brooklyn with danny and joe

Denis to God, Agnes to Work

During the fifties in the Catholic Church, there was a great attempt to recruit boys for the priesthood. The most successful way of doing this was to send in the missionaries. The Graymor Friars were very good at presenting great opportunities for young men who were attending Catholic grammar school. Denis signed up and our lives took another turn. We started saying the rosary. I am not sure what my father was praying for because he was against Denis going into the priesthood. My mother was torn between losing her son and her religion. We, as Catholics, believed that you were called by God to serve him and eventually you would accept this calling. “Many are called but few are chosen” was something that we grew up with, it was more than a statement, it was a way of life. I remember Denis had to go to a Catholic high school for a short period to make up some courses or wait for the term to start, I think he went to St. Leonard for a few months. Saying the rosary was boring, you say the same prayer repeatedly, I always wanted to say ditto, ditto. Our lives were now fully surrounded by the church. I was an altar boy, was a member of the “Squires” which was the Knights of Columbus for kids, attended mass almost everyday, and after Denis went into the seminary, sold the paper (Tablet) at the church on Sundays from 6:30 AM to 1:00PM.

I didn’t understand why Denis wanted to leave us, so he took me to hear one of the Graymor Friars during one of the retreats. A retreat is when Catholics say even more prayers and try to make their life more Christ like. The idea is good, the message the missionaries told us was very effective. I even started to think about becoming a priest and I was only twelve. The first thing you notice is how good they are at preaching, it was all about doing good in the world, about helping the poor, about walking in the shadow of St. Frances of Assisi. Listening to the friar, I kind of understood why Denis wanted to help other people. He would do that for the rest of his life. He really did follow in the footsteps of St. Frances.

While Denis was waiting to go to the Graymor Seminary he had to train me how to sell our Catholic paper called “The Tablet”. Denis explained that for each paper you sold you got three cents and the church got seven cents. He took me with him so I could watch and do as hedid. I didn’t like the split, but this was not the time to bring that up. After a few weeks, I was on my own.

I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning to be at the church for the 6:30 mass on Sundays, and stay until the last mass at 12:30. In between each mass you could go to the candy store and have hot chocolate, and I loved hot chocolate. Danny would come to help me and we would explore all the nooks and crannies of the church. We would go up to the choir loft and watch the mass from there, we only had to be in the church at the beginning and the end; so we had lots of time to look around. One day when we were exploring we found a storage area under the stairway to the choir loft and in that place, we found hundreds of old Tablets. I looked at Danny and started to laugh.

Selling the church paper worked like this….. we would pick up the Tablets about 6:15AM and at the end of the day return any unsold papers to the Franciscan Brother’s House. We would pick up a few hundred copies and sell what we could, we’d get three cents for each one and give the church seven cents. The brother who took the papers would decide how much we received. The unsold papers were only counted and never looked at for the date. We had a plan.

The next Sunday we sold two hundred papers and were to return fifty as unsold, however, a trip to the storage area under the choir loft increased our unsold “Tablets” to seventy-five. When we checked in with the good brother and gave him the money we collected, it was seventeen dollars and fifty cents, instead of the twenty dollars we should have given him. Worked like a charm. We did not make much but it was a good test run. The next Sunday we found out that all the unsold papers were stored in this area under the choir loft for several weeks. We would have extra papers forever. Going to confession and telling the priest we were stealing from the church was something we were not looking forward to, but the extra hot chocolates sure tasted good. When we said our penance, we had to break it up because if you stayed too long at the communion rail, our parents would want to know what you did that caused such a long penance. Our luck ran out when my brother Denis who was checking the altar boy schedule for me, saw Danny and I putting the old papers in between the new ones. He didn’t say anything right away but gave me that “Walsh Look”.

I remember Denis telling me that stealing from the church, no matter how small would be considered a big sin and we were fired. I was only eleven and got fired.

The day of Denis’ departure was approaching and we were all sad, I don’t know a lot about the Friars of the Atonement, as they were called, but do know they had cool habits to wear and when we did go to visit Denis they had great scrambled eggs. The seminary was located in a place called Montour Falls, upstate New York, somewhere close to Watkins Glen. Our journeys to visit Denis are stories in themselves and have to be told later. After Denis went up the river, our family suffered another major blow; my father was seriously injured on the job. He fell from a ladder and fractured his skull. The greatest impact was felt by Agnes who was sixteen.

Agnes was going to high school and taking courses designed so that in the future she would get a nurse’s license. The future looked bright; she was a great student and was doing well in her studies. My father falling from the ladder changed everything. There were no options for my father and mother, Agnes would have to quit school and go to work to support the family. The staff at the high school tried to convince my mom to let Agnes stay and work part time, but the program could not come up with enough money to keep the family going. This must have been a heartbreaking decision for my mother, she wanted all of us to get a good education and enjoy life. Agnes found a job with a big company named Continental Insurance, she was going to be a bookkeeper. That’s what Danny and I needed….. someone to keep our books.

Once Agnes was working, she also had to go to continuation school, which was the law in New York at that time. The weirdest part of the law was you could not go to night school before you were seventeen, so once a week the company had to allow you to take time off to attend a four-hour class. I am not sure what Agnes did in her continuation school, but when I went, we sat and copied words out of a dictionary, page by page. The teacher did not want to be there, we didn’t want to be there, it was a big waste of time. Agnes would lose time completing her high school because of the stupid law. Since Agnes was working and Denis was up the river, guess who got to watch Carol. I was twelve and did not want a little sister around to tell mom all the bad things that we did. Carol was about nine, and so I thought she was old enough to be on her own, but mom and dad didn’t agree, so Carol was with me a lot. She was a good kid, and most of the time we got along. She would watch me play stickball and became a cheerleader for her older brother. She did have some cute friends, but they were way too young for me, I liked older women, at least thirteen.

Agnes had to give all her money to mom and dad, and I think they gave her some kind of lunch money; we were very poor during that time. Agnes saved the family from disaster and of course, we never gave her the credit she deserved. There was something about Irish families not praising one member of the family for fear of hurting the others. Agnes did finish high school, go on to teach catholic school, and go to Brooklyn college.

When my father did go back to work, it took a long time to pay back the money we owed and Agnes had to keep working. She was now in Thomas Jefferson night school and completed school there. It was not an easy task, especially the way Agnes did it; she would never miss a class and worried about getting A’s, not to mention working at a full time job. I was happy she had the weekends free, we would need her laughter when we made our first trip to see Denis.