After that rough introduction the to LaSalle rowing program, Joe Sweeney did come back to Crescent, again and again. He discovered that coaches Joe Dougherty and Tom “Bear” Curran were not just founts of rowing wisdom, but also had some remarkable rowing stories from their younger days.
One of Joe Sweeney’s favorites was the story of the Reich Chancellery theft.
***
The American “Big Eight” that won the gold at Liege, Belgium in 1930 consisted of Charles McIlvaine in bow; Tom Curran, 2; Jack Bratten, 3; John McNichol, 4; Myrlin Janes, 5; Joe Doughert, 6; Dan Barrows, 7; Chet Turner, stroke; and Tom Mack, coxswain. In the final, the Penn AC “Big Eight” beat Italy by two lengths, and Denmark by six lengths. During their trial runs, the Philadelphia Irish “Big Eight” made 2,000 meters in an astounding 5 minutes and 18 seconds. According to Joe Sweeney, “there was considerable speculation that this might be the fastest eight ever seen.”
The Philadelphians of Penn AC teammates tried to repeat their time to enter the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, but they sadly lost to crews from the University of California and the University of Washington crews, respectively. In 1936, the men of the Penn AC eight went to Berlin to participate in the controversial, high profile Olympic games of that year. Although they didn’t make the US eight, the Penn AC men rowed in various smaller boats.
There, they faced a few challenges. The first had to with equipment. The University of Washington crew (of The Boys in the Boat fame) brought their own boat with them: a magnificent cedar-and-mahogany eight handbuilt by the British-born master boatbuilder George Pocock. Yet the other American rowers, including the Penn AC boys, had to make do with quads and pairs loaned to them by the Germans.
The brand new LZ-129 zeppelin “Hindenburg” flying over the Berlin Olympics. Built for the transatlantic run between Frankfurt and Lakehurst, New Jersey, she would make 12 round trips that year. The 800 foot long, hydrogen-filled airship would explode while landing in Lakehurst the following May. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Nazis had their own agenda: proving the athletic superiority of the Aryan race. at the expense of the foreign teams.
“The rowers swear they were sabotaged,” Sweeney said. Tom Curran and Joe Dougherty, who rowed in the Penn AC pair, didn’t even make it to the finals.
The second problem was that their coach, Frank Mueller of Vesper, was a German national who was terrified of being detained in his native land and being conscripted. He stayed behind.
The young men of Washington won the gold at the 1936 Olympics in their American boat, running the Langer See course in a mere 6:25.4, beating out Italy at 6:26, and Germany at 6:26.4. Bringing their own boat across the Atlantic probably made that .4 second difference.
Rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics on a German stamp. Source: Wikipedia
After the games were over, Dougherty, Curran, and the Penn AC boys stayed in Berlin for a week to take in the sights of the Germany capital, which on the surface seemed radiant and prosperous, a shining symbol of a renewed Germany. Little did they know of the concentration camps, the incarceration of political dissidents, and the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights as citizens. The highlight of their week in Berlin was a tour of the Reich Chancellery, recently renovated and expanded by architects Paul Troost and Leonhard Gall in a sleek, somewhat sinister Art Deco style.
While touring Adolf Hitler’s private office, the story went, Tom Curran spied an elegant pen set on the Fuhrer’s desk. While no one was looking, he swiped it, and took it back to his room at the Olympic village. That night, a group of men wearing black jackets, swastika armbands, and high jackboots showed up at the Penn AC dormitory, waking the men up.
Hitler’s office in the New Reich Chancellery, completed in 1938 and designed by architect Albert Speer. The ceremonial office that the Penn AC crew visited was in the old Reich Chancellery. Source: Wikipedia.
It was the Gestapo.
“The pen set is missing,” the lead Gestapo officer snapped at the Americans. “We want it back.”
Joe Dougherty, who was the captain, took a guess that it was the “bad boy” of the group who committed the crime. He turned to Tom Curran and ordered him to hand the pen set over to the Gestapo. Curran went back to his bunk and gave it to Dougherty. The stern, starchy Philadelphia Penn AC captain then solemnly handed Hitler’s pens back to the Gestapo officer.
He turned to Curran and punched him square in the jaw. Curran fell to the floor, groaning in agony.
Dougherty then said to the Gestapo officer, “Are you satisfied or are you next?”
***
“I’ve heard that story from two or three other people,” Joe Sweeney said of the coaches he got to know twenty years later when he towed at LaSalle. “They were gentlemen. They had their own ethics. Really good guys.”
Joe Sweeney being interviewed at the University Barge Club, November 9, 2016. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
Crescent Boat Club (right) and Pennsylvania Barge Club (left), January 3, 1984.
After spending several years in the Navy, Joe Sweeney came back commercial obstacle course to Philadelphia in the late 1950s to go to college on the GI Bill. His widowed mother continued to work as a nurse, rising to become the head of Student Health Services at the University of Pennsylvania.
The day he started his freshman year at LaSalle University, Joe swung by Boathouse Row, across the Schuylkill River from his old Powelton Village neighborhood. He had shown up on campus dressed in his Navy uniform. The Christian Brothers gave him a suit to change into on that first day of school. Dressed in his new outfit, he was on the way to pick up his mother at Penn, but had an hour or two to kill on the way home. He knew that LaSalle’s rowing program was based out of the Crescent Boat Club, a Tudor-revival structure on the eastern end of the row. He walked into the boathouse and saw a group of young men (he was a decade older than the other Lasalle freshmen) gathered around coaches Joe Dougherty and Tom Curran, both “Boathouse Row gods.” Dougherty, a “straight-laced Irish Catholic” as Sweeney remembered him, had rowed in the American “Big Eight” that set the 2,000 meter record at the 1930 Olympics at Liège, Belgium. They were also part of the “Irish Mafia” that hung out at the neighboring Penn Athletic Club (“Penn AC”) over cards and whiskey: the Kellys, the McIlvaines, and other Irish-American patriarchs were prosperous but couldn’t join any of the elite downtown clubs. Tom Curran, the “bad boy of the group,” had also rowed with Dougherty at Liège.Inflatable Irish pub
John B. “Jack” Kelly, powerful contractor and prominent Democratic kingmaker, was the godfather of the group. He had famously been denied entry at the Henley Regatta’s “Diamond Sculls” because the rules stipulated that which excluded anyone “who is or ever has been … by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer”. The rejection kindled a competitive fire in Kelly to not only push himself harder as an athlete (he was also an excellent boxer), but also his son Jack Jr, a Penn graduate who won the Henley “Diamond Sculls Challenge” in 1947 and 1949. Using his enormous bricklaying fortune, Kelly Sr. built up the rowing program at the Pennsylvania Athletic Club. He also mentored many aspiring young, working class Catholic rowers so they could compete toe-to-toe with the scions of Philadelphia’s Protestant gentry.
