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

With a twist, in which MIKE ROYKO GETS A STORY   One of our disagreements in the teacher’s conference was with what I’d written on something son Bill had handed in.  He had defended his point of view when the assignment had been to report what had been said or written—a sort of exercise in objectivity.  Viewpoints were what we traded in class, which in Bill’s case was all white.

I had set up certain rules for our discussions, as never to say “nigger.”  Opinions flew hot and heavy.  But in some writing assignments, I had ruled them out.  “Give me what the man said, not what you think,” I had written on Bill’s paper.

The mayor missed or ignored my point ,and as they left, turned to shake hands, and in a show of sarcasm said, “I’ll tell him [Bill] he’s to give you back just what’s in the book!”

Then they were gone, the driver holding the door open.   Adrenalin pumping, I left the building by the back door and headed into the yard for some walking around.

Next day I filled the rector in on it.  He didn’t say much, but I think he appreciated my holding back and in general putting up with the situation as it developed.

A few years later, I told Daily News columnist Mike Royko about the whole business, and he put it in Boss, his book about Daley, in the part about Daley’s attitudes towards blacks.  Mrs. Daley tried to get a Bridgeport supermarket not to stock it, which Royko duly publicized in his column.  But a few years after that, doing a story about Ignatius, I talked to a student carrying his paperback copy of Boss, which he was reading as a class assignment.

Bill Daley and most of his classmates, realizing I meant business with my assignments, did all right the rest of the semester.  There were no more meetings with the Daleys.  But at year’s end, when I was up on the altar with other priests at a baccalaureate mass, the mayor came down the aisle for communion, our eyes met, and in his was no benevolence.  I had crossed him, and he hadn’t forgot.

Years later, Royko wrote in the copy of Boss he autographed for me, “He knows it was you [who told about the parlor conference].  Beware!”

JESUITS REACT   Meanwhile, before the year was out, 1965–66, I had done my best to swing my white students around.  The only sign I had that I did so was the comment in a semester-end paper by one of them that before the class he had joined others of his neighborhood in driving into nearby black neighborhoods to find a black and beat him up.  Now he wouldn’t be doing that any more.

From my colleagues I got various reactions, mostly along lines of age.  A Jesuit religion teacher who emphasized the inner life for his students, vs. my emphasis on behavior, told me he was doing more for the race problem than I was.  I did not argue with him, at a loss as to how either of us would know.

A lay teacher whom I knew better than most from his years in the Jesuits, cut me off one day as an extremist for some position I had taken in class.  I had gotten defensive, at that, falling into the old loss-of-perspective trap, as in failing to justify the black kid flashing a knife at whites on an “L” train, for which indeed there was none.

However, it comes to mind as I write this how differently a young black kid decades later looked at me passing him on the sidewalk a block or so from our residence. I was on two crutches after knee surgery, and the kid had a softened look when he saw the crutches, whereas passing me on other occasions, he looked at me as an enemy.

We had that in Oak Park, suspicion to burn by blacks. Not all, of course, but not a surprise when we encounter it. Never the same experience in our now ten years on the city’s northwest side, which is rich with diversity.

The Ignatius principal was in general not happy with how things went, on one occasion demonstrating his disapproval in another context, breaking into my classroom one afternoon—while I was there—to tell my students to be quiet.  The door to the classroom, down the hall from his office, was open, and I was reading from Catcher in the Rye for a once-weekly Creative Writing class, and the boys were roaring.  The students reacted well, reading the interference as uncalled for.  I told Bob Koch about it.  I considered him on my side, or at least sympathetic with my position.  He was certainly one I could level with, even when he boiled over at me, as he did once.

I was eating my steak in the two-story fourth-and-fifth-floor grand library turned rec room on a feast day.  My various neighborhood activities were in his craw, and he crossed the room, which was full of Jesuits, to upbraid me, I forget about what in particular.  But he was a straight guy whom I could put off in relaxed fashion with “Now’s not the time I want to argue about that, Bob,” at which he went back to his steak.

This was an aberration.   We had barbecued on the fire escape, by the way, a stone’s throw from the projects.  It was probably July 31, St. Ignatius Day, and all in all, the kind of nice experience, sitting and chewing the fat with the brethren, that endured as a fond memory, even with the rector pissed off at me.

He wasn’t someone I could hold a grudge against anyhow.  In fact, I’d have to class him with Mike English of Loyola Academy and John McGrail of the juniorate and Bob Harvanek of West Baden, later province head of schooling and after that provincial, and as men I had as superiors or teachers whom it is a pleasure to remember after these many years—each a man in whom bullshit had no place.

As the 1965–66 academic year had wound to a close, a lay teacher whom I had known when he was a student in my year at Ignatius in 1957–58, thought I should ask out of the whole religion-social problems business and teach English.

It was not a bad idea, not least because the content of religion-social problems was nonexistent.  In how many ways was I to urge my students to do right?  After a while at it, I would be reduced to spitting out data that made my point.

Decades later, it occurred to me that I’d have been better off teaching the course out of literature, assigning novels, essays, and even poetry for its combination of rhetoric and insight.  On the other hand, at a 50th-anniversary reunion of the Loyola class I taught in the ‘50s, I heard from one of them that our field trips to the black South Side were life-changers.

In any case, I chose another route out of my situation, unfortunately.  I went back to school.   This made no sense.  Caught up in an imaginary power game—wanting power so I could “make a difference”—I decided I should be a sociologist, because “knowledge is power.”

What I was doing planning how much power I could gain—to do lots of good, of course—is one of the mysteries of the ‘60s.  I had joined as an 18-year-old as if coming home to a divine certainty.  Sixteen years later, a thoroughgoing creature of my time, I was just another influence-seeker—to do lots of good, of course.

My first year as a priest-teacher had gone well, all things considered.  I had people mad at me, including the principal, but there was nothing terminal about that.  In fact, years later he and I met at a reunion and shook hands and were glad to see each other.

So people were mad at me.  It was nothing I couldn’t handle.  Nothing others couldn’t handle either, as far as I could see.  The student newspaper played me up as Ignatian of the Year or something like it, in honor apparently of my having made a splash.

— Yet more to come . . .