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CHAPTER 2

In the Beginning

The bed I sleep in today is that in which I was born — as were my sister and six brothers — on May 20, 1913, at 1501 17th Street in Washington, D.C. In those days babies didn’t enter the world for free — but almost, as the doctor charged my parents, Lilian and Patrick Hannan, a mere ten bucks for this momentous, in their opinion, house call. Undoubtedly, it was the same fee they forked over for the arrival of each of their other children: my oldest sister Mary as well as my brothers John, Frank, Bill, Tom, Denis, and Jerry. I came along fifth. Given its familial pedigree, our communal birthing bed hardly needed anything further for me to cherish it as I do. However, in 1987 even that sentimental game got upped when Pope John Paul II slept in it for two nights on his historic visit to New Orleans. (In case anyone gets the urge to have a garage sale one day, I put a plaque on the headboard making that clear.) And though I love my bed, I never spent more time in it than my necessary five or six hours of sleep a night.

Like many of the Irish, we were immigrants. My father, Patrick Francis Hannan — P.F. or “the Boss” — was born on March 8, 1870, to an impoverished family in Kilfinny, County Limerick, a village so small it’s not even on the map. Since his father was sickly, Patrick attended the local school, a thatched building with a sod floor, for only three years before going to work at the nearby estate of the English Lord Adair where future prospects were slim. Indeed, thanks to the area’s English, viciously anti-Catholic landowners, the Irish were legally prohibited from even buying any property — no doubt a driving force prompting my father, at 18, to strike out for America where he subsequently snapped up every piece of land he could lay his hands on.

Patrick Hannan set foot in America on February 29, 1888, just in time for the famously paralyzing blizzard of 1888 (as a result detesting snow for the rest of his life) and signed on as an apprentice plumber for $2.50 per week. Foregoing even streetcar fare by walking three miles to and from work every day, he supported his family on Capitol Hill as well as Ireland on his weekly salary. When he had saved up a modest stake, he went into business on his own — a great success thanks in large part to his philosophy of working hard and saving money.

My mother, Lilian Louise Keefe, born in Washington on August 16, 1881, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant, John Keefe, and a German-descent Lutheran, Louise Kaufman. Three weeks after giving birth, Louise died. Consequently, my mother’s father, a successful saloon owner, agreed to have his new daughter raised by her late mother’s Lutheran family. Their agreement, a written contract, stipulated that though John Keefe would never seek to regain custody of Lilian, even if he remarried, she was nevertheless to be raised a Catholic. As a result, my mother matriculated at the The Immaculate Conception Academy, ate fish every Friday, attended Mass every First Friday, showed up at Mass every Sunday and attended all the parish missions.

The man who raised her — Uncle Charlie Smithson — was the chief mechanic of the Navy Yard who prided himself, even if forced to arise at two, on making it to work by eight, never having been late to work a day in his life. Growing up we were equally devoted to our relatives, both Catholic and Protestant, with whom we shared many similar values. (Citing moral lessons learned from her Lutheran relatives on sexual morality, for instance, my mother remarked: “I was told that it was better to have ten children on your pillow,” she said referring to abortion, “than one on your conscience.”)

My parents were married on June 22, 1905, in Washington’s Immaculate Conception Church. Considering the early 1900s, the Hannans were a typical Irish Catholic family: our parents were devoted to God, each other, and their eight children, stressing the importance of faith, sacrifice, love, and hard work. Mary, the eldest, and only girl, was the family darling. (According to the Boss, Mary’s brilliance, talent, and patience with her unruly brothers were worth at least three boys!) Born on February 25, 1906, Mary weighed only one pound, fourteen ounces. Two months premature, the doctor said there was faint hope that she would survive. But he didn’t know the Boss. Refusing to accept his daughter’s death sentence without a fight, my father, like the plumber he was, rigged up a radiator heating system in her room to serve as an incubator, raising the temperature to eighty degrees. Bringing in goat’s milk to supplement that of my mother, he proved the doctor wrong as Mary got bigger and stronger. A few months later, she was completely out of the woods.