When Joe Sweeney entered Crescent that day, he had stumbled into the heart of Boathouse Row’s Catholic community. It was gritty, no-holds-barred competitive.
“Hey kid,” Dougherty shouted at Sweeney as he walked in the Crescent door, “would you like to row?”
One of the LaSalle eights was missing a man. Sweeney had never rowed in his life. He didn’t have a change of clothes, so he jumped into the eight in his Christian Brothers suit.
Sweeney not only had no idea how to row sweep, but he also learned to his horror that Coach Dougherty had his kids row at only one speed. “Full power upriver. Full power down river. No pieces.”
Yet Sweeney didn’t shirk. “In the Navy, I did what I was told,” he said. “I was so sore, my legs were cut up, Grease all over my pants. I looked up at Tom Curran and I said, ‘you son of a b***h.”
Curran smiled back at Sweeney. “You’ll be back!” the old Irishman said.
Witchita State men’s eight at the 1990 Dad Vail Regatta.
Source: interview of Joe Sweeney by Steven Ujifusa, November 9, 2016.
Map dated October 7, 1920, showing the grounds of Pennsylvania General Hospital (known as “Blockley”) and the adjacent burial grounds for the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic.
Gray, lanky, and serene-faced, Joe Sweeney is now 80 years old. The former Commodore of the Schuylkill Navy grew up in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia. His father was a prominent physician at Pennsylvania General Hospital, his mother a nurse. His mother, born into a well-to-do North Carolina family, converted to her husband’s Roman Catholic faith, not just out of love, but out of a remarkable thing she saw during the 1918 flu epidemic.
“There were lines of people people on 34th Street trying to get into the hospital,” Joe said. “The people who died at the hospital were buried across the street, where the Civic Center was. The seminarians from St. Charles dug the graves. Mom and Dad had horrible experiences, but she was inspired by what she saw.”
Young Joe came up through Philadelphia’s parochial school system, living in a big Victorian house at 38th and Spring Garden and attending St. Agatha’s Parish. Yet he never got the chance to row in high school: his father died when he was only ten years old. Even though his father was a highly-paid physician, the Sweeneys did not have enough in savings to maintain their previous lifestyle. “My mom put the older boys through parochial school,” he said, “but she couldn’t afford to keep everyone at home.” To earn extra money, Joe would run errands for the local Pennsylvania Railroad employees. During the 1940s, the PRR was in slow decline, but it was still one of the biggest employers in Philadelphia. Thousands of brakeman, signalmen, locomotive engineers, and repairmen worked long and hard shifts at the Powelton yards adjacent to 30th Street Station, “In the afternoons, the clerks would give you an address to a train man to let him known when and where to report,” Joe remembered. “The PRR would give you a quarter to deliver the slip to the man at his home.”
3417 Baring Street, located one block south of Joe Sweeney’s childhoold home, December 14, 1962.
Running errands for the railroad also gave young Joe his first taste of alcohol. As the dusk approached, he would stop by the houses on Brandywine Street, just north of Powelton Village, where the wives of the railroad workers were making dinner. “The mother would give you a metal pot, and you’d go to the nearest bar, where there would be a blackboard with the names of the guys.”
The bartender would fill up the pot with beer, and then give Joe a shotglass full of beer.
“That was his pay to you,” Joe remembered. “I remember being so small that I had to reach up to the bar to get that little shotglass full of beer. It was the culture. Teach you how to drink.” Yet despite the heavy drinking, the clergy made sure that their flock would turn off the spigot in time for Sunday communion. Monsignor Mellon of St. Agatha’s would stride into Deemer’s bar, fully dressed in his robes, and announce, “Alright men, It’s Sunday!” And everyone would scatter and the bar would close.
When he turned 17, Joe left home and enlisted in the Navy. He came back to Philadelphia in the late 1950s and enrolled at Lasalle University. It was there that he discovered rowing, which would turn into a lifelong passion. It was also on Boathouse Row that he discovered the so-called “Irish Mafia,” headed by the legendary Kelly clan.
To be continued…
Source:
Interview of Joe Sweeney by Steven Ujifusa, November 9, 2016.
The site of Satterlee Hospital, 43rd and Chester Avenue, May 15, 1956.
Excerpt from “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go, Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground, Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital, To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.
Nowadays, it is the Saturday farmers’ market draws crowds to verdant Clark Park, the heart of West Philadelphia’s Spruce Hill neighborhood. Yet only a few short steps from the stands displaying pink heirloom tomatoes and canned Amish chowchow is a large chunk of rock pulled from the Gettysburg battlefield.
It is the only reminder of what stood here a century-and-a-half ago: America’s largest Civil War military hospital. During the worst years of fighting, over 5,000 wounded soliders lived here, many suffering from debilitating, horrendous injuries.
According to the late historian Shelby Foote, the reason for the high casualties during the Civil War was that the cutting-edge weapons of industrial warfare were far ahead of the generals’ Napoleonic tactics. Massed infantry charges met with very accurate, withering fire from the newfangled rifled musket and heavy artillery. When using a rifled musket when paired with the conical Minie ball, a soldier could kill an enemy at half-a-mile. After a major battle, the statistics printed in Northern and Southern newspapers were so vast as to be almost minded numbing. At the 1862 Battle of Antietam, for example, an estimated 87,000 Union soldiers under the leadership of Philadelphia-born General George B. McClellan faced off against 37,000 Confederates under the command of General Robert E. Lee. September 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest day in American military history: 3,600 men killed, 17,000 wounded, and 1,800 captured or missing on the banks of a creek in rural Maryland.
