A Pack of Jebbies

I browse the 1969 Tower yearbook some mornings, trolling for any person who might grab on to my memory and give it a good tug.  It was a pack of Jebbies that caught my eye, nine of them flanking Fr. Carron around an altar at a Mass in the fieldhouse, the Mass of the Holy Spirit.  What first struck me was that I knew all nine of them.  What got me to start writing is that this photo was that as I began to recall each of them, I realized that they exemplified the diverse talent of the Jesuits, these guys who were really good at what they did, and were so different from one another. 

Tom Acker taught Biology, eventually became the chair if the department and went on to serve as president of Wheeling Jesuit University.  The summer after I graduated, I worked in the kitchen at the Jesuit residence on campus, a way of getting good meals while I helped one of my Psychology professors with research and waited to start graduate school in the fall.  The Jebs knew how to eat.  There was nothing ascetic about their dining room, nothing spare or sparse in the fare served at dinner.  Good cuts of meat and fish, generous portions of veggies, fresh fruit, wine, and desserts were part of their nightly gathering.  My serving them every night gave me a casual, familiar relationship with them.  Tom Acker zipped me with a truth one afternoon, a truth about myself.  I saw him walking across campus with another Jesuit and teased him about how good he and his brother Jesuits had it.  He knew the cost of those meals, probably suspected that I wouldn’t pay it.  “If you like the way we live, come and join us!”  He was right.  I was in love with Kathy.  I realized what I’d be giving up, and realized what they were giving up, all of them.

Dick Dempsey looked and talked like his boxing namesake Jack, with a big frame and heavy jaw, he made pronouncements out one side of his mouth, his heavy brows like hoods over deep-set eyes that followed you as you walked by like a tiger would.  But a tiger would not burst out laughing, the Irish storyteller gladdening his company by his humor.  He would stay at the university for the rest of his life, some 40 years, before moving into convalescence.  Tom Brown was next to him, tall, dark-haired quietly intense, he was the center of an energy that radiated from one of the row of houses across from the dorms, houses that had been there when the campus was built, and now served as makeshift Health Center, Public Information Office, and Fr, Brown’s Radio-TV Department.  He was a bright light on campus, a bright guy with a burgeoning department attracting students to the then-exciting world of broadcasting, running it out of that little house in which he burned so brightly that within three of four years he was gone, doing bigger things in some bigger place, and the department was never the same without him, the house turned over to some other use and eventually demolished.

Next to him was John O’Malley, who I remember not from campus but from the day he arrived from another Jesuit community out east, his big smile entering the kitchen, bigger than he was it seemed, big enough to brighten all of us somehow, as he looked to us for some idea of how he could open a wooden crate he had received.  I’d thought of the rod of steel that served as a knife sharpener, strong enough and long enough to pry the crate open.  He’s praised me so much for my cleverness and handiness that for a moment I forgot that I had been so mediocre in my studies, and in much of my life.  His magnanimous affirmation made me feel wonderful, and decades later when he returned briefly from his publishing career in Rome, his smile was the same, and he blushed to hear how significant he had been to me that day in the kitchen.  Fr. Carron was flanked on the other side by one of the two Hartmann brothers in the photo.  Ed and Clete were not two peas in a pod.  Clete had Dick Dempsey’s pugilistic face, while Ed’s was gentle and kind-looking.  Clete was burly and big-boned while Ed was tall and lithe.  I’d watch the two of them in the dining room that summer, sometimes entering together, sometimes sitting together, sometimes stopping by each other on the way in or out, sharing some comment that made me wonder what it was like, how brothers could choose their life, good food and total sacrifice.  Next to Ed, looking down at his hands was Don Brezine, one who didn’t seem to take root, who left after a year or two.  Next to him was Tom Blackburn, a guy with huge charisma, big and masculine, who would have sex talks with the guys in the dorm, straight talk about what it means to be a Christian man, whose manliness, perhaps, is what carried him right out of the Jesuits, into married life.  Finally, on the extreme right of the photo beyond Clete Hartmann was John Hopkins, who added to the enigma of just who these Jesuits were, because he lived with his brother Jebs here in Lansing Reilly hall, but worked somewhere else, somewhere in the city that had nothing to do with the university at all, maybe not even in what I would have though was “God’s work”. 

It would be twenty years later that I would begin to discover what brought these diverse, talented guys together, their “formation” in the Society, the Spiritual Exercises that they practice.  It was a guy not in this picture, who would have been in the world for those twenty more years before joining the Jebs at age 50.  Bob Hartigan came to campus, his energy spring wound tight, and repeated Tom Acker’s invitation to all of us.  “If you like the way we live, come and join us!” 

More about Bob and his invitation tomorrow.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.