Latin, Greek and all that as a Jesuit trainee 70 years ago . . .

In some ways an idyllic existence, complete with the retired missionary, "Zoo," chanting the office in the cemetery

In the juniorate, like it or not, you got Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare.  And speech training and speech experience.  You read aloud, without a microphone, to 200 people busy eating and waiting table.  You wrote and memorized and delivered sermons to the same eaters and waiters.  You gave talks of every kind to your classmates.  Willie Ryan threw his repetats into the refectory air, you caught them.  And if you fumbled, you got a second repetat immediately, and a third, until Willie corrected you loudly and directly, telling you in front of all what the problem was.  Words meant something.  You had to get it right, you had to say it right.   For Jesuit high school graduates, Latin and Greek study was more of the same.  From my non-Jesuit school and my year at Loyola I had excellent Latin but no Greek.  The Latin we got now was Livy the historian, Cicero as essayist and orator, Virgil (including my third run through the 6th book of the Aeneid, the first in high school, the second at Loyola), Tacitus (another historian), Horace the poet, and maybe others whom I cannot recall.

The Greek was Homer, Thucydides the historian, the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides, and others.  I memorized and delivered with feeling a speech from Sophocles on stage.  In Latin I could sight-read Virgil.  Greek I could read aloud without a pause and get much of it on the run.   We were taught to hold Latin- and Greek-English desk dictionaries in mild contempt and instead used the big Liddell and Scott on a stand in the library, tracing words and phrases down to their beginnings.  Willie Ryan’s emotion-laden “If words mean anything!” was reinforced by our immersion in language.  Later, in philosophy, we would hear about English “adversaries” to our scholastic positions who emphasized language analysis, as opposed to our leaning on essence and existence.  In the juniorate we worked towards fluency in such analysis.   Along the way, I found myself challenged by Greek.  Having none, I entered the beginner’s class, but in due time got promoted.  By the second year, I was in the A-class, reading the orator Demosthenes, and here I chickened out.  I went to the teacher, Ed Hartman, and begged to be excused.  Things were causing me pressure, I told him.  “Well, ‘things’ are ‘things,’ aren’t they?” he responded pointedly, not pleased at losing a student.  Abashed, I agreed and let it go at that.   It was taking an easy way out.  For all his rather grand manner, Physical Ed was worth sweating for.  He was sharp but no bully.  Neither was Willie Ryan.  None of the juniorate teachers were.  In fact, it was for me all in all a happy time.  We were in the meatiest of study arenas, in my view.  Books, poetry, language work, an emphasis on writing, including for publication, dramatics, including for me performing and directing plays, and lots of baseball, softball, touch football, even a little basketball, swimming in our own pool, hiking, picnicking, and talking, talking, talking.    Milford was an exurb, a nice middle American small town.  Our walks could take us through Indian Hills, a posh ‘burb, or past a golf course.  The hills and woods were rural.  In fact, we had a working farm in walking distance, complete with milk cows and chickens.    The farm had a “villa” in its middle where we gathered weekly for a day-trip walk destination and spent two weeks in the summer.  After we left, Paul Allen as rector had a swimming hole put in.  Pretty relaxing for the most part.  We had neither beer nor babes to distract us from God, nature, and each other.   The novitiate-juniorate grounds proper were a garden spot, full of athletic fields on either side of the three-story building, which had a pleasant design to it.  There were big leafy trees, statues and shrines, heavy wooden chairs to flop into with a book.  The Little Miami River flowed by on one side of the property, beneath a bluff.  We skated and played hockey on the river now and then.    On the other side of the property was a cemetery where Father Zurlinden, known as “Zoo,” walked chanting his divine office, his long hair pulled from behind over the top of his bald pate.  He was a survivor of the Belize hurricane of 1931, in which nine Jesuits died.  Their names appeared in the “necrology,” or calendar list of the dead, on the anniversary of their perishing, to be prayed for on that day.  Not just remembered, but prayed for: we wanted to spring their souls from the purgatory that awaited us all.   These were in large part two years among the lotus-eaters, like Ulysses on his way home, though come to think of it, we never did the Odyssey at Milford, just the Iliad.

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