The Battle of Gettysburg, which took place 10 months after Antietam, ended with a decisive Union victory, but there were over 50,000 casualties on both sides over three hot July days. At the same time, General U.S. Grant captured the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, opening up the Mississippi River to Union naval traffic and cutting the Confederacy in two. Yet many Northerners did not herald General U.S. Grant as a hero. First Lady Mary Lincoln derided him as “Butcher Grant.” In response, President Lincoln said, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
Where did these thousands of “wounded” men go? Some recovered from relatively minor injuries, and then donned their uniforms again to fight another day. But then there were the amputees, whose shattered legs and arms were sawn off in makeshift battlefield hospitals. In the days before sterilization, Army surgeons would reuse the same blood-soaked saws again and again. For the poor patient, the only anesthesia was a slug of whiskey. Infection ran rampant. And then there were men whose faces had been gruesomely disfigured. They were missing eyes, ears, even parts of their jaws. Many of them ended up addicted to the opium-based drugs that doctors freely distributed to them to alleviate their intense physical and psychological pain.
Philadelphia in the mid-19th century was arguably the preeminent American medical city. The University of Pennsylvania, still located at 8th and Chestnut, was more famous for its medical school and teaching hospital than its undergraduate programs. Due to its relatively close proximity to the killing fields of Virginia, not to mention its large and well-trained medical community, Philadelphia was a logical place for a new hospital for convalescing veterans. In 1862, Surgeon-General William Alexander Hammond appointed Philadelphia physician Isaac Israel Hayes to construct a new Army hospital on 15 acres in then-rural West Philadelphia. The setting was woodsy and pastoral, and Washington’s Army brass hoped that the clean country air of the Philadelphia suburbs would not only hasten the soldiers’ recovery, but also uplift their spirits.
Hayes was a natural choice. Not only was he an esteemed physician, but a brilliant planner. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1853, the young Quaker signed on as ship’s surgeon in one of many expeditions in search of lost British explorer Sir John Franklin, and on a later Arctic expedition allegedly became the first European to tread the shores of Ellesmere Island. The logistics of planning a 4,500-bed hospital from scratch, and in a hurry, dwarfed even those of planning a multi-year Arctic expedition, but Hayes was not deterred. He put pen to paper and laid out a temporary city of canvas tents and wood structures on the site. It was later calculated that that at its peak, Satterlee consumed 800,000 pounds of bread, 16,000 pounds of butter and 334,000 quarts of milk per year, all of which had to be brought in by horse-and-wagon on muddy, rutted Baltimore Pike.
Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes. Source: Wikipedia.Birdseye view of Satterlee Hospital. Image from Pinterest.
For Hayes, who had just returned from the Arctic, being thrown into the bloody cauldron of the Civil War was a rude awakening, as he had been away from America for so much of his adult life. His years of sailing through fields of icebergs in search of Franklin and the Northwest Passage were as if “set down in a dream.”
To augment the ranks of professional physicians, Hayes partnered with the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, who would live in an adjacent convent. Twenty or so nuns would change the bed sheets, empty the chamber pots, dress festering wounds, and most importantly, offer emotional solace to those lonely men in agony, far from home and loved ones. According to biographer Douglas W. Wamsley, Dr. Hayes instructed the medical staff to do whatever it took to avoid amputations, thus keeping the soldiers’ bodies whole. Given the lack of sterilization, this policy might have actually prevented deaths from infection.
Walt Whitman’s poem: “The Wound-Dresser.” Whitman served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.
Sources:
Faith Charlton, “1832 Cholera Outbreak in Philadelphia and Duffy’s Cut,” PAHRC, Sisters of Charity, http://www.pahrc.net/tag/sisters-of-charity/, accessed November 1, 2016.
In the 1930s, Ferdinando’s son young Ambrose went to work at his uncle’s butcher’s shop in South Philadelphia, which he would eventually take over. Because few families owned cars during the lean years of the Great Depression, most Philadelphians still shopped for food in their neighborhoods, bringing home only what they could carry. Meat was expensive. Housewives would usually pick out a live turkey, chicken, or goose, have the butcher do the slaughtering, and then take the carcass home to pluck and dress themselves. “The animals were our pets all year,” remembered Ferdinando’s grandson Michael Sr. “Well, until Eastertime.”
In 1947, joining the postwar exodus of second and third generation Italians out of South Philly, Ambrose Campo set up a new establishment at 2401 S.62nd Street in a squat, two-story brick building decorated with pressed-tin bay windows and cornices. Like countless Philadelphia business owners, the Campos ran their butcher shop on the first floor and lived in an apartment on the second floor. Everyone in the family was expected to help out, whether it was mixing meatballs, manning the cash register, or sweeping up at closing time.
By the 1970s, as supermarkets squeezed family butcher shops out of business, Ambrose’s son Frank decided to remake Campo’s as a delicatessen. The delicatessen was originally a German concept: it served sandwiches and other prepared meals to sit-down customers, and also catered meals for family events and local fraternal organizations. Jewish delicatessens served only kosher meats (pastrami, corned beef, brisket) and sold no dairy products, while Italian and German ones served plenty of pork products (salami, prosciutto, soppresata) and specialty cheeses such as provolone. “Butcher shops were becoming a thing of the past,” said 33-year old Frank Campo, grandson of Ambrose, “and after some years of decreased sales my father started making sandwiches with the shop’s steaks and sausages.”
Campo’s Deli at 62nd and Grays Avenue,Ambrose Campo holding a slaughtered calf, 1956. Image courtesy of Michael Campo.
Yet despite this adaptation, the old Italian-American community in Southwest Philadelphia that had sustained Campo’s Deli continued to disperse. Many of the residents moved to newly constructed automobile suburbs in South Jersey and Delaware County, a pattern followed in other mostly-Catholic neighborhoods such as Grays Ferry. In 2001, Campo’s Deli closed its 62nd Street location and moved to a new site at 214 Market Street in Old City, and also opened concession stands in Citizens Bank Ballpark. Not long after that, the Philadelphia Archdiocese announced that Our Lady of Loreto parish was to be shuttered. “Yes the area has become somewhat economically depressed and church attendance has declined,” wrote Damian D’Orsaneo to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, “but is that any reason to close a church? I’m not a biblical scholar, but one thing I remember from 12 years of Catholic schooling is that Jesus’ followers were, for the most part, the poor and downtrodden. If this church provides peace and comfort to even a few, isn’t that a good enough reason to keep its doors open?”
The church thankfully did not meet the wrecking ball, and continues to serve local worshipers as Grace Christian Fellowship. Its colorful murals and Art Deco facade still attract the attention of airport-bound motorists hoping to avoid traffic on I-76.
