EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Three - 1901-1909
St. Ignatius High School and College

College Memories of St. Ignatius

During his second year at St. Ignatius Iva sold the house on Vincennes and the family moved to the suburb of Austin, the neighborhood next to the Village of Oak Park.  They bought a house at 434 S. Howard Ave. at Madison.¹   At the time, most streets were dirt and autos rare.  The house with bay windows and a large porch had shingles on the upper story stained in gay colors.²

The Sodality at St. Ignatius High was not very good.  It met once a week:

There was usually a talk, spiritless and without any reference to our life or problems, by the director—a saintly priest who loved our Lady but had small ability to pass his love along to us.  We dashed into meetings, checked a roll call, paid our dues of ten cents, said the office like an express train rattling over an uneven roadbed, listened apathetically to the director sermonette, and then bolted to resume the interesting and exciting things of student life.³

Lord had an active social life in high school and college.  Near the end of his life, he would look back:

When I sometimes meet men with a Puritan or Jansenistic background who shake their head over dancing, I laugh.  I am sure that my Jesuit vocation was safeguarded on the dance floors of my youth.  When I see graying heads shake over time spent in social life, I recall the blissfully happy evenings of play rehearsal, of parties in the basement of the parish church, and the parties that moved in a happy cycle from home to home.  We were much too gay to be much tempted by sin.  We were too busy to have idle hands for the devil to fill.  Our clubs were made up of the kind of girls we boys expected some day to marry, and it was our duty to see to it that they stayed good and worthy of Christian marriage.⁴

In fall 1905, Lord entered Saint Ignatius College (later Loyola University).  The high school and college together had 600 students.  The school had a dusty old museum and an old, inadequate gym with a low ceiling that made the new game of Basketball problematic.

Lord later remembered, Can you imagine that in 1905 the debating teams of St. Ignatius College debated: ‘Have labor unions been a benefit or a detriment to the laboring man?’  And the judges decided that they had done more harm than good.⁵   (The rights of workers would later be one of the many topics Lord wrote about.)

Lord once got into a two day argument with his ethics professor who had stated that dueling was a form of murder, forbidden by the natural law.  Lord defended dueling because of the thrilling and heroic stories he had read in The Three Musketeers.  He finally realized he was wrong: So I withdrew ignominiously but resentfully.⁶

Lord had never joined his parish church choir.  His Mother said, I once heard a woman say that the surest way to lose your faith was to join a church choir.⁷   However, during college, she let him play the organ in St. Catherine’s choir for mass.  Yet his mother insisted he attend another mass so he could give it his full attention.  Obediently I went to the eight-o’clock mass, returned home for breakfast, and then sallied forth again to play Millard and Farmer and Gounod at the high mass.⁸   Even as an usher, he was required to go by to another mass.⁹

Regarding the world of professional theater and the new phenomenon of motion pictures, Lord would later remember:

I recall how about 1907, John Pierre Roche, my theater-minded friend, and I talked of the future of the theater, and he predicted that in time the movies would be a least equal competitors with melodrama, musical comedy, and vaudeville.  I laughed.  I’ve swallowed that laughter many times since, as the movies took over the whole theatrical world outside New York except for a little gasping relic here and there.¹⁰

Sometimes I have laughed as I recall how, about 1908, a critic writing in the Chicago Daily News solemnly declared that the motion pictures were practically through.  They have run out of plots, he explained, and without plots how can they continue?  Little did he know that Minnie and Jake liked their dear familiar plots, and that the studios would continue to turn out exposed film as long as boy could meet, lose, and regain girl, and the West remained cinematographically unwon.  . . .  As the film joke put it: That is a sheer inspiration. I’m so glad you thought it up.  We’ve made a barrel with it every time we’ve used it.¹¹

More on Claude Pernin

For four incredible expanding years he was the ideal on my horizon.  He introduced me to the new authors as they came along.  He despised people who could not tear the heart out of a book as he did.  He talked with a scintillating cleverness and a depth of perception that was never show-off and always genuinely alert and alive.  He welded a little cluster of us, boys from various parts of town, different classes of the school, unjointed ways of life, into a band of readers and observers and talkers.  He was that one-man university of which you read, the most fascinating personality I was ever to know in my life, a Jesuit of the mental caliber I had expected in the sons of Loyola’s dramatic tradition, a friend of a lifetime.¹²

He loved his profession.  He devoted himself to it with a transparent eagerness.  He loved learning.  He loved human minds in human souls.¹³

I have repeatedly assured groups of priests and religious teachers that good preaching and good teaching are really so identical that the great preacher is really the outstanding teacher.  Always I have ventured a step further and claimed that both preaching and teaching are at their best conversation raised to the level of inspiration and art.¹⁴

Pernin encouraged Lord’s reading and writing:

Under his eyes I expanded.  I wrote thousands and thousands of words of voluntary manuscript, most of which he dismissed with a flick of his stogie.  At his nudge and urging I read scores of books unrelated to class or to assigned subjects.¹⁵

He taught me to know and love light verse and to copy it in my own style.  He was bored with long sentences and demanded that mine have the crack of a whiplash.

