COMING OF AGE WITH THE JESUITS

Like “The Farm,” the story of growing up on a small Kansas wheat farm in the 1940s and 1950s, an account dedicated to my parents and family and to a lesser extent to childhood school friends from those days, this book too is about memories. In a sense it is a continuation of “The Farm.” Although autobiographical in nature, it is much more. The book is a recollection of seven years spent in Jesuit schools of higher learning. It is meant to not only relive those days, but tell what Jesuit education was like during the early and mid-1960s. The story is not unusual, yet perhaps not typical since I was a product of public schools in Kansas and not the Jesuit prep school or big city Catholic high school of so many of my Rockhurst friends. The story will be told chronologically but the memory is in charge. The narration is based on a list of persons, places and events written down years after the fact and then recounted in the various sections of the book. I apologize now for the lack of more precise details but it has been a long time. The book is once again a change of pace from academic writing. Since I’m not gifted in the art of fiction, these short “chronicles” are a compilation of what happened and what I thought about it. In addition to the two phases of Jesuit education, the first at then Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Missouri, and the latter at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, sandwiched between is the telling of my first encounter with Latin America leading to a future career of language and culture teaching at Arizona State University. My first foreign experience took place the summer between junior and senior years at Rockhurst and was spent studying at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City followed by travels in Mexico and Guatemala. The book is illustrated with personal photos, but I am in debt to images scanned from “Rockhurst Magazine” and “The Saint Louis University Calendar, 2012,” and images used with permission from the Office of Archives, Saint Louis University. Credits will be given accordingly. Finally, the book is certainly not an academic or historic treatise on the Jesuits or their philosophy of education, the “Ratio Studiorum,” but rather a personal account of a young man’s formative years with them. Thus it comes in the wrappings of the memories of a nineteen-year-old with feelings of nervousness in the beginning, a bit of fright at the Jesuit discipline and ways, and a whole lot of immaturity. Was this typical? Perhaps yes. A title could have just as easily been “Growing Up with the Jesuits.” There was some maturation that took place in those seven years, but it was just the beginning. All was not assistance at mass, toil, study and cramming for exams, not by a long shot. I hope the reader can share the memories.