From the West Side to Wilmette, Loyola Academy and a different kind of student.

Onward and upward with a second-year teacher's classroom experience,

CHANGE OF VENUE

If by the close of my first year teaching I had got the hang of running a class and managing passably well with the boys, I had been too clearly seen as suffering under Rudy Knoepfle, "the terrible Teuton," one scholastic called him. In this, Rudy's first year as a principal and my first as a teacher, he did not approve of my performance and showed it, and I chafed under his tutelage. I probably hinted at the situation to the provincial in my conference with him at the time of his mid-year “visitation,” as we called it.

In any case, when province assignments were posted in the spring, I was scheduled for Loyola Academy, in Wilmette, where Tom Murray, the soul of ease and professionalism, was in his umteenth year as a principal. I was apparently expected to fare better there. Murray, a big relaxed guy, was perfect for a supposed bruised reed like me. He gave me classes that were amazingly ready to learn.

I slapped a senior on my first day, barely grazing him, and got a very helpful reputation from that. I relaxed in suburban surroundings and was pretty much off to the races. A year later, who should arrive at Loyola but the terrible Teuton himself, Knoepfle. But by then I had some seasoning and was ready to respond to his heavy hand on the tiller, which he naturally eased up on as a result.

At Loyola I began pushing the racial business in addition to my English teaching, and that didn't always go well. I had my students read Twain's Puddn'head Wilson, a story of black and white babies switched at birth, and emphasized the racial angle, banging it home. Not for many years did it dawn on me that I'd been something of a scold.

Nobody likes one, but scolding is out of place, I realized, especially in the classroom, which is for engaging mind and heart but mainly mind, trying to help students make it in a mindless world. Instead, I injected tension into the learning situation - not always a bad thing, to be sure - beyond what was helpful. A more muted presentation would have done better. Those who were receptive would have got the point. The others would have squirmed but got it later.

I had other ways to push various agenda -- assigning compositions about labor unions, for instance. One father said I had objected to the kid’s composition because he disagreed with me. The father argued the point well in conversation at a fathers’ club gathering. You were more likely to run into that at Loyola than Ignatius, where parents' educational level was a step or two lower and comments were earthier. One Ignatius father, for instance, told one of us about his son, an exemplary student, that he “wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful.” The boy later joined the Jesuits, staying several years, and had a distinguished newspaper and authorial career.

Another Ignatius father dispatched traffic for a trucker. Another, whom I knew from errand-boy days as a high-schooler, ran an electrotype machine. Loyola parents, on the other hand, were more likely to be upper-level managers, business owners, even socialites. One kid, a big and good-natured senior, rode his horse onto the campus at lunch time on a spring day just before graduation, when seniors had the day off. I can still see him galloping across the football field. There was of course the vast middle in each school that was transferable. But that didn't change the overall dynamic.

The Loyola kids were less direct, more politic and more devious. The study-period cherry bomb at Ignatius had its counterpart in the senior lounge roar during lunch period, with lights out and an attempt to ignite my cassock, for God's sake. Nasty stuff, as if there were more pent-up hostility there and less awareness of what happens to bad guys if they don’t watch out. Father Charley Conroy, a young priest faculty member, appeared just in time at the lounge door and stopped it all pronto. Charley, later an army chaplain in Viet Nam, had authority that I lacked. That attempted lighting up of my cassock was in a class by itself.

Later, teaching at Ignatius as a priest, I fielded questions that never would have been asked at Loyola, such as one from a Bohemian-ancestry senior about “this ‘bohemian’ business” after a character in a short story spoke of being bohemian, meaning artistic, as a lifestyle choice. He was genuinely puzzled. Answer a question like that, you feel you've pushed ignorance back visibly and maybe headed off a bar fight at some future date.

On the other hand, Bill Daley, Mayor Richard J. Daley's youngest son, later secretary of commerce, Al Gore campaign manager, and Obama White House chief of staff, asked why the short stories we were reading all had unhappy endings. It was something we might have spent a semester on but didn't -- a teaching moment that I let slip away.

Ignatius was a rich environment and satisfying in its way. But as a scholastic in the late '50s, it was at Loyola where I found students I could run with. Tom Murray gave me classes of higher literacy than I'd had at Ignatius. A year later Murray was gone, and Rudy Knoepfle came to Loyola as principal, moving from Ignatius as part of the new rector’s plan for saving the Academy, as I saw it at the time.

More later on saving the place . . .

— All from my Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968 —