- Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
The Liberace Show -- Liberace
The Lawrence Welk Show -- Lawrence Welk

 

How I became Hispanic.

Some years ago I was working at home and a knocking came at the door.   When I opened the door there was a young woman.  
How can I help you, says I. 
I am here to take the census.  
This gave pause as it was 1995.   You are very early or very late, says I.  
Oh, we're taking a special census.   We think we've missed some of the Hispanics in the last census and the city can get more money from the federal government if we find them.
I'd be glad to help you find the lost Hispanics.  How can I help?
I just have two questions you need to answer.
Go ahead, says I.
What is your race?
Scientifically there is no such thing as race, young lady.
(since this was the government, I demurred on my "we're all one in Christ bit")
She didn't miss a beat and checked off race = smart aleck.
Do you have any Hispanic ancestry.   (the infinitely powerful word any)
What do you mean by any.
Any ancestor from any country on this list.  
And she handed me a very long list.  I turned it over to the other side and found a match.
Yes, says I.
She smiled, elated that she had found one of the lost Hispanics, said thanks and was off without another word, not bothering to ask about my ancestor the Spanish Armada sailor shipwrecked on the Irish coast.

---------------------------
The identity we know as Hispanic today is a result of the marriage of Celtic Iberia and the Roman Republic,  whose forces under Scipio Africanus allied with Spain's Celts to defeat Hannibal of Carthage during the Punic wars.

"Livy tells the story of the capture of a beautiful woman by his troops, who offered her to Scipio as a prize of war. Scipio was astonished by her beauty, but discovered that the woman was betrothed to a Celtiberian chieftain named Allucius. He returned her to her fiancé, along with the money that had been offered by her parents to ransom her. While Scipio was long known for his great chivalry, Scipio doubtless also realized that the [Roman] Senate's first priority was the war in Italy, and in the midst of the Carthaginian base in Hispania, he was to be outnumbered without much hope of reinforcement. It was paramount therefore that Scipio cooperate with local chieftains to both supply and reinforce his small army. The woman's fiance, who soon married her, naturally brought over his tribe to support the Roman armies" 
--  Livy, Ab urbe condita

The Way of the Dragon

My young brother was out shopping one fine Topeka day and as he approached the Walmart entrance he came upon a young couple being accosted by several skinheads.   It was a nasty pushing and shoving, profanity laced, intimidating altercation.   Tim walks up and shouts at the skinheads to stop.   Which they do and immediately start screaming and threatening my brother.   Tim's response is to shout.  I'm FBI and if you guys don't beat it, I'm taking you all in.   (Tim's credibility on this was helped by the fact that he is 6' 3'' and looks like his great-grandfather, one of the NYPD's 40 Immortals).   The skinheads head for the Flint Hills.

Relieved of this trouble Tim proceeds into the Walmart where he encounters the young couple.  The young woman is in tears.   Her husband has his arms wrapped around her and turns his head to my brother.  "Thank you so much for stopping them.   Are you really FBI?"   "Yes that's true," says my brother with a smile.   "Full Blooded Irishman."   Quick on his feet, too.

The Quiet Man

When the Irish students at Holy Cross discovered that Clarence Thomas and Ted Wells had formed a Black Students Union, they felt left out.   The British were long gone from County Clare, the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was still just a twinkle in Bernadette Devlin's eye, and the Bloody Sunday Bogside Massacre was four years off.   The Catholic Church had done it's darnedest to drill into us "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's."   But we were all reeling from the assassinations:  Kennedy, King, Kennedy.  The Vietnam war was a bad dream that wouldn't go away (and still is), spoiling what was left of our little honeymoon at Holy Cross before getting on with life.

Little IRA signs started appearing around the campus.  They should have read Sinn Fein, but with the Jesuits more interested in teaching Latin and Greek and, with few Gaelic speakers among the students, few would have gotten the message.

Not long after, a bunch of freshmen marched on Mulledy Hall, the junior and senior residence, rumored to be the headquarters of the Holy Cross chapter of the Irish Republican Army.   IRA!  IRA!  IRA! They chanted.   We cowered at the windows, watching them, looking at each other, wondering what would happen next.   A large fellow, a tackle on the football team who didn't say much, appeared and asked what the commotion was.   "They think this is IRA headquarters and won't leave."   He thought about this for a moment and said, "Okay, I'll take care of it."