Mary was always a supremely gifted student — beginning in the second grade when she started studying French at the Visitation School, current site of the Mayflower Hotel. Moreover, she was in the vanguard of multitasking, practically raising my youngest brother, Jerry, born in 1922. Sitting on the bottom step of the porch, Mary, crooking a leg around the axle, would rock him to sleep while reading a book and knitting a sweater. Later, after graduating from Trinity College, she became the first laywoman student at Catholic University of America to secure a doctorate, majoring in mathematics, Greek, and Latin. During my seminary years, I leaned a lot on my sister who knew more Latin than most of my professors. When it was time to choose my episcopal motto — “Caritas Vinculum Perfectionis” (“Charity Is the Bond of Perfection”) — I ran it past just one person: Mary liked it, which was good enough for me. From my perspective, if she wasn’t the most wonderful creature God ever made, she was darn close.

Positioned in the middle of seven boys, I was the fourth son. The eldest, John, born in 1907, unfortunately suffered a serious brain injury when he was hit by a truck riding his bicycle — so unnerving our parents that they forbade the rest of us to go anywhere near one. After graduating from high school, John joined my father in the plumbing business. The second son, Frank, born in 1909, graduated from Georgetown Medical School and, following World War II, in thanksgiving for making it out alive, devoted himself to caring for the sick (charging $2 for an office call and $5 for a home visit) with patients ranging from top names in government to anyone who walked in his office door. Bill came along next in 1911, going on to become a prominent D.C. trial lawyer and partner in the law firm of O’Connor and Hannan. Advising me on difficult cases when I was a bishop, Bill refused to take on a divorce — except when I asked that he help a priest who, having married, wished to return to the Church.

Tom followed me in 1915, eventually graduating from Catholic University’s School of Engineering; while Denis, born four years later, was inducted into the Army on the first draft following high school graduation, serving in six major World War II campaigns from North Africa to Italy, including the terrible battles near the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino. Returning home, he went into the rug business, eventually working for the federal government. (Although Denis, Frank, and I all served in the Army during WWII, none of us, by the grace of God, was wounded, with Frank hauling home the best show-and-tell piece: a large chunk of the shell that grazed his helmet.) The youngest Hannan, Jerry, born in 1922, was a brilliant student, speeding through elementary school in six years to graduate from Catholic University’s School of Science. Exempted from the draft to work at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, Jerry spearheaded a study that improved the service life of gun barrels.

Sitting around the dining room table, we joked that we had everything covered but an undertaker.

All the boys in the family attended nearby St. John’s College High School where the Christian Brothers had developed a college-prep curriculum specializing in science and mathematics (four years) and Latin (two years). I even learned how to type — a skill that came in handy later when I got involved in Catholic journalism. I fared well in my studies (was valedictorian) — along with being cadet captain — and at the end of the four years received a scholarship to Catholic University.

Large families naturally develop into sections. In ours, I teamed up with my older brother Bill, who was good-looking, sociable, a great singer, and never bashful or cautious. We often went to parties and dances together, sometimes double dating. One night, after attending an event at St. John’s High School (therefore wearing a cadet corps uniform, gray with scarlet trimming, much like West Point’s), we passed by the Mayflower Hotel where a dance for West Point cadets was in progress. “Our uniforms look just like theirs. Let’s try to get in,” Bill said. Naturally, I tagged along. We made it in until an ominous-looking officer approached and escorted us out. Bill’s advice was not always perfect.

Parents

Despite their opposing temperaments, my parents were extraordinary role models. Lilian, dedicated to Catholicism and education, firmly believed that it was the mother who was responsible for the family’s direction. Not only did she keep the books for the plumbing business, she cooked, sewed, heard our lessons, gathered us for Rosary, and made sure we were never late to serve Mass on the altar at St. Matthew’s. Moreover, she was a gracious hostess, constantly hosting meetings and encouraging women to attend retreats as well as holding dances, since both parents loved to celebrate. (When I was fifteen, declaring it was high time I learned to rhythmically negotiate my feet, she pushed me around the floor of our spacious parlor. “It’s important for you to know how to dance,” she insisted. “You’ll need it.”) She was also great with a buck. Her economy in running our home not only guaranteed each of us any education we wanted but also allowed my father to acquire any property he wanted for additional income — not only for himself.

