Fr. Simon back and our church got him! He had returned some months ago to his African homeland. Kenya, that is, whose missionaries to the U.S. are helping us get around our shortage of priests.

I’m still a priest, by the way, though not practicing since I left the Jesuits after 18 years in ‘68, later asking for laicization from the pope via Vatican officials, among thousands asking for it in those days of turmoil . . .

As such, “defrocked,” as the Daily News city hall man, the inimitable Jay McMullen, referred to me when introducing me to Mayor Daley’s spokesman later that year, when just before the presidential election I had hired on as religion reporter. The Daley man was taken aback and said nothing.

McMullen was a many-sided, outspoken, smart guy, later to marry Chicago’s mayor-to-be, with whom he settled in as a married man. Ran into him later on a Loop street, we chatted, he asked what I was doing in those early ex-Daily News days, suggested I get in touch, indicating I might have work with him. I didn’t.

Other day I bought new boots from Target, which had them sent from an out-of-state location and which at first I liked very much, trying them inside. Alas, the good in-house experience never got my approval in that a zipper on a boot’s side turned out unacceptably recalcitrant and I sent it back, got payment restored on the spot.

Have been going routinely to A-zon (A for Ama, of course), but am likely now on occasion to hit the Target button. Later if I do, will tell about it.

People at church, yes! Pious as all get-out, let me tell you. Far more so, I must say, than at our Oak Park churches, where avant-garde liberalism was a take-for-granted factor and so-called Novus Ordo, new way of doing mass, reigned experimentally, as in a so-called family mass in the gymnasium of one of the village’s four RC churches, where going for Communion, standing, of course, the man — not a priest, of course — required that I say my name before he’d hand over the Eucharist!

Speaking of Oak Park, in which I grew up and where the love of my life and I raised our six perfect offspring, the other day is worth mentioning a headline and story in its local paper, Wednesday Journal, that unfortunately demonstrates the village’s uproariously leftist character:

Driver fatally shoots themselves after crashing into Pace bus in Oak Park,

featuring one of the more obvious and ridiculous — I’d say laughable but for the horror it reports — violations of common sense and stunning sample of say-not-gender-admitting practice in our time!

“A driver fatally shot themselves after crashing into a Pace bus in Oak Park, leaving more than a dozen others injured,” the story went on, showing it not an editor’s inglorious headlining,

And:

“The driver was travelling south on Harlem Avenue when they ran a red light at Lake Street.”

And:

“The driver then took out a gun and shot themselves in the head. They were pronounced dead on the scene, according to the village.”

Ouch, ouch, ouch. Saints preserve us from such damage to the English language!!!

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

Leaving tertianship, I asked to spend the summer at a writers’ house in Evanston, Canisius House, a block or so from the lake.  The man in charge was Rev. John Amberg, who headed Loyola U. Press.  He welcomed me, hanging my picture on the wall with other writers.

Such a deal it was.  I had nothing to do but write.  During the previous summer, at the U. of Iowa writers workshop, I’d got a fair amount of fiction written and a “B” from my teacher, novelist Vance Bourjaily.  I had a novel to write.

But having nothing else to do was not a good formula for me.  I found myself lolling on the beach a few steps away and otherwise hanging about.  So in a few weeks I was off to Ignatius, where I was to teach in the fall, and my picture was off the wall at Canisius House.  It was an omen.  In my remaining three years in the Society, I was to move three times.

SUMMER AT ST. IGNATIUS   At Ignatius I settled down to some writing, not of a novel but journalism.  A summer enrichment program was in full sway at the school.  Jack Arnold and other scholastics had organized a program for neighborhood boys who otherwise would never darken the school’s doors.  I tagged along with them and wrote that up.  It became a cover story later in a national Catholic magazine.  Ditto for one I wrote on the summer’s civil rights agitation.

For the latter I tagged along with a Newsweek intern whom bureau chief Hal Bruno introduced me to.  I’d got to know Bruno through my brother Paul, who headed the Chicago ad office.  Bruno thought a lot of Paul, noting for instance how he treated the black shoeshine boy who came up to the office.  Some gave him a hard time, picking on him for laughs, but not Paul, who treated the guy well.