He went outside and invited the demonstrators in.
"Thank you for coming, Lads."
"Please take a seat on the floor and I will share with you our plans."
"Ireland is yet not free!"
"Brits out of Ireland!"
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshmen
"We oppose tyranny and oppression wherever it may be!"
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshman
"We are behind the blacks students 100 percent in their fight against tyranny and oppression!"
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshmen
"When they take over the ROTC building, we'll take over the greenhouse!"
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshmen
"We are a secret society.   Here's what I need you to do."
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshmen
"Go back to your rooms and don't say a word about our meeting to anyone.  Not even your confessor."
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshmen
"We are never to be seen talking together in public again."
"When I need you, I will call on you."
"HOOORAY!!!!!" shouted the freshmen
"Now leave by different doors, by one's and two's."
"Be careful you're not followed.  There are informers among us."
The freshman drifted off into the night.

The Usual Suspects

Appearances can be deceiving,

but the Madison #1 Wildcats are doing algebra homework.

 

Who's afraid of  Keyser Soze?

¿Quién tiene miedo de Keyser Soze?

Quem tem medo de Keyser Soze?

Hvem er bange for Keyser Soze?

Is fearr Gaeilge briste, ná Béarla clíste.




Three's Company

Night at the Museum

 

Las chicas sólo quieren divertirse!

Garotas só querem divertir!

Le ragazze vogliono solo divertirsi!

Piger vil bare have det sjovt!
 

Girls just want to have fun!

Is folamh fuar e teach gan bean

 

Schnepf Farms: Sonnets from the Portuguese

8 Mile

Not quite.  The hills in the distance were gray shadows you could make out through the mist and the rain of Prince William Sound.  From a fishing boat you look up from your work and all around you see where sky and water meet.  Even on a clear day you can't see anything else but mountain tops farther out than 8 mile.   On the run out of Homer there'd been plenty to fill your eyes.   The glaciers in Kachemak Bay, fingers of ice holding onto the ridge on the south shore in July.   Augustine Island: the smoking volcano, the solidary sentinel standing guard at the entrance to Cook Inlet.

The boat's not fast so there's plenty of time for dolphins to find us and keep company.  Up north the dolphins are black and white, like little killer whales.   They put on quite a performance doing twists and somersaults in the boat's bow wake.  Then they're gone.  Time for lunch?  Or just fickle like young women. 

Whales can be curious.   They sneak up on you and announce they're here with a belch of air and water.  Then they slide alongside, disappear in the water ahead and pop head high in the air to get a better look at you.

A local looked at me after I arrived.   This is pretty hard work.   He was trying to intimidate me.  You think you can cut it?   Do the fish shoot back (contemplating the 200 raids I'd survived during the war)?  Nope, he said with a puzzled look.   I'll be fine.

You work from dawn till dusk, in July in Prince William Sound that means 3 or 4 hours sleep.  When the salmon are running, you do nothing but work.   No one wants to hear that you're tired, sick or hurt.   Just work.

And at the end of the day and the beginning, you'll have another job.  On a small seiner, the deckhand doubles as the cook.   My specialties were beer pancakes for breakfast and fresh caught salmon for dinner.  The crew, the philistines, never wanted salmon: give us steak or burgers.  I tried chicken and dumplings once.  The dumplings ended up being just soggy dough.  I blamed it on the diesel drip stove that took forever to heat up, but it was probably not having any milk on the fishing grounds, so I substituted beer for milk in the recipe.  It worked for the pancakes, so why not for dumplings.

Before long a deckhand's hands become so tough you can't open them all the way.  Cut yourself with a knife, you don't bleed.

Grab the end of the big seine net you forgot to secure and you'll get whipped across the deck faster than you can say Jack Robinson.  Pray you let go of the net before it pulls you in the water.  If you go in, the cold water blows the air right out of your lungs.  Don't get your boots off before they fill with water, you sink.  Get tangled in the net you're probably a goner, too.