Charity was the supreme virtue of my father’s life — starting with his own people. Encouraging any Irish immigrant who crossed his path to buy a home as soon as he got a job, he opened his own Savings and Loan. Each week, these hopeful, newly minted Americans would bring their deposits — and books — to our house where a special box on the hall mantle was reserved as the bank. Once their weekly “board meetings” adjourned, my father deposited their fistfuls of money into their bank. The immigrants trusted my father, and he, in turn, honored their trust. One “regular,” a maid pulling in $30 a month, saved enough to buy a small house in Georgetown where, at that time, property was cheap. Upon her death, she left everything to the archdiocese, which sold it for unimaginable profit. Years later, when I was chancellor, another maid whom my father helped purchase two houses on M Street near 18th also willed both to the archdiocese, which turned them around for $250,000. (A lifelong member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, Dad, opposing those who advocated keeping “a safe balance of funds on hand,” always voted to give any that was available to the poor. “The money was given by people who want it used to aid the less fortunate,” he argued at the Society’s weekly appeals meeting. “Leaving it on a balance sheet doesn’t help them.”)

Altruism aside, my father certainly wasn’t above flashes of Irish temper. When it came to the delays by city bureaucracy in granting his frequent applications for plumbing work, he would take on anybody. “As soon as Frank Hannan comes through the door,” district building officers were heard to remark, “there’s going to be a fight.” They were wrong. The Boss had his fists up before walking through them. When it came to his employees, however, almost anyone was given a chance to prove himself. “I’ll always remember,” he said to us again and again, “that I was once a greenhorn, needing help.”

Growing up, we were surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins — all of whom lived within a five-block radius.

The “other” Hannan family, my father’s older brother, Will, and his nine children, lived down the block. The operator of a large, prosperous grocery store, Uncle Will saved every penny to bring his family, including my father, over from Ireland. A devout Catholic and member of every known parish organization (including the Nocturnal Adoration, where as group leader he would read aloud every word in the prayer pamphlet, including “Now be seated”), it was almost fitting that Uncle Will was killed crossing 17th Street on his way to confession at St. Matthew’s.

My father’s sister, meanwhile, Molly Ryan, and her two sons, lived on P Street; while the big house on the corner of 17th and T Street was home to the Boss’s other sister, Margaret “Maggie” Collins, her husband, Aeneas Patrick, and their children: Margaret, Mary, Bill, and Aeneas Patrick’ — called “Collie” — with whom my brother and I palled around. Smart, fun-loving, and witty, Collie, after serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, signed on at the fledgling National Institutes of Health as a medical librarian, where he helped build the institution’s world renowned library. Always full of surprises, Collie and his beautiful southern wife, Elsie, shocked our Washington clan (almost as much as I did when announcing that I wanted to be a priest) by moving their family in 1954 to what we considered the genuine wild west — that is, Hamilton, Montana — to take over the medical library at The Rocky Mountain Laboratory, a branch of the NIH. (Their son, Pat, a Bronze Star recipient in Vietnam and a Republican campaign manager, in 1980 at age 35 was appointed the Undersecretary of Energy in the Reagan Administration, at the time one of the youngest undersecretaries in any department. Later, it was his sister, Nancy — a respected print and TV journalist whose interviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Architectural Digest, as well as on ABC’s “Primetime Live” and “20/20” — to whom I turned to help me write this book.)

Though our Irish enclave — the Hannans, Collins, and Ryans — boasted no shortage of memorable characters, my cousin Francis, raconteur extraordinaire, probably topped the list. Following a “private graduation” from sixth grade, he briefly worked for my dad before opening, close to the Lincoln Memorial (the sight of today’s Kennedy Center), a riding school — famous for housing congressional horses and staffed by a conglomerate of relatives and horse-crazy volunteers who always included several beautiful, female government employees. Not that Francis was any smooth talker. Indeed, “Hey, get me something to eat. I’m hungry” was the closest he ever got to a flirtatious overture.

