Saving Loyola Academy, more of the teaching life as a Jesuit, 1959. Mike English in the driver's seat. He brings his team. It's "for the church."

FORT LARAMIE . . . The academy had moved in 1957 from Rogers Park on the Loyola University campus to a new Wilmette campus bordering the Edens expressway on the west. It had a Laramie Avenue address, the same Laramie that runs through the West Side a mile east of Oak Park. The building sat in splendid isolation on the space of two or more city blocks. Charley Conroy called it Fort Laramie.

The building, a cement-block construction on two floors, was no architectural gem. One scholastic called it a button factory. But it had lots of space for athletic fields and team practices, a big gym (whose floor buckled zanily shortly after installation), and a great swimming pool. Jesuit living quarters included a top-floor scholastics' rec room and a first-floor fathers' rec room, rather nicely appointed, leather-cushioned chairs and all, at first out of bounds for scholastics, later not.

We had privacy, unlike in the ancient Ignatius building, where you could walk out of your bedroom into the hall right outside the rickety gymnasium. One scholastic had a narrow room under the stairs. High windows opened on to Roosevelt Road, then served by electric trolley buses — now and then a bus went off its trolley, and the driver had to get off and reconnect it, by hand. We looked out on ABLA Homes — Abbott, Brooks, Loomis, (Jane) Addams - a multi-building housing project or group of projects that stretched a half mile west and east.

At Loyola there were no rooms under staircases, nor partly brick-paved Roosevelt Road or housing project or trolleys, just the Edens Expressway a half-block away on one side and the pleasant streets of Northfield to the west, with the length of several football fields on the south. Very suburban. But the place was going under. The Knights of Columbus were on the verge of calling their loan, we heard, at which point a nice big button factory would go on the market and Loyola would disappear.

At the helm of this institution as its rector was the nicest, least offensive guy who ever oversaw a debacle of such magnitude. He had come with the new building, might have been in on its construction. Whether he was or not, once at the helm he was in over his head, and Fort Laramie was sinking in the sands of west Wilmette. He made sure no lights were left lit at night. We Jesuits ate fish on Friday that was bought cheap by the boatload. Economy was the byword. None of it mattered. The Knights were closing in.

A year into my time at Loyola, in 1959, the province fathers reached into their store of talent and came up with a Chicago Irishman named English, ranking Jesuit at the Loyola University dental school and before that a high-ranking Army chaplain during the world war that had ended 13 years previously. Mike English was smart, charming, personable, and above all realistic about the jam we were in. He told someone that as rector it was the first time in his 30-plus years in the Jesuits that he wasn’t sleeping at night.

His predecessor went back to Cincinnati to resume his quiet life as a kindly priest and low-level administrator. Mike English was installed as rector. The usual term was six years. The other man had lasted two, which is as good a measure as any of how serious the situation was. When you remove a rector after two years, something is up.

THE ENGLISH ERA . . . Mike English brought John Reinke with him. Reinke was a psychological counselor and piano player, a handsome, smart guy who could wow an audience. The salesman factor went double for English, who had the most direct, no-nonsense manner of all superiors I ever had. He also acquired Rudy Knoepfle, much as a new coach acquires assistants. Tom Murray went elsewhere, eventually if not then to Cincinnati’s St. Xavier High School, where to my considerable benefit I ran into him some years later.

Why Knoepfle? Because he was in his way a hot shot, and English wanted the hottest shots around. In addition, Knoepfle may have ruffled too many feathers at the more tradition-minded Ignatius. These things are rarely simple. And straight-talking Tom Murray may have sensed high-level salesmanship on the horizon and wasn’t interested.

Leaving Ignatius with me in 1958 had been Florian, “Zim,” Zimecki, a veteran Latin teacher with a remedial-reading specialty, torn from his comfort-providing Ignatius and sent or exiled to distant Loyola. Knoepfle may have called the shot on that one, as he may have called it on me, for that matter. Zim consoled himself with reference to the swimming pool, which he intended to use as a weight-control measure but never did that I could tell. He got back to Ignatius eventually; so all ended comparatively well for him.

English’s task was to make a go of a school in danger of going under, in the service of "the church," as he put it. This was the first time I heard of my life’s work, my vocation, expressed in this manner. It had been in the service of Christ the King, which gave it a collective tinge, since kings had kingdoms, but was essentially a personal matter between me and Christ, whose kingdom was not of this world. He said so himself, didn’t he? We said Christ, not Jesus, in those days, before ecumenical, especially interfaith, considerations led us to downplay him as Messiah by calling him simply Jesus.

Focus was on conscience and duty. We were to give our all as soldiers of Christ, compromising nowhere. In effect we had imbibed a reformist mentality, and for those who caught the radical, even anarchic, element in all that, the institutional church was a potential hindrance. We were saved from heresy by obedience, each calling on himself as a stick in an old man’s hand, to quote St. Ignatius, again as a personal matter. But resting in the bosom of mother church, we were nonetheless vipers at the ready, critical and detached, a sort of cabal.

Not Mike English, who if he ever nourished such considerations did not show it. We younger Jesuits were said to think that each had the Holy Spirit to guide him individually, as opposed to church authority, its divinely licensed leadership, whose guidance should have been enough for us. We did think that way. We thought each had the Spirit, whom we had got at confirmation and had been relying on ever since. So did Martin Luther, and there you had a problem.

In addition, as young men we were naturally alert to institutional failings. It's what young men do. But English talked of serving the church, which he did not envision as ethereal. On the contrary, it was something that called for bricks and mortar if it was to achieve its goals. In this case it called for the salvation of Loyola Academy.

In this cause it was a pleasure to work under someone who seemed to know what he was doing, especially one who appreciated producers. English would introduce us scholastics at a reception for Jesuit family members, citing our achievements, and paid attention in other ways. When his man Reinke came down to West Baden a few years later, several of us former teachers at Loyola, now theologians, gathered with him. By then we were students, passive recipients of other people's instruction and feeling at times lower than whale droppings. Working for English, one did not feel like whale dropping.

The same went for Knoepfle. In 1959, my third year teaching and the year he arrived at Loyola, he was a better principal after two years on the job, and I was a better teacher. If I put my students to studying vocabulary, ten words a day from a paperback book, and told him the purpose was to make them more aware of words rather than merely pick up ten words a day, he took it seriously and quoted me.

The scholastic didn’t always get that kind of respect. When a veteran Jesuit teacher spotted a collection of student writings that I left out in the rec room for all to see, he grunted and flipped it back on the table. When Knoepfle died in spring of my last year teaching, I lost one of my reasons for doing a good job.

. . . More to come, from the pages of Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968 . . .