Thick-lensed glasses, pudgy with a look of softness, idiosyncratic, hard taskmaster -- Jesuits in training 70 years ago
He called out to the dinner-time reader, stop right there, pardner . . .
The speech teacher doubled as a history teacher. The history course was a holding action, so involved were we in literature. Public speaking, on the other hand, was front and center for us as future teachers and preachers. This was William F. Ryan, as strong a personality as we ran into in those days. He wore thick-lensed glasses, was pudgy and had a look of softness about him.
He had a pleasant idiosyncrasy, clipping the New York Times in various subjects for various juniors’ reading. Once I had taken on play-directing, under his rather distant moderation, my clips were about drama. He’d drop them on my dormitory desk, and there I was checking out Brooks Atkinson and others in the nation’s newspaper, something I probably wouldn’t have been doing if I’d stayed home in Oak Park.
Willie F. (later I served with a Willie P.) Ryan’s soft appearance contrasted mightily with his booming voice which he let loose during meals in his capacity of supervisor of reading. The word was “Repetat!”—Latin for “Repeat it” or “Say it again.” It was our version of Sam’s order to play it again in “Casablanca,” but without the dreaminess.
His repetat cut through the dining room clatter, stopping the reader in his tracks. Sometimes he supplied the correction, as “roof” with the long “oo” versus short “uh.” The Irish setter who roamed the grounds was Rufus, and the legend was that Father Willie’s repeated “roof, roof” elicited a bark from Rufus, who heard it through the open refectory window on a summer day. One of many good stories that floated among us.
Willie Ryan looked soft and flabby, but he wasn’t soft. On the day he’d had a tooth pulled, he did not give himself the day off but sat in the rear of his juniorate classroom spitting blood into a cup while student speakers performed. Later, at Loyola Academy in Chicago-suburban Wilmette, he ruled his senior English classes with strong personality, booming voice, and strict requirements.
In the juniorate, our two-year course after novitiate, he also ran – as I said, from a distance – the drama program, two plays a year, on November 13, St. Stanislaus Day, when a three-act, full-scale production was staged, and in February, on “Rector’s Day,” when a shorter play was done. Both were one-night stands to a full house, including the entertainment-starved novices. I appeared in two of these and directed a third, the St. Stanislaus Day performance in my second year.
The saint in question, patron of novices, was Stanislaus Kostka, the 16th-century Pole who had not even made it through novitiate before dying in the odor of sanctity. Novices had him as their model. Many years later, I stopped my Chicago Daily News coworker, columnist Mike Royko, in mid-gibe with this information. Royko had a sort of old-world skepticism and sometimes antagonism toward the church and was thoroughly identified as Polish, if only through his creation and alter ego, Slats Grobnik. He was needling me one day about religion, and I scored one of the best conversational hits of my life by telling him about the Pole St. Stanislaus as my model of how to live for my two years as a novice. “Really?” he said, abandoning his gibe of the moment and walking back to his corner office apparently impressed.
As juniors, we had a Belgian for our model, St. John Berchmans. From his life you could figure out the Jesuit rules, we were told, so assiduously did he observe them, including his badgering a teacher until he understood the day’s lesson. Never in my life was I to know or meet a Belgian columnist with whom to make a similar point, however.
In any case, let us praise Willie F. (for Fortune, a family name) Ryan, that least athletic of men, for putting muscle into the speech and speech patterns of us juniors. “If words mean anything,” he would rage against the dying of light shed by precise expression, strongly urging us to say it right.
Yes.