He, did, however, have a soft spot which could backfire on him. At one point, he let a black youth, claiming his parents never cared for him, eat and sleep in the stable. As a result, several months later, Francis was hauled into court on a charge of “involuntary slavery,” the first such case since the Civil War. Being an equal-opportunity pin cushion, he was also once charged — by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — with mistreating his goat. The animal, it seems, had a daily habit of ambling to nearby Heurich’s Brewery where he’d be given mash to nibble. Following a six-pack lunch, he’d lurch, happily, back home to the stable — until, that is, the day he got nabbed by a zealous SPCA officer who charged Francis with cruelty to animals. Francis’ final foray into misunderstood good will took place in a more public forum: a Washington Redskins football game in Griffith Stadium. Always up for the theatrical, Francis and a parachutist, dressed as Santa Claus, cooked up a surprise entrance onto the field during the game’s halftime. Just as Paratrooper Claus was about to hit the ground, Francis, driving a Santa sleigh, would speed onto the field in time to scoop up Kris Kringle and drive off. Alas, the best laid plans of mice and merriment often go awry — and did here. Instead of gracefully landing on the grass, as planned, a sudden gust of wind blew Santa into the nearby parking lot, where, landing unceremoniously, he sprained an ankle, leaving getaway-driver Francis racing, inexplicably, toward mid-field in front of hundreds of fans. Needless to say, the family dined out on that one for years.

Immaculate Conception School

All the Hannan boys, and most cousins, attended the Immaculate Conception Parish School, at 8th and N Streets. In 1920 carpooling fashion, Dad trundled us to school in the family’s horse-drawn carriage, clip-clopping along the asphalt, picking up any kids, regardless of race or nationality, along our route. In those days, Catholic boys were taught by male teachers, in this case the Brothers of Mary, advocates of those tried-and-true basics: education and discipline, the latter dispensed, if necessary, by a determined principal wielding a stout ruler. Complaining at home about a paddling simply guaranteed getting another from the Boss. Contrary to horror stories of parochial school punishment, nobody I knew ever complained. Most of us, after all, were the offspring of immigrants, seasoned believers that when it came to seizing opportunities afforded by this wonderful country, you did whatever it took — and took whatever resulted — without complaining. It was action that mattered. When it came to bullying, for instance, that hot button issue generating hours of discussion among today’s school administrators, the Brothers of Mary suggested, shall we say, a more hands-on approach. “The next time an older kid beats up on a younger one,” they instructed, “defend the little guy and beat the devil out of the big.”

I liked school — sports and studies which my mother monitored tenaciously. Every evening, sitting around the dinner table, our kitchen turned into a one-room school house overseen by Mother making sure that we did our homework. If anyone got stumped, we simply shouted across the table to our sister, Mary who knew everything. When it came to sports, meanwhile, baseball — played during recess and lunchtime — was my game (I was an outfielder). Growing up, my hero was Walter “The Big Train” Johnson, who, pitching for the Washington Senators from 1907 to 1927, wound up with 417 victories, second only to Cy Young in major league history. Sportswriter Ogden Nash wrote that he was called “The Big Train” because, fast and overpowering, “he could throw three strikes at a time.” I don’t know about that, but he certainly was my hero. When I was eleven, I wrote Johnson a letter, praising his pitching and sportsmanship. When he sent back a quick response, I couldn’t believe it: “Dear Philip, I am very grateful for your kind letter and appreciate your support of me.” In the seventh game of the 1924 World Series, Johnson, coming in as a reliever, pitched four scoreless innings, ensuring the Senators’ victory over the New York Giants. For me, it was one of the greatest nights of my young life, sitting in the stands, listening as my dad, literally, did play by play in the dark (in those days baseball parks weren’t lit at night). He explained that batters, hampered by nightfall and seeing only his release, not delivery, knew they struck out only after hearing the ball pop into the catcher’s mitt. Strike three!

