Seminary Reminiscences from the 1960s - Part 4

I’ve written a number of blog entries about life in a Catholic seminary in the 1960’s. Here are some additional reminiscences about those years.

I entered St. Charles College Seminary as a freshman in high school. Like many boys of that age, I enjoyed playing sports. Since the seminary was a closed environment, separated from “the World”, the sports available to us were intramural. We had teams that competed against one another in all of the major sports (football, basketball, baseball and track).

Although basketball was my favorite, I enjoyed playing all the sports. For football, we played “touch football” where the play stopped when a defensive player touched with two hands the offensive player with the ball. Maybe not as exciting to some as tackle football but we had a good time. And the only equipment required was a pair of cleats. As I recall, basketball was played in a building that had no heat. Our high school yearbook refers to it as Tuberculosis Hall. Baseball was played in both fall and spring. For track and field, we had one meet in October and one in May.

For most of high school, there were four teams: Trojans, Vikings, Spartans and Crusaders. And, to accommodate as many students as possible, for each sport there was a “A” league, a “B” league and at times a “C” league. During my senior year, there were only three teams. I was the captain of the Vikings; Bill Reilly was captain of the Spartans; and Bob Callen was captain of the Trojans. Here’s a picture of the three of us with the two Masters of Games, Frank Benedetta and Joe Petryszak, who organized the teams and schedules. Each class had its own class colors. Ours were green and white. We are wearing our class’s football jerseys. I’m number 5 in this picture. Also, here’s a picture from a track race with my friend, Larry McAvoy, ahead of the field.

Along with the four sports mentioned above, we also had tennis and handball courts available. And, during the winter, there was an outdoor ice rink for those who wanted to skate. I spent a lot of time on that rink. The handball courts were very popular. They were outdoor courts with a front wall and two short side walls (maybe six feet long). I remember having handball gloves with padding in the palm. That little black handball was pretty hard and our hands were usually pretty red after a few games. We had pool and billiards tables and ping pong tables that got a lot of use.

We also had other activities for students to participate in. I remember that we had movies shown in the auditorium on some Saturday nights. Because it was a seminary in the 1960’s, the movies were all PG rated. I remember seeing a number of movies with Doris Day in them. It seemed that in each of them she sang Que Sera Sera (“Que Sera Sera/ Whaterver will be, will be/The future’s not ours to see/Que Sera Sera”). Each grade had a glee club that performed at concerts held twice a year (in the fall and spring). The glee clubs were led by a student conductor. And there were talent shows where individuals or groups could perform. We also put on plays, in which some of the students had to play female roles, Sounds strange as I think about it, but what choice did we have. I specifically remember some Shakespearean plays being performed. Here’s a picture from the play J.B., a contemporary version of the story of Job, from the Bible. And a picture of our sophomore college glee club.

After high school, we were at St. Charles for two years of college. The freshman college students were referred to as Poets and the sophomore students as Rhets (short for Rhetoricians). Rhetoric is “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing”. One of the curious things I remember involves the grading of a college English term paper. This term paper came towards the end of the school year and counted for a significant percentage of the grade. In Father Eaton’s classes, our papers were returned with grades made up of two letters. But we did not know what the letters signified and he did not tell us at the beginning what they referred to. This caused a lot of confusion and anxiety among us. We eventually figured out from the pattern of the grades that he had substituted for the numbers 0-9 for the letters “blackwhite” (or perhaps “whiteblack”, I don’t remember for sure).

I previously wrote some things about the Refectory (Dining Hall). One of the things related to the Refectory that Larry McAvoy reminded me about is the many bets involving desserts that were placed on sports games or pool and ping pong games. This could be a bet of a single dessert or a bet of a week’s worth of desserts or even two weeks worth. You can imagine the dismay of some students when the dessert they owed because of a lost bet ended up being one of their favorites. Very unpleasant!

After graduating from high school, we moved into the newer college building. As opposed to the large dormitory rooms for high school students (56 in a dorm), those in college had a room they shared with one other student. Instead of going to a large study hall, college students had desks in their rooms where they would study at the designated times. As you can imagine, the move from high school to college was a big deal.

I’ve always felt compelled to follow the rules and in the seminary there were a lot of rules. When we were in high school and living a very communal life, it was not so easy to get away with breaking rules. But, in college, with a room that we shared with only one other person, it was easier to break some rules. My freshman year, I had a roommate who didn’t seem much concerned with the rules. We were not allowed to have radios but he had a small portable transistor radio that he listened to in the room with an earphone. We were supposed to have personal books approved by the priest who was the school librarian. In our room, he was reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. I’m pretty sure it would not have been approved by the librarian. He just didn’t seem like he was serious about being in the seminary. It was his first year in the seminary and he left before the end of the year.

Ours was a small world. But over the next few years, it was about to change significantly for all of us. And also for St. Charles. We graduated from the junior college in 1967. St. Charles was part of St. Mary's Seminary and University. Two years after our graduation from St. Charles, the high school section was closed and the junior and senior classes of St. Mary’s moved from Paca St. in downtown Baltimore to the St. Charles campus and the combined college was renamed St. Mary’s Seminary College. Eight years later, that college closed and the campus was sold to a developer, who converted it into senior housing (Charlestown Retirement Community). So St. Charles College, which opened its doors in 1848, came to a rather abrupt end. The same thing would happen to many other minor seminaries throughout the country.