Sources:
Campo family history provided to Steven Ujifusa by Michael Campo, June 23, 2016.
Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, June 23, 2016.
Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, October 18, 2016.
Interview of Ron Donatucci by Steven Ujifusa, January 26, 2016.
Natalie Hardwick, “Top 10 Foods to Try in Sicily,” BBC Good Food, http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/top-10-foods-try-sicily, accessed October 14, 2016.
The oldest surviving cookbook, De re coquinaria (On Cookery), was compiled by Marcus Gavius Apicius in the first century A.D., the high water mark of the Roman Empire. Each region of Italy has been reveling in its own favorites ever since: “pane con la milza” (open-faced pork spleen sandwich) from Sicily, coretello (minced lamb and lamb innards) from Abruzzo, ‘Nduja (spreadable sausage) from Calabria, and penne with arugula and tomatoes from Puglia.
For Italian immigrant families who came to the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, village recipes were crucial parts ties to their familial and regional pasts, and they died hard in the American urban melting pot. The Philly cheese steak, supposedly “invented” by brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri, did not come along until the 1930s, and originally called for an Italian roll and provolone cheese, not the Americanized orange cheese product.
To Ronald Donatucci, the current registrar of wills and native of the Girard Estates neighborhood, the Jews and the Italian-Americans of Philadelphia shared many common cultural traits, among them a love of food, a focus on education, and (more often than not), a strong mother figure. “They’re so similar,” Donatucci recalled. “My father instilled education in myself and my siblings.” Like the Jews, with whom they often coexisted in tightly-packed rowhouse blocks, Italian immigrants quickly applied the trades they learned back in the old country to the streets of Philadelphia, especially in culinary and the building trades. And they kept these businesses in the family. Bakeries, cheese shops, and confectionaries flourished in Italian neighborhoods. Older women in various neighborhoods would go to the early Sunday Mass at their local parish church, then do their grocery shopping for the week. Young boys were expected to help them with their bags.
Food was not just central to regular family gatherings, but also to the myriad feast days and festivals of the Roman Catholic calendar year. Each village had its own patron saint. One of the biggest, of course, was the Festa di San Giuseppe (Feast of St. Joseph, patron saint of Sicily), celebrated every March 19 with limes, wine, fava beans, cookies, breadcrumbs (representing the sawdust from Joseph’s carpenter shop), and zeppole cakes.
Campo Butcher Shop on the 1100 block of South Street, May 3, 1930.
One such culinary family was the Campo clan–friends of the Donatuccis–who settled in Southwest Philadelphia in the parish of Our Lady of Loreto. In 1905, the three Campo brothers (Fernando, Francesco, and Venerando) arrived in Philadelphia on the Red Star liner SS Friesland. They were natives of the Sicilian village of Cesaro. According to Ferdinando’s great-grandson Michael Campo, the family had been butchers for generation: there were at least seven men named Campo operating butcher shops in Sicily in the early 1900s. Most likely through family help and local Italian-American banks, Venerando raised enough capital to open his own butcher shop at the intersection of Carpenter and South 9th Street in Philadelphia. In the meantime, his brother Ferdinando opened a similar establishment in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Eventually, Ferdinando’s son Ambrose opened another butcher’s shop, this one at 62nd and Grays Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, and joined a brand new parish that had opened its doors in the neighborhood. The church, finished in 1938, was the anchor of a neighborhood of tidy brick rowhouses surrounding the main thoroughfare leading from West Philadelphia to the new Philadelphia Municipal Airport. When aviator Charles Lindbergh dedicated the airport shortly after his epic 1927 transatlantic flight, Philadelphia’s city fathers named this arterial street in his honor. Designed in the fashionable Art Deco style by local architect Frank L. Petrillo, Our Lady of Loreto was a radical departure from the baroque and Byzantine revival popular with church architects such as Henry Dagit and Edward F. Durang. Inside and out, Our Lady of Loreto (the patron saint of air travel) looked more like a 1930s airport terminal than a church. According to Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, “Petrillo’s design cleverly links that story with the great technical advance of the 1930s: commercial air travel. Because streamline moderne’s strong, horizontal lines evoked speed, it was a favorite architectural choice for new airports’ terminals.” The airplane theme didn’t stop with the building envelope. According to church teaching, on May 10, 1291, a flock of angels flew the house where the Virgin Mary was born from the Holy Land to the comparative safety of the Italian village of Loreto.
The mural on the church’s facade depicted this miracle as propeller-driven planes swoop around the heavy-lifting angels.
Feast of St. Anthony, c.1985. Image courtesy of Michael Campo/Our Lady of Loreto Facebook group.
The modern style of the church reflected the forward-looking aspirations of the 1,200 or so families who belonged to the parish, They saw Southwest Philadelphia as a step up from cluttered old South Philadelphia. For the members of this parish, the most important festival was the feast of St. Anthony, which took place on the first week of June. “I remember being a kid and my parents giving me a dollar to pin on the St. Anthony statue, for which I would get a blessed roll,” remembered Michael Campo. “The roll was from Mattera’s Bakery, which was the neighborhood bakery, and located on the same intersection of 62nd and Grays Avenue, as the Church and Campo’s.” Following the parade was a carnival, complete with fireworks and a dunk-the-clown contest. “Looking back on it, it was probably a couple roman candles,” Campo said of the fireworks dislay, “but when I was 10, It felt like I was at Disney World.”
Sources:
Campo family history provided to Steven Ujifusa by Michael Campo, June 23, 2016.
Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, June 23, 2016.
Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, October 18, 2016.
St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church, January 14, 1963.
St. Francis de Sales was formally dedicated and opened for worship on November 12, 1911. Originally consisting of about 600 families, the parish swelled to 1,500 by the mid-1920s. Pastor Michael Crane’s power and influence grew so great in the Philadelphia archdiocese that in the early 1920s Pope Benedict XV elevated him monsignor to auxiliary bishop, or assistant to the Cardinal, which made his church into a cathedral (Latin for “throne of the bishop”). He died at the St. Francis de Sales rectory in 1928, but his chair remains in the sanctuary to this day. In the ensuing decades, St. Francis de Sales served not just the neighborhood, but also the students of the nearby universities such as the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the University of the Sciences.