Unfortunately, my grammar school years weren’t all World Series and hero worship. In fact, in the summer of 1919, Washington’s Seventh Street race riots resulted in the worst memory of my young years. After World War I, the African-American veterans who had to fight for the right to serve in actual combat roles in the Army returned home hoping that their proud military service would promote fair treatment as full-fledged U.S. citizens. It did not. Indeed, the civil rights situation worsened, causing clashes to break out between white and black veterans. It got so bad, in fact, that President Woodrow Wilson, in order to stop the riot, mobilized 2,000 troops who patrolled Seventh Street in armored cars. Even now, eighty years later, that scene — we small boys being protectively convoyed home by larger ones — remains vivid in my mind.

Blacks may have been persecuted in other parts of the city, but not where we lived. As an underdog growing up, my father favored the downtrodden. Unlike the prejudice of most whites toward blacks, Irish immigrants of that era retained a sense of kinship with Negroes, as they were then called, as fellow sufferers under tyranny. (Never did I hear the “N” word used in our home, church, or school.) In fact, my maternal grandfather, John Keefe, financially helped St. Cyprian’s Parish, a black Catholic parish; my own folks considered it a duty to contribute money to St. Augustine’s, a 15th Street parish for African-Americans, continuing a tradition started in the 1860s by President Lincoln who allowed St. Augustine to use the White House lawn for a fund-raising fair to build a new school. (Politically, my parents, though conservative, were, like most Catholic immigrants, Democrats. Though I never officially joined the Democratic Party, I always felt it was my party.)

In our family, meanwhile, any black workers or maids whom my father hired for business or home were always treated like family, in fact, were respected, mythic figures to my siblings and me: Old Joe, carrying a piano on his shoulders into our home, and Charlie Tatum from North Carolina, who could shovel dirt with one hand. (For the record, the Boss always used an African-American notary public.) One Thanksgiving — then the auxiliary bishop of Washington — I showed up at the family dinner to scant fanfare; while my parents’ maid garnered a near-standing ovation. “I’ve married into a strange family,” remarked my newlywed sister-in-law. “When the son, a bishop, arrives, nobody pays any attention; but the maid shows up and everybody cheers.”

An International Neighborhood

It helped, of course, that we lived in such a truly international neighborhood, starting with the public school where both black and white students were enrolled (among them the future General Douglas MacArthur). Adjacent to our house was my father’s plumbing shop, whose backyard was cluttered with discarded sinks, stoves, and pipes, the perfect place, as it turned out, for my first — and only — encounter with tobacco. Egged on by older cousins, I confidently stuck a cigar, undoubtedly purloined from Uncle Will’s store, into my mouth. Seconds later, I spit it out. It didn’t take a surgeon general to tell me that tobacco was a lousy idea! The next-door laundry shop, meanwhile, was owned by a Chinese man who was also proprietor of a nearby restaurant where each year he hosted an elaborate dinner attended by my parents and their friends. It was not his only custom. Every night at six, sitting in a chair in front of his shop, the Chinaman calmly filled his pipe with opium and smoked it — a ritual paid no heed by the neighbors nor police. Further down the block, a white man lived with his Japanese wife, while the black Protestant church belted out Christmas carols all year long, including August. Across the street, a Filipino houseboy ran the home of a retired brigadier general; while his neighbors, a sun-worshipping Scandinavian couple, determining their offspring benefit from sunshine, allowed their children to play naked in the front yard — much to the amazement of pedestrians heading to their offices in close-by government buildings.

My mother Lilian in her wedding dress that was handcrafted by nuns who made the dresses to earn money for their community

Father Philip Hannan, September 1951

Seven-year-old Philip Hannan, seated with older brother Bill just to the right of the main wooden stairs, was present at the September 23, 1920, groundbreaking for the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. Cardinal James Gibbons, seated beneath the main tent at left, presided over the ceremony.

A Hannan family photo taken at my twenty-fifth anniversary of episcopal ordination in 1981.