More than all, however, I think he taught me that a little personal interest can make all the difference in the life of a young fellow—that we learn best under the approval of a man interested in us, that formal education can readily give place to informal, and that the quick give-and-take of alert minds is probably what Plato sought when he walked with his disciples in the beginning of the peripatetic school of philosophy.¹⁶

Pernin only had a bachelor’s degree, but he had a great curiosity and enthusiasm for everything including photography and the latest gadgets, such as mechanical pencils.  Pernin was interested in spiritualism (contacting the dead in séances) although he did not believe in it.  Pernin read voraciously.

Regarding this social life, Lord would later write:

For that matter, during my years at St. Ignatius in Chicago we had one dance, a senior affair, which we managed for ourselves.  It may interest this extravagant generation to know that each of us paid two dollars, which included the hall, the orchestra, a little mild punch (no alcoholic content), and one sandwich.  Ah, we were roisterers!¹⁷

Yet I could never have guessed that the very fun I was experiencing, the friends with whom I was associating, and the interests that engrossed every waking moment were a kind of negative preparation for the day of vocation.  I hadn’t time now for the fierce temptations of adolescence.¹⁸

Lord frequently had parties at this home with skits, singing, and dancing.

Play that last one again, will you, Dan? Harry asked him.

What did they say is the name of the musical?  Clare asked her brother, Everett, who was standing next to her.

Why not just look at the sheet music? her brother kidded her.  Dan won’t mind.  He plays by ear anyhow.

Dan Lord winked at his friend as he played.  How did you guess, Ev?  Anyhow, you don’t have to look—it’s The Yankee Prince.  George M.  Cohan, you know.  He turned his full attention to the piano again.  Dan was a tall, thin young man of college age.  His reddish brown hair made his blue eyes seem dark and somewhat piercing.  As he played and sang with the others, he looked around at the group, his gang. 

How about a little variety? he shouted over the singing as he suddenly swung into the melodies from The Merry Widow.  Soon the whole crowd had joined him in Villa, and Then I Go to Maxim’s, all but tearing off the roof in their enthusiasm.¹⁹

By junior year, Lord was editor of the Collegian.  He made the mistake of filling it with his writing.  One of the exchange editors of another college publication in his criticism of our journal suggested that it should be called ‘The Daniel A. Lord Edition.’²⁰

Cultural Insensitivity

In 1950 Lord would look back and lament the lack of sensitivity of the culture and times in which he grew up.

As I write these lines, I almost hesitate to recall the insults that we shouted so casually.  The memory, however, does stimulate within me a feeling of hope; what we took for granted in our youthful days has become unthinkable less than a half century later.

I was a Catholic.  Yet, with my fellow collegians, I shot out the football yell of my very Catholic school:

Nigger!  Nigger!  Hoe Potato!

Half-past alligator!

Rah!  Rah!  Bully Nigger!

Chippewa da!

Almost with shame I confess that added to that strange antisocial yell, was the name of my school—called after the great soldier saint.²¹

NOTES

•   ¹ Today the house is 17 N. Mason Avenue.
•   ² My Mother, 224-25.
•   ³ Played by Ear, 243.   See Gavin, 69.
•   ⁴ Played by Ear, 95-96.
•   ⁵ Ibid., 374.
•   ⁶ Lord, I Can Read Anything (QW, 1930), 24.   The story is told by Lord’s created character Father Hall.
•   ⁷ My Mother, 264.
•   ⁸ Ibid., 264-265.   Lord describes his skilled choir director and her impact in his book People You’ll Like to Meet, (QW, 1943), 47-49.
•   ⁹ Some who grew up Catholic wondered if the whole purpose of being an usher was to meet one’s mass obligation without having to pay attention.
•   ¹⁰ Played by Ear, 259.
•   ¹¹ Ibid., 266.
•   ¹² Ibid., 83.
•   ¹³ Lord, My Greatest Teacher, 8, 9.
•   ¹⁴ Ibid., 21.
• ¹⁵ Played by Ear, 83.
• ¹⁶ Ibid., 83.
• ¹⁷ Ibid., 183.
• ¹⁸ Ibid., 92.
• ¹⁹ McGloin, 16-19.   Did Lord relate this scene or did McGloin create it?
• ²⁰ Played by Ear, 310.
• ²¹ Lord, Song in the Winds America November 25, 1950.

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Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner