My Fifth Year 1966-1967

FIFTH YEAR 1966-1967
 
Having completed four years at Callicoon, I did not expect vast changes on the hill when I arrived in September 1966. Up till that moment, third year [1964-1965] had been the “swing year” in my Callicoon experience. The change of senior prefects to Brennan Connelly was a welcome one for many of us in 1964. Brennan ran a strict ship, to be sure, but without the drama and Hitchcock atmosphere of his predecessor. Brennan was still at the helm in the fall of 1966. Edward Flannagan was settling in as a school fixture as assistant prefect and curious fellow with the nickname “Derf.” [I was glad to see him in 2018 at the Villa Roma Reunion.] Ligouri, Myron, Elmer, and Aidan, the longtime hands, among others, did not realize it at the time but 1966-67 was the last of the “old school” Callicoon style; new careers or new positions for several of our faculty would lie in the future. In the spring of 1967, the Province would hold its chapter and elections. A progressive slate came into office and would usher in a wave of personnel and policy changes for Holy Name Province, reflective of Vatican II and the social changes of the 1960’s but I don’t think most of us were attuned to the event or the implications for us at the time.
 
September 1966 brought new blood to our class, including some Buffalo additions like Joe Hynes and Dan Paul. But Bob Hudak had moved on to novitiate in his branch of the Order. The newbie I remember best was Dick Fleshren, by far the oldest in his late 20’s. We were roommates for quite a while. As an organist, he would, during the evening study period, hand me the “White People’s Mass Book” or “The Black People’s Mass Book” [two separate hymnals with separate color schemes that could produce moments of unintentional humor] and say “Tommy, pick out the hymns for Benediction tonight.” Dick and I were on good terms with Florian Walczyk, the school music director, and he invited Dick and I to sing lead in the Latin Litany of the Saints procession outdoors during the “Rogation Days” of spring. That was one of my best memories of Callicoon. And in a remarkable footnote, “The Dude” and I will spend the future in the same cemetery, with the Trappist monks in South Carolina, a total coincidence. [Dick was an active musician volunteer for Mepkin Abbey, and Margaret and I make our annual retreats there.] Florian, sadly, found the changes in the Church after Vatican II difficult; I recall him editorializing in French class about liturgical abuses in Holland and holding up pictures from Paris Match. Florian would move on to 31st Street in New York for confessional ministry.
 
Academically, fifth year was a nothingburger year for me for the most part. I am careful to say that this was my subjective experience and not everyone else’s. Eric Kyle, whom we had for English and Religion, was trying to put us in touch with Jean Paul Sartre and modern trends in Christology, but I simply was not mature enough to capture the post-war intellectual trends in philosophy, sociology, and religion, at least not yet. Eric wrote on one of my essays that my writing style befit a small-town sports reporter, or words to that effect. I was angry and embarrassed about that, and it lit a fire to work on literary expression. Looking back, that might have been one of my biggest takeaways from the St. Joe’s college years, academically speaking. It was clear to me too that the college agenda was striking home with some of my thoughtful classmates. I was content to debate politics with Mike McCarthy who also joined that year. The contemporary protest music was making inroads in my class—Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. I was always envious of the guys who could play guitar; later, in Novitiate and Washington, I learned to play a twelve-string.
 
On the lighter side of school, Elmer was attending Boston College, I believe, during summers and studying set theory mathematics, which he in turn inflicted upon us. If you remember his style, he stated a problem and sent somebody to the board to work it out. To this day I remember Vinny Laviano sweating up there like Captain Queeg at the court martial. But we all had the jitters, to a point where we played “kill the clock.” Several of us would time how long the guy up front could tie up the class figuring out the problem and saving the rest of us a lot of embarrassment. I think Matt Seymour held the one-day record at 45 minutes. He is proud of it, too. On the other hand, the easiest college course: Greek. Ligouri was so predictable! He started every class with a prayer and then he would say, “Burns, please.” That was my cue—every day—to translate the first sentence of whatever. Then he went down the alphabet and elicited one translated sentence from the class in alphabetical order. We only had to prepare one sentence the night before. Now there was a member of the class who was higher than me in the alphabet, John Burke. We text or call almost every week today, but I’ve never asked him when he got called upon.
 
