1963 Workday Wonders

Someone once remarked that “you can take the kid out of the seminary but you can’t take the seminary out of the kid.” In some ways the seminary was not your usual American teenage high school experience; but in other ways maybe it was. I remember the enormous idealism and energy that seemed to animate so many of us at that time. The sense of community is something to which I keep coming back in my own memories of Saint Anthony’s:     
Here’s a scene I remember from my freshman year—I was fourteen. It was one of those “work days” when all of us were out building, cleaning, painting, planting, etc. For some reason, a whole lot of us were outside on or in the vicinity of the sports fields in front of Saint Anthony’s. I remember looking up and seeing roughly a hundred of us all working in smaller groups. There was not an adult to be seen, even though some of the tasks were complicated. The seniors and juniors were in charge—sort of. “Kids” between 14 and 18 were driving tractors that pulled carts, piled with tools, rocks and other kids, from one work site to another; some were on two-story ladders washing windows. Others were hanging out of windows high up and cinched to metal glass frames with a rope in order to scrape mold off the shutters.
I remember one group was digging rocks out of the side of the landfill that made up the athletic fields: crowbars, picks, shovels short and long, sledge hammers. Everyone was swinging away within three feet of one another; and I remember what happened next very clearly... a junior named Landis—I don’t remember his first name—drove the tractor off the end of the land fill and into a garden, a fall of some 6-8 feet. All the work stopped and nobody moved. I think I remember Gerry O—student body president--saying something like “Oh sh-t.” Then, Landis suddenly appeared, covered with mud, and laughing as though he had just won a second piece of Friday pie. Without a word, some twenty or so guys, got the tractor back onto its wheels and onto the street that went between the swimming pool and the athletic fields. I experienced a recognition of the sheer power of community—what it could or should accomplish—along with a sense of the shortcomings. All peace and goodness.   John G T  '65