Almost freezing in July your fishing gear keeps you warm while the net races off the stern and into the water,  its floats clopping on the end of the deck as they go over the side.   The freezing rain hits your face like an amphetamine, a rush carrying you through the job of hauling in the big net.   When you're heaving it in, it feels like it will pull the muscles right off your bones.

Three miles off shore in the driving rain with the engine cut off because there's a net with 2,000 salmon alongside. The wind was driving us on the rocks and not another boat anywhere to be seen. We should have cut the fish loose. Even in the summer the cold waters of the Sound will kill you quick.  2,000 salmon was too big a payday, we were young, reckless, rolled the dice and bagged the fish.  As I looked up after bringing the last fish abroad, a wave broke over the rocks that were almost close enough to touch.   The engine started and we pulled away.

The Last Hurrah

St. Patrick's Day, Topeka, KS, many years ago.   Al is smiling, but inside he is sad.   Someone's just told him: we're glad to have you march in the parade, but no "Al for President" signs.  No politics in the parade.  We all looked younger then.   I don't know why he was worried about the signs.  There wasn't a single person in town who didn't know who he was and why he was there.

Courtesy the Topeka Taxi Service

Standin on a corner in Winslow, Arizona...

and don't forget to eat and stay at the La Posada Hotel.

Young and Black in Arizona

One of the most entertaining parts of life in Arizona is driving my son and his friends around.  To the movies, the pool, to spring training baseball games.   They get caught up in a frenzy of animated story telling.   Their middle school adventures are retold like they happened yesterday, even some that happened years ago.  They repeat themselves a lot.   How they tricked this or that teacher.  Their schoolyard fights and football games.  The time they got detention for defacing somebody's social studies poster about racism and anti-Semitism with "Hitler and the KKK are gay" graffiti.  Trying to interject that they shouldn't fight or say bad things about gay people only gets the response (if any) that we're never backing down and what do the teachers expect when they let people put up posters with Hitler and the KKK in a room with black, Catholic and Jewish kids. 

Even when the stories turn dark there's still great revelry in their telling.   After the basketball game at Maryvale in central Phoenix when the other team's cheerleaders followed them to the bus shouting profanities and throwing rocks at our team's bus as it left the parking lot.  The baseball game when our black pitcher was winding up and a Latino parent cheering for the other side shouted to the batter "wait until he throws you another watermelon!"

The most troubling story was about  a cousin getting suspended for slamming a schoolmate's head into a door and opening up a cut that required stitches.   I asked why in Heaven's Name would he have done that.  His cousin sitting in the back seat matter-of-factly replied:  "This Mexican kid was following him around all day calling him the N word.  So my cousin got fed up and clobbered him.   Then the kid's parents got after us and said they'd shoot us if we ever walked by their house.   So after that my cousin and I always had to take the long way home from the Sunnyslope community center, cause they sounded like they really meant it."

Arizona Kids

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam

Enter the Dragon

It was late Sunday afternoon at the downtown Phoenix dining hall run by the Catholics for the  homeless, a nasty neighborhood. Outside the temperature was over 110.  Inside the swamp coolers and thick concrete walls of the crumbling old gray building weren't keeping it much cooler.   Shouts came from the dining hall.   I ran out from the kitchen to see what was going on.  In the middle of the room where 200 people were eating, not one raised his eyes to see what was happening. Six black men were stomping another black man lying on the ground.   The young Notre Dame graduate who ran the place was standing on the periphery not knowing what quite to do.   I pushed him out of the way, elbowed past the attackers and straddled the man on the ground.   The man facing me shouted "I'm going to kill you Mother F..ker!"  I wanted to drive my fist through his face, and in my younger days would have let him have it in an instant, but now I was older and wiser.   Instead of starting a riot with me in the middle of the fight, outnumbered, I shouted back:  "this is God's house!  Stop and get out or you'll never eat here again!"  I watched for a knife, trying not to break eye contact.   My testicles were trying to hide behind my spine.   The victim scooted away and out the door while his attackers were distracted.   Then they all just stopped and without a word drifted out the door, too.

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.