The college classes began at 1 P.M., and the high school at 1:30. The college occupied the first floor, so we were under the high school floors during Ligouri’s class. The younger men could get somewhat rowdy upstairs during their “study periods.” One day some kind of fight broke out upstairs during Ligouri’s class, and someone must have taken his opponent’s large winter coat and thrown it out the window. It expanded during its fall and handed with a loud thud in the snow and myrtle outside our window. Liguori noticed this, then turned to us and said: “I wonder who that was?”
 
One of the funniest and most unexpected things to happen to me in fifth year was the Science Club’s trip to The Corning Glass Works. It turned out to be the last “science trip” for Cronan Mullen, as he went to 31st Street the following year. I was still president of the Science Club because he walked with me through the exhibit. Then, at lunchtime he looked at the cafeteria menu and decided he and I should go out for lunch. He hailed a cab and we found ourselves in downtown Corning at a respectable restaurant. He paid for both of us, including our bar bill. Try as I might, I cannot for the life of me recall what we talked about for three hours and then a bus ride home. God bless “the man,” as we called him. Sadly, in 1974, I was assigned as a priest to Siena where Cronan had retired, and he did not recognize me. I should add here that Ligouri and Elmer were both stationed at Siena when I came on board as chaplain. I wish I had taken the time to talk to them about the old days. Elmer, I am pleased to say, was a very happy confessor at the friars’ mall chapel in Albany.
 
My memory is not what it used to be, and I don’t remember if our class operated or considered conducting “The Maze.” I doubt it. As I noted above, the times were a changin’ and the idea of college men trashing the new high school freshmen on Halloween seemed lame. Of course, the number of freshmen was smaller than ours in 1962. Our class football team went undefeated that year; the basketball team no longer had Bob Hudak but as I recall, Manny Correia and others stepped up and the team played respectably.
 
The implementation of the liturgical reforms was a slow but noticeable process. I cannot recall when we experienced our first folk Mass or guitar Mass. It seems to me that we had class Masses in the Scotus Hall Mass chapel where the music was more modern—Joseph Gelineau, Lucien Deiss, etc. In the main church we had primarily [or exclusively] traditional hymns in English and Latin. In those years Mass was celebrated from a provisional missal; the Roman Missal of Vatican II did not appear till 1970. Some minor experimentation was taking place, but under Liguori and Florian [music] the traditional middle held ground. The first public “concelebrated Mass” I can recall was All Souls Day 1967 in my sophomore college year. I remember it well because, as senior sacristan, I had laid out a dozen black vestments—and I heard plenty about that from the new young priests who wouldn’t wear them anymore.
 
My house job in fifth year was sacristan under Dan Kenna. Later, in Washington I would give youth retreats under Dan’s leadership. We filled a sizable number of cruets after dinner each night, meaning that most of the friar priests were still offering private Masses that year at the side altars. Early in 2026 I reviewed a book on the American experience of Confession, and I remember fifth year as the period of my life when I withdrew from regular confession. I was surprised that several Callicoon classmates responded with similar recollections. It sounds trite to put it this way, but “I wasn’t getting much out of it anymore.” And it wasn’t just confession, either. Again, classmates have expressed sentiments that there was little or no “spiritual formation or direction. As one put it, “I wish we had learned to meditate.” [Today meditation is taught to children as young as 3 or 4…though I don’t think Ligouri would ever have signed off on it.]
 
