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

Meanwhile, the summer program completed and my paper work in the hands of the Office of Economic Opportunity downtown, I packed my trunk and bags one August day and decamped for Cincinnati to teach English.

I was a late appointment; but the English department head, found three slots for me.  I had to bone up on my poetry for an evening class of business majors and others, whom I intended to make a little more sensitive to the finer things in life.

In the class was Bill Mason, a black guy known around Xavier and in the neighborhood as stand-up and congenial, a 20-something bachelor and guardian of a teen-age nephew.  He and I played basketball and ate pizza and drank beer together.  He took me into black bars and in general helped make life more familiar and comfortable in my new home.

On campus I lived in the so-called honors dormitory, a three-story mansion, a gift to the university and thus in no way scarred by dormitory architecture or design.

It housed mostly honors course students.  As a high school senior many years earlier, I was considered for and considered entering the Xavier honors program.  I took at least one phone call at the time from Father Heatherington, who ran the program then and was running it 18 years later when I went to live in the dorm.

I did not go to Xavier but to Loyola.  My generation of our family was the first to attend college, and leaving town for school was not accepted procedure.

As dorm rector, I was in the midst of students, living in my first-floor room with fridge and pantry.  I shared the latter two with an older Jesuit, a very nice guy who taught theology.  Between us we had our own car.

Moreover, at XU you only had to go to the common supply room in the main Jesuit residence, a fort-like structure on a hill in the center of campus, to replenish your liquor supply.  Not bad.

Between my bedroom and the rather extensive hallway entrance area was an anteroom where I had a desk and telephone and typewriter.

DEATH AND BURIAL   On November 1, 1967, I was sitting in that anteroom office with a female student, going over her work, the outer door wisely kept open, when the phone rang.

It was my brother in Chicago saying our father had died.  He had dropped by his and my mother’s Oak Park apartment in the middle of a work day, between calls on customers for a printing company, had gone into the bathroom and hadn’t come out.

My mother pushed the door but couldn’t get it all the way open because he had slipped off the toilet and was leaning against it.  A vascular occlusion had done it, as it had done to his younger sister Enid some years earlier at 63.  He was 72.  The brother who called with the news went the same way, 30 years later, at 73.  Circulation was quick death for some in our family, in the blink of an eye.

I drove to Chicago for wake and funeral.  The wake went two nights, was packed each night—a tremendous outpouring for my father, whose memory meant much to those he left behind.  My mother revived nicely for it, buoyed as ever by the socializing, to which she always responded with her sparkling smile and conversation.

Back at Xavier after wake and funeral, I continued my brand of outreach to the neighborhood.  I had gone looking for activity but did not find anything right away.  I did make contact eventually with some white activists who gathered and devised a plan of deployment in case of rioting, which was in the air.

And I found and went to meetings, standing at one of them at a microphone somewhat foolishly waving my membership card in the Association of Chicago Priests.  Someone asked me later if my XU superiors had sat on me for that appearance.  It had never occurred to me that they would, and they didn’t.

While attending another meeting later in the spring, word came of King’s being shot, and we went into action in our assigned roles and places.

— More to come . . .