Dagit, who lived only a few blocks away from his masterpiece, was the founder of an architectural dynasty. His sons continued designing churches under the moniker of Henry Dagit & Sons, and his grandson Charles Dagit Jr. studied at the University of Pennsylvania under Louis Kahn before starting his own successful firm of Dagit-Saylor. Shortly before his death in 1929, the Dagit patriarch designed another West Philadelphia church, the Church of the Transfiguration at 55th Street and Cedar Avenue, also inspired by the Byzantine style. “Aided by a large corps of draughtsman, artists, and engineers in his office,” the firm’s brochure stated, “no detail has been slighted, and the entire work has been pushed with a promptness that has delighted both pastor and congregation, who take great pleasure in saying, ‘Well done!'” Membership in St. Francis de Sales parish became a Dagit family tradition: generations of the architect’s descendants were baptized and married under its honey-hued tiled dome.
The dome of St. Francis de Sales. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
Yet like so many other grand liturgical structures in urban areas, by the second half of the twentieth century it began to suffer from years of deferred maintenance, especially as the congregation shrank in the 1970s and 80s. The grand dome leaked almost as soon as the building was consecrated, and the dripping water caused salt to leach out of the sanctuary walls. In more recent years, vandals spray-painted the facade with graffiti, including the statue of St. Francis de Sales, which was taken down and lent to another parish for safekeeping. In the late sixties spirit of Vatican II, the parish commissioned postmodern architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to design a modern Plexiglas altar and neon lighting system. The outcry among the congregation was so great that it was taken down within a few years. The architects were furious. “It was like watching your child die and not being anything to do about it,” steamed Scott Brown. The original gilt-and-marble main altar donated by James Cooney was restored to its former grandeur, and is still in use today.
A decade ago, the parish faced a true emergency: the facade had pulled eight inches away from the main structure of the church. Without any intervention, the front of the church was in imminent danger of collapsing onto Springfield Avenue, taking the two towers with it. To fund these emergency repairs, the Archdiocese made the tough decision to close another West Philadelphia parish: the Most Blessed Sacrament at 56th and Chester Avenue. According to Michael Nevadomski, sacristan at St. Francis de Sales, the sale of MBS and its attached school (once advertised as the largest Roman Catholic school in the world) raised $1.2 million, much of which went to pay for the urgent restoration needs of St. Francis de Sales. Workers erected scaffolding in front of the facade and meticulously removed and replaced each of the stones. The bas-relief of the Virgin Mary above the west doors is still undergoing restoration and sits under protective wraps.
South doors of St. Francis de Sales. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
Today, although it has only has about 500 registered parishioners, St. Francis de Sales reflects the diversity of its West Philadelphia neighborhood. There are masses in Vietnamese and Spanish, as well as traditional and “charismatic” services. Its parochial school is one of the best and most affordable educational options in the Cedar Park area. Restoration of St. Francis de Sales continues “on a shoestring budget” notes Nevadomski, but the most serious structural repairs are over, ensuring that the gold-and-pearl Byzantine dome will gleam over the rooftops of West Philadelphia for decades to come.
Sources:
Ron Avery, “Their Tradition Is Built to Last Dagits: A Family of Architecture,” The Philadelphia Daily News, October 30, 1995. http://articles.philly.com/1995-10-30/news/25693182_1_philadelphia-architects-catholic-church-sons
1890-2015, St. Francis de Sales Parish, United by the Most Blessed Sacrament, pp.10, 12, 14, collection of St. Francis de Sales Parish, courtesy of Michael Nevadomski.
Henry D. Dagit, Architect, collection of Paul H. Rogers, p.43.
Interview of Michael Nevadomski, Sacristan, St. Francis de Sales Church, September 6, 2016.
St. Francis de Sales, 47th Street and Springfield Avenue, January 14, 1963.
Note: the original article published on September 16, 2016 has been recently updated with new information provided by Michelle Dooley and the St. Francis de Sales History Committee.
n 1980, Eugene Ormandy was ready to retire from his long tenure as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. For one of his last recordings with the “Fabulous Philadelphians,” the octogenarian conductor chose a rendition of the Symphony #3 (Organ) by Camille Saint-Saëns, with Michael Murray as organist, to be recorded on the Telarc label.
A great organ symphony needs a great organ! Michael Murray recalled that “the Telarc folks and I visited half a dozen churches in the Philadelphia area to try out organs, before settling on the St. Francis de Sales instrument.”
St. Francis de Sales at 47th and Springfield Avenue had the second largest pipe organ in the Delaware Valley, surpassed only by the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in Center City, arguably the largest musical instrument in the world. The Haskell/Schultz instrument was also of the 19th century French type, which made it well suited to the flamboyant French Romantic repertoire of Saint-Saens and his contemporaries.
It took several days for parish organist Bruce Shultz and assistants to prepare the instrument to Ormandy’s specifications, since Ormandy preferred a higher-than-usual “442 pitch to make the sound brighter.” The police closed the surrounding streets during the recording so that the “Fabulous Philadelphians” could work their magic without the distraction of honking cars and squealing trolleys in the background.
This was only one of many times in its long history, that this grand church has had a moment of fame.
St. Francis de Sales parish was established by Archbishop Ryan on May 14, 1890 to serve a community comprised mostly of Irish and German immigrants seeking a foothold in what was then suburban West Philadelphia. The first masses were held in a rented hall above a store at 49th and Woodland. The first building, a combination chapel/school (today’s SFDS school auditorium) was constructed on a portion of the property at 47th and Springfield Avenue in 1891.
The parish’s second pastor, Rev. Michael J. Crane, declared that he would like to build a permanent church where “the soul would be lifted up to exultation; an edifice in which the liturgy would be carried out in all its mystical beauty.” In 1907 Archbishop Edmond Francis Prendergast laid the cornerstone for the new building.
Designed by prominent local architect Henry Dandurand Dagit (1865-1929), the “Byzantine Romanesque,” (also called “Byzantine Revival”) structure took four years to complete. Rafael Guastavino designed and built its imposing domes using his own patented system of interlocking tile and special mortar that did not require internal bracing. (Only 600 Guastavino structures are known to exist, and they are much prized. The Penn Museum and Girard Bank-Ritz Carlton Hotel are the other two Philadelphia examples). The four rose windows and six long windows in the church were one of renowned Philadelphia stained glass artisan Nicholas D’Ascenzo’s first big commissions.