Family picture at Hannan family farm taken in 1943

Photo of the handsome Hannan family taken around 1923, when I was nine or ten years old. Front row: Tom, Jerry (on Mom’s lap), Mom, Denis, and Dad. Back row: Me, Frank, Mary, John, and Bill.

Hannan family at the Mayflower Hotel, celebrating my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1955. Seated: Mary, my mom, and my dad. Standing: Frank, me, John, Denis, Jerry, Bill, and Tom.

Mary Hannan, the only girl among seven Hannan brothers, was a brilliant student. She graduated from Trinity College and then became the first laywoman to earn a doctorate from the Catholic University of America in mathematics, Greek, and Latin. My father Patrick was so proud of his eldest child that he often remarked: “Mary was worth at least three boys.”

1929, St. John’s College High School

Denis, Jerry, and Bill Hannan flank their brother at a reception in the St. Louis Cathedral rectory after a 1981 Mass celebrating my twenty-fifth anniversary of episcopal ordination.

Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle and my mother Lilian, with my brothers and me

My brother William Hannan reading at the 1981 anniversary mass

My brother Jerry Hannan and I at Christmas 2009

Jerry Hannan and I minister to our brother, Denis Hannan, who passed away on February 5, 2010.

With so many government officials living in the area, you never knew what celebrity might walk down our sidewalk, stopping — like one ramrodstraight Army officer, whom I later learned was General John J. Pershing — to pat our heads. (Pershing apparently never recovered from the traumatic loss of his wife and three young daughters in the tragic fire at San Francisco’s Presidio in 1915.) My brother, Tom, in fact, may well be the only person in Washington to run down a sitting president with a scooter. One morning, President Calvin Coolidge, accompanied by a Secret Service agent, was enjoying his usual, early-riser constitutional up 17th Street (from the White House) when Tom, hell-bent on getting his scooter to fly across the pavement, suddenly scored an abrupt bulls-eye on the leg of the leader of the free world. Unperturbed, Coolidge, sidestepping his young assailant, simply continued on.

It would not be the last time that Tom — or the rest of us — would set eyes on the President of the United States. In 1927, due to White House renovations, Coolidge temporarily moved into the home of publishing heiress Cissie Patterson in Dupont Circle, two blocks from our house — wonderful serendipity, as it turned out, for the Hannan boys. When President Coolidge welcomed Charles Lindbergh to Washington, following his historic transatlantic flight, he invited “Lucky Lindy” to the Patterson house where an excited crowd — my brothers and I among them — stood on the lawn’s trampled bushes, cheering for the dashing aeronautics hero to make an appearance. Finally, Lindbergh and Coolidge emerged onto a second-floor balcony where Lindbergh, timidly waving to the noisy throng, allowed my brothers and me a bird’s-eye view of the world’s (then) most famous human being. Seconds later, he was gone, both men disappearing back into the house without saying a word. So much for public relations!

St. Matthew’s Cathedral

Ultimately, everything of any importance in our family centered on the Church, in our case St. Matthew’s Cathedral, four short blocks away on Rhode Island Avenue. I can still dimly recall the church’s aged, aristocratic founding pastor, Monsignor Thomas Sim Lee, a Maryland cousin of Robert E. Lee. Autocratically deciding in 1897 that the parish church, whose boundaries included the White House, should be worthy of a Catholic president of the United States, he set about making it a reality. As a result, the Monsignor commissioned New York architect Grant Lafarge to design St. Matthew’s imposing dome whose construction, exceeding the height restrictions established by zoning laws, required the city to change them. (The ornate interior, meanwhile, required thirty years to reach completion.)

