Being a Jesuit in the '50s -- teaching at St. Ignatius on the West Side of Chicago . . .

. . . Fresh out of seven formation years as novice and student

TO THE BARRICADES

As for the state of my soul in 1957, after seven years I continued to pray, trying my best to slap on over my discontent a nice coating of religious devotion. And I mostly did my duty, not turning left onto Roosevelt Road, my metaphor for jumping ship, as I descended the ancient wooden staircase at Ignatius, but right toward the classroom where 2-D English was waiting.

They were a challenge, to be sure, but also fun on wheels, once literally so when I found several pushing a radiator around the room on a dolly, one of them riding it. You may ask what the radiator and dolly were doing in the classroom, but Ignatius was an old building and maintenance was ongoing, and you found things like stray, unattached radiators.

The scene struck me so funny that my shouted desist order had a certain I-don't-give-a-damn quality that got instant response. 2-D’s 41 students - yes, in one room - were red-blooded American sophomore boys, smart enough to be a challenge to me without quite mastering the subject at hand. I found it a strain but also a saving grace in that they (and their counterparts in other classes) provided for me an object for attention besides myself.

Fr. Bob Harvanek had the right idea. At this point or later, when he was director of studies for the province, he heard me out as to my supposed troubles and said he did not expect me to walk away from them because I was "not that kind of man.” He was a guy who could get away with calling you to be a certain kind of man, which is what it came down to, Jesuit or not.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

I was one of a bumper-crop dozen or so scholastics at Ignatius. We had our separate "rec room," or lounge, overlooking Roosevelt Road, where we gathered after the night meal. I don’t recall having television. If we did, the reception wasn’t very good. The fathers and brothers, only two or three of the latter, had their rec room one floor higher in the two-storey-high community library, with shelves on a balcony reached by a rickety staircase.

Our rec room faced the projects - ABLA Homes, which stretched a half-mile west and south to the tracks, beyond which lay the Pilsen neighborhood, once Bohemian, already becoming Mexican. Kitty-corner, stretching south and east, was what black residents called Jewtown - old, dingy, dilapidated but not public, housing. Jewtown was a Dickensian blot, black like the projects but considered tougher. Russian Jews -- "the worst kind," wrote a Jesuit brother in an early history of Holy Family parish -- had settled there at the turn of century.

Barney Rasofsky grew up there. His father cuffed him when he came home cuffed by toughs in the street: no son of Rasofsky was going to be a streetfighter. But Barney, turned Barney Ross, became world champion. He held three titles at once, then joined the Marines, got shot up in the South Pacific, came back with a heroin habit after taking morphine for the pain, kicked the habit, becoming yet another kind of hero. The sabbath was honored in the Rasofsky household, which shut down every Friday at sundown.

It was not honored in the convenience store on Roosevelt kitty-corner from Ignatius, where its students would wander in during lunch hour - unwisely, said Father Whitehead, a veteran Latin teacher, in a faculty meeting, because the place was full of “hopheads.”

The customers were black. So was the young woman with whom the white proprietor pulled away from the curb in his convertible one spring day, waved off by neighborhood men. This was 1958, remember: the revolution had not started. The good-looker would have been congratulated on her good fortune, as would the proprietor. You could see it all from our fourth floor.

— more to come, as in Company Man: My Life as a Jesuit, 1950-1968 —