Loyola Academy, province exams 1960. Vocational quandaries. Pete Fox, iron lung, wit and wisdom.

THE GOLD . . . I pitched the province exams hard. “Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the mind of man, to imagine what I have prepared for you if you win the province exams,” I told 2-A, adapting Scripture to my purpose. They took the challenge. They studied and I drilled, using readily available former exams, and tested and quizzed.

This getting ready for a test can be a teaching device. That is, a learning device. What does the lawyer do when preparing for trial but bone up on data and burn them into his conscious and subconscious? Or the executive for a meeting? Or preacher for sermon or writer for writing a book? Or, for that matter, the boxer for a fight or quarterback before a game? It’s performing under pressure. Schooling should include this, I say. If it’s a good test, why not teach to it? It’s excellent motivation for the schoolboy.

Your students have to be game for it, of course. They need a certain competence and confidence. You can’t give that to someone, but you can encourage what’s there and watch it grow. I had it as a kid. In sixth grade Sister Monica told me I was sure of myself. It was the first time I’d heard of being sure of myself as a good thing. I was encouraged at home and felt appreciated from my earliest days, but it was largely unspoken. It was good to hear at age 10 or 11 that it’s good to be confident. It’s where a teacher comes in.

My province-exam promise, put up on the blackboard, became a byword. In time I specified: win first place and no written homework the rest of the year, meaning exercise work, not compositions, but unfortunately without making that clear. Lesson: make EVERYTHING clear. And make no unfillable promises.

November became December, which became January, which got to its late days and brought the day and hour of the exam. The testsarrived on the day itself—freshman English, sophomore English, etc. through all levels and subjects. When they were taken, all on the same day, of course, they were sealed and sent to a Jesuit office in another state for correcting.

One morning the scores came back. I left 2A to walk downstairs to the principal’s office to get the results. I walked back up and silently walked to the board, where I wrote “Province exam results, English, 1960. Loyola Academy 2-A, FIRST PLACE!” Their yell resounded through the silent halls. Such a day. It was their victory but mine too.

STRUGGLING . . . Meanwhile, there was the vocation-perseverance matter, still an annoyance no matter how many firsts my students won. I worked at dwelling on the good things I had in the most everyday sense possible, as in the good times with my confreres—not a bad stopgap measure. I had an out, of course: the church could dissolve my vows.

Absorption in the work at hand was another good tactic, not that I had a choice as a busy teacher, which I intended to be whatever else was going on inside my head. On the other hand, it didn’t help any to go full speed ahead and get all tired out. We lived where we worked, and I wasn’t always smart about using myself. Later, when Daily News columnist Mike Royko caught me working late in the city room on a story and observed that I hadn’t worked that hard in my previous life, I said that had been the problem, or a problem: I had burned holy candles at both ends.

In any case, when a doctor suggested vitamin shots in my second year teaching, I took him up on the idea. They were the color of darkened orange juice, from a big fat syringe. I took them from him regularly for several months until he told me they were expensive, meaning I ought to call them off, which I did. Knowing Jesuits, he was pretty sure I wasn’t thinking in terms of cost.

However hard I was working and however tired I was getting, I was budgeting nothing. Mike English was doing our budgeting for us. Doing my own budgeting had no appeal. Discussing options with a classmate a few years later, I said I couldn’t see “chasing a buck” as a non-Jesuit. This would have struck the insomniac, financially pressured English as precious indeed. For most of us, freedom from financial worry was one of our perks. It came largely from not having wife and family to worry about. We were spared that, and with it unfortunately, the potential maturing effect that goes with it.

We scholastics had good times together, true. But it was no fun not having female friends or the freedom to slug beers on Saturday night and sleep in on Sunday morning, though our clean living in those early years had to be a contributor to physical health. We got up early, and to this day I have early morning habits.

Reminding myself of those good times, the brotherhood we enjoyed, ranked high among crass motives I used to buck myself up—crass as compared to the high-flying, all-for-Christ-the-king motivation we had nourished as novices. Walking alone in the school’s neighborhood on a Chrismastime evening, seeing lights on in comfortable homes and envying their inhabitants, I concentrated on my own good times. Thus consoled, I would head back to Fort Laramie for litanies and the night meal. It was not quite a whole-burnt offering, but it did for the moment.

My struggle was hardly heroic. The appeal was still there of the spiritual-idealistic and intellectual life. I was on the high road and reaped the psychic rewards of knowing it. Besides, everyone had his problems, I had to tell myself. As to this, it helped to get around, as to a late-night visit with fellow scholastic Pete Fox to the house of a friend of mine. This was Jack, a friendly, smart guy with a Rogers Park flair who had played basketball for Loyola Academy. He and his wife had six young kids. He was in television ad sales and moved with assurance in that fast-moving milieu.

He and Pete and I had a beer in his panelled basement. A word or two about Pete. As I mentioned before, he had gotten polio in our first few months at West Baden. Thereafter, he spent months in an iron lung, or tank respirator, in a Louisville hospital, where we took turns staying with him. Pete smoked too, contrary to Jesuit regs, and once showed a visitor how he could take in a drag while iron-lunging it and eventually expel it. A good story that.

In the novitate he had grown a plant next to his dormitory desk; and when Bill Dietrich, an older guy from Cleveland a year ahead of us and a Navy veteran, genially quizzed him on it, noting that the rules said no one was to have things others did not have, Pete, unfazed, said everyone should have a plant.

He had gotten polio after exploring a culvert beneath the front road at West Baden, we were told. He lost a year of training because of it, much of it spent at the hospital. At Loyola Academy, walking stiffly and with the potential of falling over if he wasn’t careful, he taught math, for which he had a special talent. Low-key, witty, alert, Pete was someone my parents were always glad to have me bring along for a visit. His polio had knocked him out of athletics, at which he excelled, but he never complained. A splendid man.

My friend Jack and he were the sort to appreciate each other, each with his brand of earthy directness. In the course of the visit, Jack pointed out somewhat wistfully a keepsake that had been broken when one of his kids had knocked it over. Pete caught that and later noted that this sort of interruption was not ours as celibates to put up with. Without acrimony he could note the fussiness that characterized some of us and threatened us all as holy bachelors.

— More to come, from Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968 —