The Night My Class Met Sally Olwen Clark

​My seminary years [1962-1968, high school and junior college] were not the best years of my life. It was a duty, earning your clerical stripes, and each of us made our way by adapting as best we could. The idea of a teenager attending a boarding school seminary far away from home dates to the Council of Trent’s [1545-1563] reforms after the Reformation, when a holier priesthood was the dream of the future. The 1917 Code of Canon Law described the purpose of minor seminaries: "to take care especially to protect [seminarians] from the contagion of the world, to train in piety, to imbue with the rudiments of literary studies, and to foster in them the seed of a divine vocation.” The word “seminary” comes from the Latin, semen, “seed.” As it turns out, one of the eight remaining minor seminaries in the U.S. today is located in Rathdrum, Idaho, a village near Coeur d’Alene where my cousin Mimi lives today, and I found the school’s most recent edition of its equivalent to our Cord and Cowl and Seraph of the 1960’s.
 
What was the 1917 Code of Canon Law protecting us from, precisely, on Aroma Hill all those years? The Code in force at the time stated that young seminarians were to be protected “from the contagion of the world.” This was code for women, or more precisely, teenaged girls of our age cohort. But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not prevent our class rendezvous with Sally Olwen Clark, in the basement of the seminary chapel on a Sunday evening in the winter of 1965. Let me set this up. As much of the “world’s contamination” was transmitted by television, we saw virtually no TV at St. Joe’s. {I’ll come back to that in a moment.] I believe we could watch the CBS Evening News [possibly in later years], but I am certain we had permission to watch the weekly Ed Sullivan Show over in the chapel basement, two-hundred metal folding chairs in a semi-circle before a black and white TV with the volume cranked to “possible audio damage to this unit.”
 
In my class’s sophomore year, 1964 began a wonderful era of popular music, and I loved every minute of it. Music, sports, and writing bad literature got me through the monotony of my life. This was the springtime of the arrival of the Beatles and the “British Invasion.” In our seminary world the only way to see and hear the big hits of the day was to watch Ed Sullivan’s variety show in the church basement or to listen to a radio in your class’s assigned rec room. Private radios were forbidden, though I know someone owned one because we listened to the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston title fight on the roof of Scotus Hall with it. Most of you in my generation or who know your rock history remember what happened next on the music charts.
 
But as rock historian Fred Bronson observed years later, it took about one year for a woman to join the English invasion. On January 23, 1965, she reached the top of the Number One Billboard Chart in the United States, edging out “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles. Her name was Sally Olwen Clark. Her father had two previous girlfriends before his marriage, named Pet and Ula, and so when Sally took a stage name, it was “Petula” Clark. Her song was “Downtown,” a smooth upbeat number that stayed in your head. If my memory is correct, the song was widely popular up on the hill. The guys could hardly wait to see her on TV, probably with the expectation that such a beautiful song could only be sung by a beautiful gal. Ed Sullivan booked her for his CBS variety show of Sunday, March 14, 1965.
 
It was a standing room only performance in the chapel basement that night. I need to interject a word about Ed Sullivan here. He was an unlikely MC, not smooth, and given to awful misstatements. He hosted a variety show, which meant that you had to sit through a Polish Dance Troupe to see the Rolling Stones. [“Let’s hear it for the Forty Polish Dentists!” he actually said.] When Sister Janet Meade sang her Number One version of the Lord’s Prayer, Sullivan beamed, “Let’s hear it for The Our Father.” But Sullivan was OK that night, although the production was not. Petula Clark’s plane landed in New York 45 minutes before the show and there was no time to rehearse. So Petula never moved from her spot on the stage and sang “Downtown” and “I Know A Place” back to back with the camera on her face.
 
At cue, the camera zoomed in on her. Now, how do I describe the sound of dozens of guys groaning at the same time? “My God, she’s old!” The disappointment was palpable. Some guys left. How old was she? She was born in 1932, or a “decrepit” 33. I thought she was drop dead gorgeous, but I didn’t dare say anything. I was just turning 17 at the time, and to admit to “those kinds of feelings” for a woman over 30 was a peculiar admission to the herd psychology of the locker room. Today I went back and looked at the YouTube clips…and concluded I was right all along. Clark, who started singing during World War II and performed for King Edward and Winston Churchill, had seen tougher audiences than our little school in lockdown. She is close to 90 today. Later, Dusty Springfield and Lulu both became popular in the U.S. and on the hill; Lulu sang the theme to “To Sir With Love” later in the 1960’s.
As I alluded to earlier, it was hard to stay current via the television on seminary property. I can only remember two sets: the church auditorium set and another, in the Scotus Hall dormitory, in what was called—possibly sarcastically— “the TV room.” This second site was an appendage off the north [?] locker room assigned to freshman and sophomores. The viewing capacity was modest because the room doubled as a trunk storage facility. Our “home theater” was furnished in “early delivery truck” motif. I have been scouring my mind to recall the nuances of our TV policy. Of course, most nights we had study hall at 7:30, and we retired after night prayer at 9 PM, so there was never opportunity to follow the TV series coming online at that time like “The Avengers” or “Wild Wild West.”
 
This does not mean that some of my classmates did not set their own TV hours. My good friend John Burke reminded me this week that he skipped a study period to watch an early evening entertainment program, possibly “Shindig” or “Hullabaloo,” two programs devoted to current rock in 1965 and 1966. John heard the duty Prefect of Discipline approaching [Cyprian Burke, no relation], so he switched the TV to PBS, and when Father Cyprian asked him what he was doing, John replied, “I’m watching Rachmaninoff.” In my final year on the Hill, January 1968, I somehow got designated to ask the duty Prefect, Father Ed Flannigan, if the school’s dinner schedule could be moved back so we could watch Superbowl II, Green Bay and Oakland. In a tone of voice that can only be termed pontifical, Father Ed declared that “the NBC Sports Department is not going to dictate our living schedule.”
 
Most of our music came from the radio, and most rec rooms had one [except the freshman rec room in Scotus Hall.] All the dials were set to WABC in New York City, which could be picked up reasonably well from 110 miles away in the Catskills. WABC was a commercial platform; the ratio of songs to advertising and self-promotion was way out of kilter. The DJ’s I recall were the morning drive time Herb Oscar Anderson, the evening drive time Dan Ingram, and the nighttime Cousin Brucie, who is still working today on Sirius.