The priests of St. Matthew’s Cathedral were, like their leader, as varied as the neighborhood. Well into old age, Monsignor Lee still insisted on taking nighttime sick calls, while his successor, Monsignor Edward Buckey, an Episcopalian convert, set the gold standard when it came to “walking the parish” to visit every parishioner. Father Argaut, a member of the French Missioners of Paris as well as a wise, gifted counselor and confessor, found Washington’s humid climate, after years spent in India, more than agreeable. What was not agreeable was anything that did not adhere to the “old France.” One time, when the visiting French choristers, Les Petits Chanteurs a la Croix de Bois, sang the Marseillaise on the steps of the cathedral, Father Argaut huffed off in disgust. “I can’t stand that revolutionary song.” I was baptized by the English Father Mills whose father (an Oxford don) taught him to speak Latin and Greek. A thoroughly entrenched academician, Father Mills required every young First Communion candidate to pass a written exam — throwing my oldest brother John into a six-year-old sweat when it was discovered that he’d re-jiggered a basic Catholic tenet: “There are,” he confidently wrote, “two Gods.”

“John, I’m shocked,” my mother reportedly exclaimed hearing of this blasphemy. “You know there’s only one God!”

“I know, Mom,” he replied, “I just couldn’t spell ‘one’!”

Priests were as much a part of our social, as religious, life. Nothing pleased my mother, an excellent cook, more than inviting over the parish priests as well as any from Catholic University (a constant influence in our lives) where Father William Turner, her fourth cousin, was a professor of philosophy. “Tur” (from baby Jerry’s inability to pronounce “Turner”) was smart and forward thinking, undoubtedly the force behind convincing, years later, the University’s powers-that-be to break tradition and allow my sister, Mary, to study for a doctorate in Latin and Greek. When Tur was named the Bishop of Buffalo, he delivered the exciting news to Mother via phone:

“Lil, how’d you like to have the Bishop of Buffalo as a dinner guest tonight?”

“Lord, no,” she exclaimed. “I’ve nothing ready for a big dinner!”

“I’ll come anyway,” he laughed. “You’re talking to him. I’m the new Bishop of Buffalo.”

In the Hannan family, the boys became altar boys, choir members, or both. Though Tom, Denny, and Bill, whose beautiful tenor voice invariably assured him the solo in the “Gesu Bambino” carol every Christmas, sang in the celebrated St. Matthew’s choir (under direction of Malton Boyce), I — better at hitting a curve ball than “high C” — never qualified. (Asked later to try out for a singing role with the Mutual Broadcast System radio network, Bill refused. “Fortunately, I had enough sense to turn down a part in a flimsy radio company,” he always explained, “and became a lawyer.”) When we weren’t at St. Matthew’s serving Mass, we were on the altar of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at 1719 Massachusetts Avenue (now Georgetown University’s School of Linguistics) where The Madames of the Sacred Heart ran a select school for young ladies. (At age four, watching my older brothers going off to church for nightly May devotions, I burst into loud, protesting tears at being left behind. Grabbing me by the arm, my brother Frank offered sage, brotherly advice: “Listen, you little dummy,” he said, “once you start going to church you’ve got to keep it up for the rest of your life. Shut up and stay home as long as you can.” And I did — quite happily.)

The Farm

By 1927 my parents, having already acquired the houses on either side of us, decided to buy a farm eleven miles outside of Washington near Norbeck in Montgomery County, Maryland. With sixty acres and a sturdy holly tree farmhouse, it would be, they felt, both the perfect summer escape from the city’s oppressive heat as well as a new, educational venue for their children to learn the value of hands-on labor. And we did. The younger sons, including me, pitched hay, milked cows, and wrestled sheep for shearing which, lacking electric sheers, was done by hand — without question the hardest job of my life. (Properly sheering a sheep requires that he be flipped on his back and held down. If standing, you stand no chance since he’ll wrestle and wriggle free.) It was also an important spiritual lesson. Thanks to those woolly devils, the Gospel image of the Good Shepherd came clearly into focus: sheep do need a shepherd to care for them; otherwise, they collapse in the heat. (Visiting the Roman catacombs as a seminarian, though, I saw plenty of pictures of sheep and the Good Shepherd. There wasn’t a single image of one being sheared — a major oversight in Church tradition!) Besides this, we milked a couple of goats and five cows a day, developing, along the way, hands and forearms like rocks. Coupled with superb fresh food — corn, lamb, ice cream made from cream skimmed off the top of milk from Jersey cows — my appetite, and physique, blossomed.