Bruno was a good guy.  It was interesting sitting in his office talking about the job he was doing.  The magazine had done a major story on crime in the cities but had to wait for a cover picture showing a white criminal.  It took a while, and the story was put on hold.  Bruno did not sympathize with this 1965 correctness, but the news industry was already minding its p’s and q’s in the matter.  Dishonesty was replacing hostility to blacks—then still “colored” or “Negroes,” of course.

He had two interns that summer.  One was sluffing off his responsibility to learn the city.  He was good enough to do what was asked of him—write reports for filing to New York.  But he wouldn’t read up on Chicago.  The other did.

It was with him I attended a rally in a Winnetka park where Studs Terkel was m.c. and spoke of “waiting for Godot” with reference to waiting for the main speaker, Martin Luther King, who was late.   I ran into Ed Rooney of the Daily News on this occasion.  He was friendly but noted that I was not marching or protesting but writing about it, this with a glimmer of criticism, as if a real priest marched.  All in all, it was a great time.  I wandered around with notepad doing what reporters do.  I loved it.

FULL-TIME TEACHING   But the time came, in the fall, to go to work full time.  I had discussed this with my old teacher, Fr. Bob Harvanek, who was province director of studies, going over possibilities with him as to my employment after tertianship.  I had my “teaching master’s” in English. I hesitated.  But Fr. Bob told me that in the last ten years only three priests had gone from tertianship directly to teaching in a high school in the Chicago Province, which had four high schools.

In other words, the thriving high school network was understaffed as to young priests, which was a measure of the foolishness then abroad among us.  There we were with this proven “apostolate” as we used the term, our high school work, and greener pastures were beckoning our younger men.

I was shocked at that and decided I should go back to high school.  How strange that I would have hesitated: when I’d started theology, all I’d wanted was to do just that.  Back to Ignatius I would go.

Come September, I was back in the classroom, teaching “religion-slash-social problems” to seniors.  It wasn’t my idea, though in view of my interest in social problems, I was a natural for it.  Rather, the principal, a few years my senior in the Society, assigned me to it, though without any instructions that I recall.  Not that I was looking for any.

Each senior-class religion section met three days a week.  (My Dominican-run Fenwick had 5-day religion classes, for what that’s worth.) Another young priest taught the marriage course, also for three days.  We each had our sections for a semester, three sections each.  So by year’s end, each had taught six out of seven seniors.  The prolific textbook author and renowned Mark Link (a story in himself) had the 4-A seniors.

BLACK AND WHITE   I jumped in with both feet, tackling race relations as our first social problem and assigning a 1964 book, Crisis in Black and White, by Charles Silberman.  There was no point in being abstract about it, I figured, though even abstractions set my white students’ teeth on edge.  For instance, I also assigned a pastoral letter from the U.S. bishops on racial justice which got them even more upset than Silberman.

I had one or two black students per class.  In one class, I had none. One of the blacks, son of Chicago public school administrators, was a basketballer, a big, good-looking guy, easy-going and his own man, and a student fans’ favorite.  He told me once that there were guys in his section who would do him in if they got him in a dark alley, however.  He was quite Chicago in his understanding of how things work.  He also took a good-looking white girl to the senior prom, sure of himself as ever.

When I took him down the street to meet the local organizer-agitators at what they called the West Side Organization, I was treated by them as God’s gift.  One of them, known as a tough guy and an ex-con, shook my hand warmly.  I had delivered a sort of Barack Obama and was justifying the school’s presence in the neighborhood.  The young man never went back, however, as far as I know.  He was too shrewd to be drawn in by the Roosevelt Road con men, ex-con or otherwise.

Another black student, a son and nephew of Pullman car porters, told me at the start of the term that he would be watching me closely as to how I handled black issues, which was nervy of him.  I did not think so at the time, however, and took it as a challenge.  Of special concern to him was that I might name successful blacks only in sports and entertainment.

On another occasion, not related to this caveat but still serving to relieve me of stereotypical notions, he noted that his family would drive many blocks into white neighborhoods to get the kind of pastry they liked.

He later joined the mostly white junior Catholic Interracial Council, a dozen or so kids for whom I became a sort of chaplain.

Much later he wrote for Muhammad Speaks, the black Muslim newspaper—without becoming a Muslim.

And he informed me when I ran into him years later on an “L” platform, that the military draft was a “paper tiger” which he had avoided easily.

— more to come —