Dirt Farmer's Son. Terry A. Maurer
didn’t feel like the needed big brother.
A typical day at the Hall of the Divine Child was to be up at 7:00 a.m., awakened by reveille, always reveille. Head to the bathroom and sink areas. Each class had its own sink area with probably forty sinks. Every other day, it was to the chapel for mass; Fr. Stanley Bowers was our chaplain for all of my six years at HDC. He was an ex-boxer, either college, military, or pro, I never found out. We knew we didn’t want to be on the wrong side of Father Bowers. He was the ultimate disciplinarian. Much later, sometime in the mid-’60s through the eighties, Father Bowers was the pastor at a church in Dundee, Michigan, and became friends with my future wife’s cousin, Bob Miller, pastor for the local Lutheran church in the same town. Pastor Robert J. Miller wrote a book about his time as a missionary in Ethiopia, Tales of Tchinia: Two Families in Ethiopia.
One time when our seventh-grade class was in chapel for our biweekly mandatory confessions, the entire class (forty students) were on our knees examining our conscience in preparation for our turns in the confessional box with Father Bowers. We heard Father Bowers exclaim from the dark confessional box “You did what!” as he slammed the privacy door. Immediately all forty heads turned to the right to see who it was that could provoke such a response. Then Regelski came out and with head down, trying to look invisible as he made his way up the side aisle toward the front of the chapel where we’d normally say our penance. I’m sure we all saw who it was and prayed that our sins would not get the same response from Father Bowers.
There was a book, at least a manuscript written about Father Bowers and the Hall of the Divine Child by my classmate, Dennis McIntyre. I know that because Dennis let me read the manuscript when I met him, Mike Sweeney, and Paul Ewing at the University of Michigan in 1964. McIntyre won the prestigious Hopwood Award for Literature that year at the University of Michigan. Dennis later went to New York and had a very successful career as a playwright. Probably his most successful play was Split Second, which appeared in a theater just off-Broadway. I was in New York when it was playing, but I am sorry to say that I couldn’t get a ticket. National Anthems, Modigliani, Children in the Rain, and Established Price are other plays by Dennis McIntyre.
McIntyre died of stomach cancer in 1990, I spoke to him on the phone a few weeks before the end. Dennis told me that he had a new play for which Al Pacino was considering taking the lead role. McIntyre said to me, “If Pacino takes it, I could make a million dollars, but Terry I won’t live long enough to know.” Paul Ewing has his manuscript about the Hall of the Divine Child, entitled “The Divine Child,” and it remains unpublished to this day.
Following chapel, it was to the refectory for breakfast. We always had plenty to eat and usually a good choice. Then it was morning classes, lunch, and afternoon classes followed by probably two hours of free outdoor recreation. We could play any type of ball. I usually played whatever was in season. It seemed that most of the students played ball. We would have baseball, soccer, and basketball, and even handball courts were available. I didn’t play much handball. In the spring it was marbles and kites. I was definitely the “king” of marbles in my seventh- and eighth-grade years. Some students and I were few of those who would be a merchant or vendor. Here’s the deal: The vendors would make a hole in the ground, say six to ten inches deep and wide, then place a boulder or several “desirable” marbles in front of the hole, just close enough to the hole, so that when the players (the richer kids whose parents could buy them lots of shooter marbles) started throwing their marbles at my prize marbles from behind a line in the sand, they would win the big marble when they knocked it in the hole. The vendor (myself) got to keep all the marbles being thrown. Sometimes you’d have three or four boys firing their marbles at the same time. You could win lots of marbles. I still have many of my winnings some sixty years later.
My little brother, Louie, played with my winnings with our Leonard cousins back on the farm in Roscommon. Naturally, some marbles were lost. I found some in the chicken yard. Louie, who was born in 1951, was not sent to the boarding school. He was conceived on the recommendation of my grandma Cherven. I heard my mom complaining to her about Tony and me being sent to Monroe. I heard my grandmom tell my mom, “Well, just make another baby!”
I think I was present at my little brother’s conception. It happened one night when I decided to scare my parents by holding up my glow in the dark coonskin cap from under their bed. Our parents had gotten Tony and I both Daniel Boon–style coonskin caps for Christmas in 1950, the ones with glow in the dark eyes in the front. If you held them near a lightbulb for a while, the glowing would become quite bright and last for twenty to thirty minutes. So after charging up my cap, I crawled from my bedroom to Mom and Dad’s room, hiding under their bed, waiting for them to come upstairs. Well, I didn’t wait long before they were in bed, and I could tell by the commotion that Dad was getting frisky. I didn’t expect anything like that, but I had invested considerable time getting ready to scare them with the glowing eyes, so I made my move before I thought the old swayed bed would come down on me.
When I raised the coonskin cap up over the side of the bed, right over as it turned out, my mom’s head, my mom shrieked, “Bernie, I’m seeing stars!”
My dad said, thinking he was doing a good job, “That’s all right, Pauline.’’
She continued, “No, I really am seeing stars.”
I figured my job was done and quickly crawled back to my room before being discovered. I never had the courage to ask either Mom or Dad about that night. Louie was born on October 14, 1951.
Back to the schedule, following the recreation period, it was time to clean up for dinner (supper in those days). I learned that farm people like me had dinner and supper and city people had lunch and dinner. Then another ninety minutes of study before taps, and the cycle started again. Saturdays and Sundays were different. Most of Saturday was free recreation time. In winter we could ice skate at the pond. There was always a hockey game going on at the far end. James Benso was the best goalie. He had all the equipment, and Paul Ewing was the best center. He could score at will, stick-handling the puck all the way down the ice. I am sure the great Wayne Gretzky was no better than Ewing at thirteen to fourteen years old.
When I was in third grade, I must have been cute because one of my classmates’ sister from St. Mary’s, the adjacent girls’ academy, chased me down on the ice, knocked me down, jumped on top of me and proceeded to kiss me repeatedly while our third-grade nun stood nearby, watching with a smile on her face. I was helpless because my classmates held me down for the duration. The girl, maybe it was Linda Wells, broke a serious rule on the pond: boys on one side and girls on the other and rarely was that rule ever broken. The nuns usually strictly enforced it.
Sundays were always special days. For one thing, we had a full-length current movie every Sunday evening. One movie I do remember was The Long Gray Line about a boy in military school who got into trouble for contacting a girl at the nearby girls’ academy, reported on himself, and was expelled. After seeing the movie, my good friend, Eugene Willis, reported on himself for doing the exact same thing and was expelled from the Hall just before eighth-grade graduation. There is a picture of me and Willis in our football uniform in this chapter.
Also, in late morning, it was a full military review in our dress uniforms. There was usually a white-glove inspection of our lockers by the military commandant. He would usually reach into the highest shelf, running his gloved finger across the full length of the shelf. Any sign of dust would be serious demerits, maybe enough to cause a student to lose movie privileges that night. After inspections and full-dress review came visiting hours from 1:00 p.m. to usually 6:00 p.m.
My parents came to visit Tony and me just once per year; that was on Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day came on the second Sunday in May and was the school’s biggest day of the year, the military review (like the annual tattoo in Edinburgh). Every class, first through the eighth participated in full dress review and marching competition. It took two to three hours of marching and standing at attention before it was over. It was the day for the entire school to show off what we learned about marching. The band was front and center as well as the special drill team with maneuvers with fake rifles. It was in 1954 on Mother’s Day that I was recognized as honor corporal for the entire school. I was chosen as the best corporal out of more than thirty corporals schoolwide.