St. Francis de Sales was arguably Dagit’s crowning achievement. He lavished uncommon care on its design and construction, in no small part because. he lived at 4527 Pine Street, and this was his family’s parish. He even commissioned statues of his daughters as “angels” to decorate the interior.
Although well-versed in historic styles, Dagit wanted to give a modern twist to his churches. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, French catholic architects were promoting a “Byzantine-Romanesque” style, with domes and rounded arches, to differentiate from angular pointy protestant gothic. This must have seemed to Dagit like the perfect historic inspiration for a church whose patron saint, Francis de Sales, was French. Along with the traditional glass mosaics and marble statuary, Dagit added modern touches such as rows of electric light bulbs along the cornices and archways and the self-supporting Guastavino dome which eliminated the need flor view-obstructing interior support pillars.
The original boundaries of St. Francis de Sales stretched from the Schuylkill River at 42nd Street over to Locust Street, up to 55th street and back to the River with a jog to 58th street from Baltimore Ave. Among the contributors to the new building was James Cooney, who donated the main altar. He lived at 4814 Regent St., owned a fleet of oyster schooners on the Delaware Bay, and also had an oyster-selling business downtown at 116 Spruce Street. Jean-Baptiste Revelli, who lived at 4609 Cedar Avenue, donated funds for one of the long stained glass windows. Known as “Baptiste,” the Assistant Manager and Maitre d’Hotel of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel was a celebrated personality, whose address book included many world leaders and international celebrities and whose “ideas as regards table decorations have won him worldwide fame.” The St. Joseph Altar was donated in memory of the deceased wife of James P. “Sunny Jim” McNichol, a prominent Philadelphia politician and also half-owner of the construction firm that built the Market Street subway tunnel, Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and Roosevelt Boulevard.(McNichol’s adult children lived on the newly-constructed 4600 and 4700 blocks of Hazel Ave.). Eleanor Donnelly, known as the “Poet Laureate of the Catholic Church” in America donated the Blessed Mother altar to memorialize her deceased family (including her brother Ignatius, a Minnesota senator who taught her to write poetry as a child, and who is remembered today as the author of Atlantis: the Antidiluvian Age – a seminal classic of Lost-City-of-Atlantis lore). General St. Clair Mulholland, an Irish-American Civil War veteran and first Catholic police chief of Philadelphia, who resided at 4202 Chester Avenue, donated one of the dome windows.
Not all of the parishioners were colorful, wealthy or well-known: many were tradespeople, shopkeepers, and office workers. There were also a number of Irish immigrant servants who helped with the cooking and cleaning in the neighborhood’s big houses. Apart from religious affiliation, what did they all have in common? An appreciation of beauty, an attachment to history, and a strong musical sense – qualities that continue in today’s richly diverse parish.
The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, 1904.
After facing decades of discrimination and violence, by the early 1900s Philadelphia’s burgeoning Roman Catholic population had truly arrived in terms of power and influence. St. Francis de Sales was the brick-and-mortar manifestation of a Gilded Age confidence. The human manifestation of this spirit was Pastor Michael J. Crane (1863-1928), who spearheaded the construction of this magnificent church soon after he took charge of the parish. Crane knew Dagit’s work well: he had assisted at St. Malachy’s Church in NE Philadelphia, during its renovation by Dagit in the distinctive Byzantine revival style. An imposing, dark-haired man with bushy eyebrows and a piercing gaze, Crane insisted that no expense would be spared on his new church. Henry Dagit described the plans: “The design is Romanesque with Byzantine details.The exterior will be of marble with Indiana limestone trimmings…On either side of the main doorway will be two corner towers with large doorways flanked by polished granite columns…These towers will rise to a height of ninety-seven feet and will be surmounted by domes covered with tiles in Byzantine designs. The main feature of the design is a Byzantine dome resting on the four great arches and pendentives of the nave transepts…The dome will be sixty-two feet in diameter…The interior of the church will be imposing. The nave will be vaulted with faience polychrome sculptured terra cotta arches, on which will rest the Gaustavino (sic) vaults.” Dagit further described an elaborate ornamentation and sculpture plan for the interior including a glass mosaic under the rose window, and mosaic emblems of the four evangelists above the main crossing. Many of the interior details changed by the time the church was finished but the Guastavino dome continues to be a distinctive feature of the local skyline.
To be continued…
For a look into the life of the MacMurtrie family and St. Francis de Sales Parish in the 1920s, click here for a PhillyHistory.org article dated June 28, 2010.
1890-2015, St. Francis de Sales Parish, United by the Most Blessed Sacrament, pp.10, 12, 14, collection of St. Francis de Sales Parish, courtesy of Michael Nevadomski.
Henry D. Dagit, Architect, collection of Paul H. Rogers, p.43.
Interview of Michael Nevadomski, Sacristan, St. Francis de Sales Church, September 6, 2016.
Additional Sources provided by Michelle Dooley and the SFDS History Committee:
Boudinhon, Auguste. “Cathedral.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. Web. 21 Dec. 2017 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03438a.htm>
Catholic Church. Archdiocese of Philadelphia (Pa.), and Philip G. Bochanski. Our Faith-filled Heritage: The Church of Philadelphia Bicentennial As a Diocese 1808-2008 / Prepared By the Archdiocese of Philadelphia ; Father Philip G. Bochanski, General Editor. Strasbourg: Éditions du Signe, 2007. 62—123, 178-181. Print
Dagit, Henry D. The Work of Henry D. Dagit: Architect, 1888-1908. Philadelphia : Henry D. Dagit, 1908. 42-45. Digital Library@Villanova University.41-44
Farnsworth, Jean M., Carmen R Croce, and Joseph F Chorpenning. Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2002. Print.
Moss, Roger W. Historic Sacred Places Of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 222-227. Print
Saint Francis de Sales Church. 1890-2015 St. Francis de Sales Parish, United by the Most Blessed Sacrament 125th Anniversary; St. Francis de Sales History Committee. 6-13, 43, 49. Print.
Saint Francis de Sales History Committee. SFDS History Mysteries. Saint Francis de Sales Parish. 2018. Web. https://SFDShistory.wordpress.com
Stemp, Richard. The Secret Language of Churches & Cathedrals: Decoding the Sacred Symbolism of Christianity’s Holy Buildings. London, U.K. : New York, NY: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2010. Print.
John B. Thayer Jr. (highlighted in white) in the c.1916 group portrait of the University of Pennsylvania soccer team. Source: PennHistory.