We observed our last Callicoon Thanksgiving on campus in 1966; we would be home with our families the following year, 1967. My class played in the Turkey Bowl Thanksgiving Day football game against a strong sixth year, but we won in a game that produced several injuries. I remember that in the fourth quarter somebody spread the word that the local medical center was getting angry because the staff had hoped to be home on Thanksgiving instead of bandaging and stitching us. The year rolled on toward Christmas, which I enjoyed at home. I would say, though, that trips home from Callicoon made me realize that I had indeed moved away from home and was becoming more peripheral to the ebbs and tides of my family life. My youngest sibling, born when I was in second year, told me once that I seem more like his uncle than his brother. And except for my four-year stint in Siena College [1974-78] I have lived my entire adult life in Florida, a long stretch from Buffalo and more recently Kansas City, where my family is situated. I do carry a sense of loss from time to time about leaving home in high school.
 
During that 1966 Christmas at home, I met a young lady who, shall I say, really caught my eye. I had a girlfriend in the seventh-grade years ago, but now I was 19 and “my face was set for Jerusalem,” in terms of my long-range future. When I got back to Callicoon, though, I took a long hard look at myself. I was seriously overweight and no threat to any Olympic records. So, I began a diet on my own. John O’Connor was an infirmarian then, and he weighed me two or three times per week. The diet made me sleepy much of the time; Eric Kyle would joke about that in class. To increase weight loss, I started running daily and got up to several miles per day. I dropped from 220 to 180 in three months. I felt good about that except that the pants to my black seminary suit started sliding.
 
I ended formal dieting because Eddie Flannagan came up to me in the gym. “We want you to stop your diet.” It wasn’t clear to me who the “we” were. Had this been a matter at a faculty meeting? Were they medically worried? Weight loss can be a symptom of about anything. So I went back to a sane existence, except for my pants. Marty Neilan came to my rescue with a pair of 36” waist black slacks—I owe you one, Marty! I was able to wear my black suit as required for the annual science fair in the spring, which was open to the townspeople. My exhibit: Calories and How They Kill You.
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My mood was improving and Buddy Ward invited me to spend Easter Vacation at his house. I had spent the previous Easter at Matt Seymour’s and had a fun time, so I joined Buddy on the bus to Little Falls. His family has a reputation for hospitality among Callicoon guys of my time, and I certainly could not have asked for anything more. Buddy was still close with his Jersey friends, and they took me into the gang. As a Buffalo boy, I had never been to the Red Apple tourist stop before, a popular spot on the way back to Callicoon from Jersey. A week of cultural immersion.
 
There were less than two months left for the academic year to end, but sometime in the late spring we got word of wholesale changes in our Province of the Order. I did not know Finian Kerwin, the new provincial, but I certainly knew Columban Hollywood, our Latin teacher, class moderator, and senior athletic coach for my entire five years on the hill. Columban was named our new guardian and seminary rector, replacing Liguori Muller. That alone meant major changes of atmosphere for my sixth and final year in the fall. Columban knew me well enough to ride me about my ennui in fourth year About that time newly ordained friars visited the campus: Ronnie Stark, Finbar Keefe, Dutchy Glynn and Adrian Porter. [I think I forgot one.] I’m not sure if I knew they would be replacing many of the present faculty in September, but they were colorful and friendly fellows, and I had no issues with that.
 
One other change impacted on my class and sixth year ahead of us. The province had revamped the novitiate team, the next step after Callicoon. Dan O’Rourke and Doc Fink would direct St. Raphael’s. The Jersey guys in my class had processed into seminary through Dan, and the Buffalo boys through Doc, when both were working in the vocations office. The initial reaction was relief; we knew them as recruiters. How things worked out is a story for another day.
 
I have very pleasant memories of taking the Greyhound bus from Sullivan County back to my family homestead at the end of May. It was late at night, the New York Thruway virtually empty. I had time to chill out and think about an easy summer of three months ahead. I had survived fifth year and even compiled some personal achievements that year. I liked my class. Compared to the previous September, I was really feeling good.