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

GOOD TIMES   All in all, I liked my time in the neighborhood.  I met some good people, including the storied Florence Scala, who lived on Taylor Street in back of Ignatius and had bucked Mayor Daley in his building the U. of Illinois “circle campus,” smack dab where people lived.

Studs Terkel gave her a chapter in the first of his immensely successful interview books, Division Street: America.  She was a woman of deep integrity who as a girl, daughter of an immigrant tailor, had found Jane Addams’ Hull House a home away from home.  It was a pleasure to mix with her in these days of turmoil and excitement.

The black ministers were also a pleasure.  Arthur Griffin, our little organization’s treasurer who let himself be euchred by a white summer worker, later headed the historic once Congregationalist (United Church of Christ) church at Ashland and Washington, across from Union Park.

The portly W.W. (Woodrow Wilson) Taylor lived well next to his substantial church near Loomis Courts, on the southwest corner of ABLA.  I never begrudged him this.  He was an island of middle-class achievement in the midst of trouble and was always warm and friendly.

RIOT   Indeed, it was while headed toward his church on the far side of the projects that I ran into trouble in the riots of ‘66, which had been set off in part by the closing of a fire hydrant on a hot day on Roosevelt Road a few blocks west of Ignatius.  I

It was about 7 o’clock on a summer night as I made my way.  I knew of the commotion that had started or was threatening.  There was a meeting of concerned citizens at Taylor’s church, a formidable stone structure.

I was crossing a field when a young adult Fagin who was organizing teen-agers for mischief spotted me 30 or so yards away, heading away from him and his Artful Dodgers.

“Hey,” he called out.  I kept going, not having been born within the previous 24 hours.  “Hey” again, “you with the collar.”  I chose not to dialogue with this group, and kept going.  They did not pursue.  These were kids meant for greater things, including the taunting of cops.

Later that night, after darkness fell and police and citizens were all over Roosevelt Road, a black organizer whom I knew, not of the West Side Organization, advised me to go home, my white face making too tempting a target.  I did so, but not before making a white-liberal telephone call to the cops.

“This is Father Jim Bowman from St. Ignatius High School,” I told the cop at the station, calling from a pay phone in the drug store at Roosevelt and Loomis.  “The problem is the fire hydrants,” I said.  “Police turned them off on Roosevelt but not on [white] Taylor Street [a block away].  This is the problem.  That’s what people are mad about.”  (I expected him to call the squads back to the station?)

“I haven’t got time for sociology,” said the cop, using the catch-all (inaccurate) going term for do-goodism.

So much for Father Bowman’s intervention in history.  I thought with supreme naivete that I was using my credentials and influence to make peace on the Near West Side.

But the Fagin who yelled at me with “the collar” had other ideas.  So did the men who stood behind rows of teen-agers and younger children throwing rocks at the police, as was reported to me by a young friend.

Next day, another friend showed up on the street with an arm in a sling.  We talked at Roosevelt and Loomis.  He wouldn’t be going to work that day in a far suburb, partly because of the broken or bruised arm, what a cop had apparently done to him in a melee, partly because he was afraid to show himself, a black guy, in a white enclave after the previous night’s rioting.

END GAME   This gives a flavor of life at Ignatius after teaching.  It was going to end.  I knew that.  My free-lancing from retreat to retreat was no life for me.  I was fairly directionless, without assignment.  I talked about it with Harvanek, who suggested Xavier University, Cincinnati, where I would be an English teacher.

Fact is, if I hadn’t been saddled with my itch to change the world and my specific itch to achieve racial justice, I’d have wanted nothing better.  He probably did more than suggest.  It didn’t matter.  I was ready to do something else, even if it meant leaving Chicago behind.  And teaching English on a college campus?  Just what the vocation doctor ordered.

I told people on the street I was leaving, including Chester Robinson, who chided me, implying that I’d been appreciated and it was a shame I would no longer be on the scene.  He regretted my leaving, he said, the two of us having dismissed or even forgotten his fingering me months earlier.  Maybe Don Benedict had said something.

— More to come, (again) stay tuned . . .