“Dig that man with the crazy tan; he’s our Dan from the Irish clan.” Frankie Warner made that up. It was a poster of a big-eared, freckle-faced eighth -grader who was running for class president. It hung at the back of the class room in St. Anne’s Parish school, Queen Anne Hill, Seattle.
The nuns, like today’s electronic voting systems, never let us use paper ballots. We all put our heads down on the desk and raised our hands for our favorite candidate. It was hard for the nuns to choose so the elections were always very close, a one vote difference. I can’t remember who won, me or Kip Toner, but the loser got to be Vice President.
Queen Anne Hill was my neighborhood from the 2nd grade on. We lived on Crockett Street (a grown up cricket, my Dad said) just below John Jay Elementary. John Jay was a public school, out of bounds for an Irish-Catholic kid like me, just like the public library. But, we hid our stash of cigarettes at John Jay in a cigar box underneath the portables, me and Johnnie Sweet who lived on Newton, my main buddy.
I’d ride my bicycle to school most days. Up past McCauliff’s house, turn right and up the hill at Joe MacNamee’s, past the park with the wading pool full of polio possibilities from peeing children, down the hill to Queen Anne Avenue, past Al’s hamburger place where you could get a cheeseburger and a green river float for 75 cents, turn left, cross Lee street and put your bike in the back between the nuns’ convent and the back of the school.
Sister Rachel Ann, my second grade teacher, said I had the hands of the priest so even though I was in love with her, she headed me in the opposite direction.
Then there was George Vanni, the Italian boy, son or nephew of Edo Vanni, who would always wear orange on St. Pat’s day and even though he was kind and didn’t want to fight me, I would have to challenge him leading to a few bruises and a “D” in deportment. Frankie Warner tried to give me hints about fighting but I was no good at it, despite my temper.
Yes, my temper, in the 7th grade, I was tripped by a girl on my way to my desk and I yelled out. The sister, whose name I can’t remember, got mad at me! “When will you learn to control that temper, Danny?” she said. I thought she was talking to the wrong person. How about the person who tripped me? No, it was about my temper.
Temper or not, I headed for the Seminary right after the 8th grade. I mean, what else would one want to be but a priest. There were no professionals in our immediate family. My Dad ran a gas station up on Capitol Hill and he never let me be around cars or the gas station. I was not supposed to be him.
I guess I couldn’t be my Mom. My Mom was a church lady, one of a cadre of women, like Mrs. Dalton and Mrs. Salladay, who ran the altar society and helped keep the priests happy and the church clean.
Plus, my Dad had a younger brother who was a priest. Pastor of Christ the King parish in Seattle, the largest in the diocese. Father Lester Leo Leahy. Father Les drove his V-8 Chevy sedan like a madman. He would pass long lines of cars on Stevens Pass while we winced in the back seat too frightened to even pray. He didn’t like any car in front of him. I wanted to drive just like him.
I had cousins who were either priests or in the seminary, Terry, Whalen and Pat. They were all great skiers. Terry and Whalen were even on ski patrol. They gave me my first pair of Head skis. And, who had the coolest car and could pitch a softball faster than anyone? Father Bill Slate, a tall red-headed young man, assistant pastor at St. Anne’s. And, then of course, if a son becomes a priest, the mom gets a straight, no stops, passage direct to the pearly gates. Plus St. Edward’s tuition was free. I only learned later that the parents had to pay tuition if their son left without becoming a priest.
So, off to St. Edward’s seminary I went. It was a drive up to 145th street, the city limits of Seattle, curve to the right around the north end of Lake Washington and up to Kenmore. At Kenmore’s one traffic light we’d grab a right, bump up and over the rail road track and head up the hill for about four miles. Turn right into the entrance to St. Edwards, a long single-lane road through the woods, past the soggy football field on the left, curve around the back of the main building and come around front at the circle drive with a statue in it.
There was this grayish, brick, three-story building, facing west, then an open space, then the woods and further down the hill Lake Washington. After four years here, I wanted to bulldoze it and salt the grounds – a plan, years later, I reserved for the Rockefeller estates in upstate New York.
The seminary was a place made to break all the rules. Our freshmen year we were in a barracks away from the main building. Lights out at 9:00 pm. One kid would play taps through a nozzle he had found and then roll out the window and into the woods. Another young recruit knelt in front of his short dresser and slapped himself so hard with the sign of the cross I couldn’t get to sleep.
By sophomore year we were in the main building. The mornings were harsh and, like the rest of my life, it was by the bell, obedience training, as my friend Rick Fellows would have said.