“There was peace and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub it’s eyes and awake, but woke it with a start – keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since, with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.” -John B. Thayer III, 1940
John B. “Jack” Thayer III seemed to have everything a successful Philadelphian could want. He was the son of the second vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and educated at the Haverford School and the University of Pennsylvania. He was married to Lois Buchanan Cassatt, granddaughter of Pennsy’s president Alexander Cassatt, the mastermind of New York’s Penn Station. After graduating from college in 1916, Thayer served his country with distinction in World War I, and then worked in a series of investment jobs until he became partner in the investment firm of Yarnall & Company. In addition to serving his alma mater as its financial vice president, he also belonged to numerous clubs and societies.
Dr. Thomas Sovereign Gates, president of the University, called him a “loyal and trusted servant.”
Undated photograph of Houston Hall, the student union at the University of Pennsylvania, 3400 block of Spruce Street. undated. A memorial plaque to John B. Thayer Jr. was placed here by his friends from the class of 1880.
Yet even as America celebrated victory over the Axis in that joyous summer of 1945, a dark cloud seemed to be enveloping the 50-year-old banker. His beloved mother Marian had died the previous April. His 22-year-old son Edward had been shot down over the Pacific a year before that.
And then there was the ever-present ghost of his father John B. Thayer Jr., whose legacy as railroad executive and sportsman was memorialized on a plaque in Penn’s Houston Hall.
Jack Thayer had spent the past three decades searching for peace. And he found none.
On September 19, 1945, Thayer drove from his elegant home in Grays Lane in Haverford to the intersection of 48th and Parkside Avenue, parked his car, took out several wrapped blades, and slit his wrists. Then his throat.
The 4900 block of Parkside on July 2, 1954, near the spot where Jack Thayer committed suicide a decade earler.
His body was not discovered for another forty hours.
John B. “Jack” Thayer III left behind a book he had printed privately a few years earlier and inscribed to his friends and family.
***
On the early morning of April 15, 1912, 17-year-old Jack Thayer and his friend Milton Long found themselves stranded on the sloping decks of the RMS Titanic. Two hours after the ship’s collision with the iceberg, the Titanic was down by the bow and listing heavily to port. There had been no general alarm or sirens.
The Titanic’s giant engines had stopped shortly after 11:40pm. “The sudden quiet was startling and disturbing,” Thayer recalled. “Like the subdued quiet in a sleeping car, at a stop, after a continuous run.”
Then came the roar of escaping steam from the ship’s 29 boilers, and an occassional white rocket bursting in the night sky.
The two young men found themselves blocked from entering the lifeboats: “No more boys,” barked Second Officer Charles Lightoller. In the distance, they saw flickering oil lamps coming from the 18 lifeboats that had made it off the ship. Jack’s mother Marian was in one of them. The freezing cold Atlantic rose ever closer to the boat deck. Lights from submerged portholes glowed green for a while in the black water before shorting out. Atop the officers’ quarters, a group of men struggled to free two collapsible liferafts lashed to the deck. There was no hope of hooking them onto the davits and lowering them properly: they would have be floated off as the ship went down.
The “a la carte” restaurant on the RMS “Titanic.” First class diners who chose this 120-seat restaurant over the 500-seat main dining room paid extra for the privilege of eating here. Source: Wikipedia.com.
“Mr. Moon-Man, Turn off the Light,” a popular song from Jack Thayer’s childhood that was almost certainly part of theTitanic band’s repertoire. From the 1979 film SOS Titanic.
Marian Longstreth Thayer. Source: Wikipedia.com.
A few minutes after 2:05am, first class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, who had helped women and children into the lifeboats for the past hour, was surprised to see a “mass of humanity” come up from below, “several lines deep converging on the Boat Deck facing us and completely blocking our passage to the stern. There were women in the crowd as well as men and these seemed to be steerage passengers who had just come up from the decks below. Even among these people there was no hysterical cry, no evidence of panic. Oh the agony of it.”
First and second class passengers had access to lifeboats from their deck spaces. But not steerage — they had been kept below until now. Except for those lucky enough to find their way through a maze of barriers and corridors to the boat deck level.
Gracie also noticed John B. Thayer Jr. chatting on deck with his fellow Philadelphia millionaire George D. Widener, whose wife Eleanor had also left in a boat. Only a few hours earlier, the Widener and Thayer families had hosted a celebratory dinner in Titanic’s captain Edward J. Smith honor in the ship’s 120-seat a la carte restaurant on B-deck. Gracie remembered that the elder Thayer looked “pale and determined.”
John Borland Thayer Jr., Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Source: Wikipedia.com.
Jack Thayer lost his father in the milling crowd, which after realizing all the boats were gone, began to surge with panic.
At around 2:10am, the liner’s bow took a rapid plunge downward, as seawater burst through cargo hatches, doors, and windows.
“It was like standing under a steel railway bridge while an express train passes overhead,” he recalled of being stuck on the sinking ship, “mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of china.
Milton Long got ready to slide down the side of the ship by using one of the dangling lifeboat ropes. “You are coming, boy, aren’t you?” Long said.
“Go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute.” Thayer responded above the din.
Long slid down the rope. Thayer jumped. “I never saw him again.”
Thrashing around in freezing water, Thayer could see the ship in full profile as it sank deeper into the Atlantic.
“The ship seemed to be surrounded with a glare,” he recalled, “and stood out of the night as though she were on fire…. The water was over the base of the first funnel. The mass of people on board were surging back, always back toward the floating stern. The rumble and roar continued, with even louder distinct wrenchings and tearings of boilers and engines from their beds.”
The Titanic’s electric lights flickered out, came on again with red glow, and then went out for the last time.
Then he saw something even more terrifying: the ship breaking in half. “Suddenly the whole superstructure of the ship appeared to split, well forward to midship, and bow or buckle upwards,” he recalled. “The second funnel, large enough for two automobiles to pass through abreast, seemed to be lifted off, emitting a cloud of sparks It looked as if it would fall on top of me. It missed me by only twenty or thirty feet. The suction of it drew me down and down struggling and swimming, practically spent.”
The water began to numb his limbs, and he looked desperately for something that could support him. Everything was too small: deck chairs, crates, broken pieces of paneling. He then banged his head on something big. It was one of the two collapsible lifeboats, overturned, with about a dozen men scrambling to stay balanced on its wood-planked bottom. With his last bit of strength, he swam for the boat and hauled himself on top.
