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This is an incredible autobiography of a man devoted to forming children both in schools and in literature. His legacy lives on in his books, especially the Tom Playfair series.
CHAPTER II
The Troubled Sea of Learning
THE day on which I was entered at St. Louis University, one month before reaching the age of eleven, is one of the memorable dates of my life. Mr. Peter J. Hert, the Belgian consul, my father, and my uncle Mr. John Daly escorted me to Ninth Street and Washington Avenue with pomp and circumstance. We entered the Jesuit parlor. Presently the Reverend Father Stuntebeck, president of the institution, entered. The sight of him appalled me. To me he was a very big man and had what I considered a tiger eye.
After the customary round of introductions, during which he made me feel quite uncomfortable, he departed, to be succeeded by the Reverend Father Joseph Zealand, the vice president. Father Zealand was very tall and as straight as a poker. The fact that both were Catholic priests of a kind that I had never seen before added to my discomfiture.
Having been duly registered in the rudiments class, the equivalent of the present seventh grade, I was left by the Belgian consul and my near relations to my own resources. I was then ushered into the building proper and placed in line with a crowd of effervescent boys awaiting their turn to buy their books from the treasurer. Some of the boys were overboisterous. Suddenly from the office of the treasurer there emerged another man clad in cassock and cincture who dashed into the crowd and administered a slap on the jaw to one of the most recalcitrant students, after which he disappeared into his office.
“What manner of men,” I asked myself, “are these Jesuits? Two of them that I have already met are too big and the other one is brutal.” That he was brutal was my first impression of Father Tehan, the kindest, the gentlest, and the most loyal friend of boys that I ever met in my life.