Up, showered, dressed, with a coin flip on your bunk and off to mental prayer at 6:30 am followed by one and half masses depending on the speed of the priests. Then breakfast in the refectory with a rank of priests staring down at you from their raised table as they ate whatever the French nuns cooked up. We sat at tables of eight ranked from top to bottom by class. As a freshman, I sat at the end of the table and got the food last. I and my fellow fellow freshman inmate, who sat across from me, were at the mercy of the six unknowns further up the food chain. If they didn’t like us, we got less. If I broke any of the real rules, the ones the seminarians made up and enforced, I’d get “starved out.” Sometimes the ones higher up the food chain would be nice and send down chocolate ice cream laced with ex-lax.
One of the welcomes a freshman received was the flush or the Royal flush. As a freshman I could not go up to my room during the day which meant that if I wanted to pee I had to go down to the basement where the showers and bathrooms were. Down there was a phalanx of large sophomores whose job it was to introduce me to the urinal (the flush) or the toilet (the royal flush) depending upon what they thought of me. They would put a freshman’s head in the urinal or upend you into the toilet and get flushed. Admittedly, all that would happen is that your hair would get wet, but I never went down there my freshman year. I peed outside.
The third Sunday of every month was visiting Sunday. My family could come to visit and my family always did. It was human contact and it was great. The whole area out front of the main building would fill up with cars and families. Soon, of course, we were looking out for sisters, the real kind, the ones with breasts like Rufus the Reds’ sisters who not only had breasts, but wore dresses with zippers right down the front! Always a main attraction if you could peek a direct look.
Returning to the building after visiting Sunday was hard, from a loving family to a cruel institution. My Dad, though, taught me a rule. Say your goodbyes once, walk toward the building and don’t look back. I did it and still do.
There was another touch of home during those years. It was my laundry bag. My mom would do my laundry and drop it off at the seminary. I’ d rush down to get it; it was not my fresh clothes that I was after. It was because my Mom was a rule breaker, a co-conspirator. She’d stash treats, date filled cookies and brownies in my laundry bag.
The seminary authorities did weird things. I had to leave my mail home unsealed so they could read it. Now I didn’t say my confession on Friday to a screen with a priest behind it, but face to face in his office. One of the cruelest things they would do was “disappear” my friends. Where is Jimmy? He wasn’t at early mass, not at breakfast, is he sick, let’s find him. No luck. No explanation. Gone in the night. Gone. Never seen again. No word. No nothing.
I can’t say I had a hard life at the seminary. We were boys. We went to class. Made jokes about our teachers. Played tricks on them. Played hard at six man, flag football, tennis, handball, basketball, said our rosaries, walked around the grounds, played in the woods, made friends, snuck out to Kenmore to read Playboy magazines, drank altar wine, hung wires out our windows to listen to banded music from Seattle, tormented those who broke our rules and learned Latin and Greek. But, by the 4th year, only 4 of 43 freshmen were still there, me, Don Werner, Kevin Hanley and Jean Chapman. Years later, they all became priests.
I wish I knew exactly why I left. Decisions never seem to be clear cut, certain, rational and well thought out. It was all mixed up.
Maybe it was Marilyn Dalton, Jimmy’s sister, who I went water skiing with on summer breaks on Lake Washington. I didn’t know what to do with Marilyn, but I liked being with her. This was a no-no for seminarians.
Maybe it was the Seminary’s Rector Father O’Neil calling me on the carpet at the end of my junior year, telling me that I was a “rascal” and that he was going “to boot me out of here.” I think Father O’Neil suspected me of having smoked-bombed all the priests cars and outfitted them with high pitched squealers before they took off for a Sunday mass, but it wasn’t me. Either way, Father Les reportedly said, “No, you are not. Not my nephew.”
Maybe it was seeing really great guys, my friends, disappeared over the years or not coming back and wondering why? Maybe it was coming to the conclusion that the only real criterion to priesthood was answering the bell.
Maybe it was that we all learned we were being taught by priests who could not be what we wanted to be. All the priests at the seminary were, for various reasons, priests who could not work in parishes.
What really did it, though, was a conversation I had with my Uncle. After I had told my mother I didn’t want to go back, she told me I had to talk to Father Les before I made my final decision. I went to his big office in Christ the King parish in Seattle. He sat behind his big desk and I timidly said I didn’t want to return to the seminary. He said, “Do you want to end up like your Father?”
What I ended up doing was hating Father Les for the rest of his life and leaving the seminary that summer. Being like my father was okay by me, even though he didn’t have a new car, a big office or a prestigious job like Father Les. My Dad worked hard every day, often for 12 hours. He went to mass every morning and fell asleep every night saying his rosary. He did right by his family and never complained. I wasn’t going to be my Dad but his brother had no business putting him down in front of his son.
My sister, Sister Daniel Maureen, a Holy Names nun, and fourteen months my senior, and her fellow conspirators at Seattle University’s admission office got my late application to the top of the pile and I entered Seattle University as a freshman in the fall of 1961.