Jack Thayer’s sketch of how he saw the “Titanic” sink. Source: Wikipedia.com.
He couldn’t just lie there. To keep the boat from sinking, the men had to stand up, leaning to the right and left at the command of Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the same man who had said no more boys were allowed to board lifeboats. Also onboard was Colonel Archibald Gracie. As cold and frightened as he was, Jack did not turn his eyes away from the spectacle. “We could see groups of the almost 1,500 people still aboard,” he wrote later, “clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, 250 feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a 65- or 70-degree angle.”
When the water closed over the Titanic’s stern–at 2:20am, April 15, 1912–Thayer heard a noise that rang in his ears for the rest of his life.
The sound of hundreds of people struggling in the icy water reminded him eerily of the sound of singing locusts on a summer night at the Thayer family estate on the Main Line. “The partially filled lifeboats standing by, only a few hundred yards away, never came back,” he wrote angrily. “Why on earth they did not come back is a mystery. How could any human being fail to heed those cries?”
Among those voices that cried out in rage and desperation in that mid-Atlantic night were those belonging to his father John Borland Thayer Jr., as well as his friend Milton Long. Over the next thirty minutes, the cries gradually grew fainter and fainter, until there was only the sound of water lapping against the sides of the collapsible boat.
At around 6:30am, the first pink light of dawn shone across the flat calm ocean. Icebergs glittered all around. One of the partially-filled lifeboats drew up alongside the overturned collapsible. One by one, the men who had survived those awful few hours atop the boat scrambled aboard. Most of the 20 or so of his boatmates were crew members. Thayer, the pampered scion of one of Philadelphia’s richest families, realized how little those distinctions mattered atop Collapsible B. “They surely were a grimy, wiry, dishevelled, hard-looking lot,” he wrote of the men who had shoveled coal into the steamship’s boilers, seven decks below the paneled salons and suites of first class. “Under the surface they were brave human beings, with generous and charitable hearts.”
With the dawn came another sight: the smoking funnel of the small Cunard liner RMS Carpathia, whose master Arthur Rostron had steamed full-speed through the icefield after his wireless operator had picked up Titanic’s radio distress call. She came a few hours too late to save everyone from the Titanic, but soon enough to pick up the 705 people who had made it into lifeboats.
“Even through my numbness I began to realize that I was saved,” Thayer wrote in his book, “that I would live.”
John B. “Jack” Thayer III. Source: Wikipedia.com.
Sources:
Archibald Gracie, Titanic: A Survivor’s Story (Stroud, UK, 2011), p.30.
“John B. Thayer 3d Found Dead in Car,” The New York Times, September 22, 1945.
Rendering of Central High School’s Logan Campus at W. Olney and Ogontz Avenues, May 21, 1937.
This past January, I spent an hour speaking with Ron Donatucci, a native South Philadelphian and long-time Register of Wills. He has been a fixture at City Hall for the past three thirty-five years. Before that, he was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, a Democratic ward leader, and a lawyer in private practice. He also serves on the Board of Directors of City Trusts, and Temple University’s Board of Trustees, the board of Girard College, and Wills Eye Hospital.He was childhood friends with the attorney Frank DeSimone, who I interviewed for a previous piece for PhillyHistory.
When asked what he felt was the most formative experience of his childhood, he replied that it was his three years at Central High School in the mid-1960s.
For Ron Donatucci, asking, “What class were you in?” is his version of the classic Philadelphia question, “Where are you from?”
He grew up in the Girard Estates section of South Philadelphia, a comfortable enclave of 1920s Tudor and Spanish revival homes within the boundaries of St. Monica’s Parish. With a few, mainly Jewish exceptions, the Girard Estates neighborhood was Italian-American and devoutly Catholic, mostly second and third generation Americans who had become doctors, lawyers, and small business owners. Donatucci’s father, an old school “Roosevelt Democrat” and local ward leader, ran a successful plumbling supply business.
After attending the local parish school at 18th and Ritner, Donatucci went to Bishop Neumann High School for a year. He then tested into Central’s 224th class, and joined about 15 other neighborhood kids who got on the Broad Street subway each morning to the Logan campus.
Donatucci remembered going up to his English teacher, Dr. Logan, saying, “I’m new here. How many books do we need to read.”
“One book a week,” Logan responded.
Outside of the guidance counselor’s office, Donatucci saw a boy sitting on the floor looking bereft.
“I screwed up,” he muttered sadly. “I got a 1590.”
“You screwed up?” Donatucci replied with amazement over his fellow student’s almost perfect SAT score.
The Central High School of the 1960s took Philadelphia’s smartest boys out of their neighborhood and parish schools and threw them together in a rigorous, competitive environment.
“All of the sudden, I was in a high school that was predominately Jewish.” Donatucci remembered. “These were the students that wanted to pursue an education that was free, and the type of competition was scary.” Among the future stars in Donatucci’s 224th class was Raymond Joseph Teller of the magician duo Penn and Teller. In 1964, the school newspapers reported that Central’s 224th class boasted more National Merit Semi-Finalists than any other school in the country. At Neumann, he said that he would study about two hours a day after class let out. At Central, he upped his study time to six.
The all-boys experience was a critical part of the Central experience. “We weren’t distracted,” he claimed. So was meeting people of different ethnicities. At lunchtime, people tended to separate into their neighborhood ethnic groups: African-Americans, Jews, Italians, and Ukrainians. “The guys from South Philly would sit at the same table,” he said. Yet the cultural exchange continued with swapping lunches. “I would give them pepper and egg sandwiches,” he said. “The Jewish kids would bring in blintzes. The Ukranians brought in perogis.”
He often found himself at the homes of his Jewish friends for the High Holidays. When describing Jewish and Italian culture, he said, “They are so similar.” He joked that his Jewish name was “Ronny Dumberg.”
Donatucci graduated from Temple University in 1970, and aside from a stint in Baltimore for law school, has remained in Philadelphia ever since. His two sons did not follow him to Central: they went to St. Joseph’s Preparatory instead, which remains an all-boys school, unlike his now-coed alma mater. Yet he still remains on the Central board of managers. “I’ve met guys in Central who are my friends today,” he said. “It’s such a great feeling when you’re talking to someone and you ask, ‘What class are you in?'”
Central High School under construction, August 25, 1938.
