The school’s mission was established decades before my class ever saw the old brick buildings. MSN had a reputation for taking all kinds of kids and making something out of them. It was a “no child left behind” or in the case of problem students a “no child left with a behind” philosophy. Most educators today would say that the methods used were certainly primitive by modern standards. Most MSM teachers had their own unique creative method of cruel and unusual punishment to foster discipline. It seemed to us that they dealt corporal punishment out unmercifully. But, for us, taking such medicine was a test of manhood that we were certainly willing to take. Like our dads, older brothers, and uncles, we wanted to make the grade more than anything else. We wanted to become men of Mount Saint Mary’s. The discipline methods were not just part of the school tradition; they were also a reason why parents were sending their kids to the school in the first place. If a parent didn’t know their kids would face such methods, they hadn’t done their homework.
While Catholics everywhere like to talk about how brutal the priests and nuns could be in the schools, in my experience it was the lay teachers who dished out the corporal punishment en masse. Most of the priests were much more kind and forgiving than the lay teachers. Nevertheless, each teacher whether lay or religious had his own unique persona with special stories that would become the living lore of the school.
Our Math teacher had the "Sabre," a narrow but thick black belt that he could wield like a Sword. His name was Karonska; we called him the Cossack. The Cossack sported a short military crew cut and was lean and angular with dark eyes and a long pointed nose. He looked like a Russian warrior and everything about him was no nonsense. He typically wore warn black leather oxford shoes polished to a spit shine. He perpetually sported black dress pants, a white cotton dress shirt and a dark colored tie. He never wore anything with stripes, dots, checks or patterns of any kind. His favorite colors were black and white. He was in his fifties, but he worked out every day with many of the other teachers and was in great shape. The Cossack was well-liked and good speaker, but he could be one mean guy when pushed. He seldom needed to use the "Sabre", but when he did, he was merciless.
In class one day an unorganized and undisciplined John Amoto was explaining to Mr. Karonska that his sister must have mixed up his homework with her stuff and taken it to her school. Suddenly the Cossack says, "hush! I think I hear your sister out in the hall. Why don't you go out and see if she has brought it for you?" John ominously walks out to the hall closely followed by Karonska who taking the “Sabre" off his pants. We heard the “Whack, whack, whack, whack” echo out in the hall. Back into the room walks Amoto bleary eyed and red faced.
Karonska announces, "Well John couldn't seem to find anything today so I helped him find his “behind.” Does anyone else need some help?" Needless to say, very few homework assignments were missed in Mr. Karonska's class.
Our Civics teacher had a sawed off wooden canoe paddle that he used to whack insubordinates. You would have thought that a paddle of that size would have been intimidating enough, but he drilled holes into the blade to cut wind resistance. His name was Jerry Patrick, we called him "Geriatric" because of his white hair. He was far from feeble though as he swung that paddle about as well as any member of the Oxford rowing team. He called the punishment he doled out “nautical nourishment.” We called it "ouch".
Another teacher, who taught science, was particularly menacing. He rigged up an electric chair in one of the labs. If he was particularly angry at someone he would have them sit down and put a few volts through their body. His name was Edward Sandals and we called him "Electric Eddie" or at times the more formal, "Commonwealth Edward." The electric chair, it turned out, had little current to it, but Eddie had it rigged up with extra wire and metal spools to make it look very nasty indeed.
Father Franz Stroussel was the Freshman Latin Teacher and although he was old and sickly, he was an institution at Mount Saint Mary's. A larger than life figure, Father Stroussel had taught students' fathers, uncles and older brothers. He was a tough old German priest who wore the full cassock or long brown robe worn by the more traditional minded Mount Saint Mary priests.
In grade school when the boys had an older nun for a teacher, some of the kids would victimize the poor lady to distraction. There were famous incidents in our grade school where the harassed teacher would leave the room in distress and return with an aspergillum, which is a device that the priest holds to sprinkle holy water to the congregation at times. She would stand at the front of the room and flail away with the device desperate to try to exorcise the demons present. Despite his advanced age, this was not going to happen with Father Franz. He knew his place as master of the class and he was going to make sure we understood ours.
Latin is a dead language, and the reason why it’s a dead language is not because it is no longer spoken, but because it is difficult and most current schools reserve the difficult for Math and Science, not language. In Latin, every word can have many different endings depending upon how it is used in a sentence. Such things as declensions and verb conjugations all must be understood and remembered. Working with Latin successfully means you must master a moving target of verb and noun endings along with grammar and vocabulary.
Before getting to the difficult study of Latin, Father Franz would begin each class with a lecture on his own personal beliefs. From Father Franz we learned that shoes and a good haircut made the man. The more ethnic you were, the more he liked you and that family was all-important. So if you never shined your shoes, your hair was a little long, you had a common American name and he didn't know anyone with your last name from the annals of Mount St Mary past, you were in trouble. On the other hand, if your name was O'Shannon or Flipovich, you had slick close cropped hair, a good pair of shoes and a father that he taught 30 years ago, you were in great shape.
Father Franz had a stout round dowel of wood that looked something like a drumstick that he kept with him at all times. He told us this was the "good wood" and he used it to emphasize points to our posteriors. He spoke with a slight German accent in a calm nasally tone.
His class consisted of constant quizzes on vocabulary and going over our translation homework on the black board. If you were having a difficult time with your board work, Father would come up behind you, grip your pants and pull them high ala a “wedgie” and then give you a few good whacks on the backside. For onlookers it was a very comedic sight, but for those who felt the good wood -- well, you got the message although it was not rip-roaring pain.
I struggled with Latin and although I loved the subject, it didn't come easy and I dreaded Father Franz's class. He was not the same teacher that he had been in his prime and at times he lost his composure. One day while I was at the board, I made a great error in a translation. The good priest tried to straighten my Latin translation out, gave up and then let the good wood do its work. I nervously smirked when he was administering the punishment and he got very angry at me. He dropped the good wood and slapped me a few times for good measure saying: "Here’s something to tell your grandmother!" In most of the classes if a teacher whacked you, it was something of a badge of courage to have survived it. That was not the case with Father Franz – most of us who got whacked were more concerned about the old boy’s stamina than about our posteriors. Father Franz gave us a sense of what the old days may have been like decades before we came to Saint Mary’s. Like other experiences, we took it in and processed it as part of the whole Mount Saint Mary education.
Copyright 2012, Lawrence M. Norris