Overseeing everything, was Milton, an African-American who lived with his wife Victoria, a large, dominant woman, in a house on the farm. Not only did we work under Milton, we also regarded him as family. In fact he was easier on us than our father, who brooked no distinctions when it came to color or class. Once, when a water system needed to be installed at the farm, my father sent out several black workers from Washington to do the backbreaking work — rendering my mother the only white woman within miles of the farm. I thought nothing of it until the day she surprised me with a comment. “Phil, people have been asking if I mind being the only white woman on the farm with all these blacks,” She recounted in disgust. “Well, I trust these black men as much as I trust the white.” Though I never mentioned our conversation to my brothers, the message was clear: whether white or black, those with whom you work deserve trust and respect — until proven otherwise.

In the country, our parish church was St. Peter’s Mission Church in Olney, three miles from Norbeck, where Mass, celebrated every fourth Sunday of the month, was attended by the whole family. One night the pastor at St. Peter’s came to dinner. Afterwards, strolling across the lawn, he announced that he was “measuring the distance for the light poles of a lawn fete.” From this was born an annual summer celebration featuring fried chicken, fresh corn on the cob (from our farm), and cakes of every description. With the Hannan boys responsible for the shucking and hauling of farm produce, neighboring families showed up to help with the cooking and serving. Not about to be left out, friends from Washington caravanned out to take advantage of the Depression price of “seventy-five cents for all you could eat.”

Blessedly, the Great Depression (1929-39) didn’t significantly affect our family simply because those relying on my father’s plumbing services, federal government workers, weren’t fired during these dark economic times. Though business slowed, the Boss never faced a complete shutdown. (Moreover, he made himself available for odd jobs — hanging pictures and fixing floors and roofs.) His goal was keeping employees on the payroll and finding them work — still plentiful in the “big houses” of people like the Duponts who employed thirty to forty maids — all Irish whom they knew wouldn’t steal. As a teenager, I learned my own personal lesson in Depression-era economics. In grammar school, the Brothers, stressing thrift and saving for the long haul, encouraged students to open a bank account with whatever coins they could scrounge up. When I left the eighth grade, my account boasted $100 which, thanks to the crash, plummeted to $6. Devastated, I simply started saving all over again.

In 1965, the Boss, having always planned to give ten of our choicest acres to the archdiocese for a church, finally did so in the name of our sister Mary, who died from breast cancer at age fifty-three. As a result, St. Patrick’s Parish in Norbeck, canonically established in 1966, was dedicated in December 1968 with my mother and her sons present (Dad had long since gone to his reward). Of course, there was no doubt about the name of the church — St. Patrick’s — though whether it was after Irish saints, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle or Patrick Hannan is yet to be determined.

Like all families, we had our share of trauma, sorrow, and loss — most notably the early death from breast cancer of our venerated sister Mary in 1959. Although Mary desperately wanted children, she and her husband, Robert Mahoney were never able to have any of their own. As a result, she simply spread her love across the world, starting in Tanzania where she established eight maternity clinics. While her husband was head of the public schools in Hartford, Connecticut, Mary was a member of the Hartford Housing Authority and President of the National Conference of Catholic Women. To avoid a conflict of interest, she turned down several political opportunities — an offer from Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff to be his secretary of state, as well as Republican and Democratic requests to run for Congress. The Mary Mahoney Village in Hartford, apartments for the elderly poor, are named in her honor. All of these charitable acts were performed in the same quiet way that our father performed his charity work through the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society.

Mary’s death — a huge loss for her husband — devastated all of us. I still recall the tenderness with which my mother personally cared for my sister in her final days spent in one big bedroom of the family home. As mentioned earlier, this was little Mary, the “preemie” who had survived long odds at birth, nursed to health in a room that my father had turned into an incubator. Life had come full circle. Thanks to my brother Frank’s brilliant diagnostic ability, I was graced to be with Mary when she died. Calling on a Sunday evening Frank told me, “Mary will die on Tuesday evening. You should be there for her comfort as well as Mom’s.” And, gratefully, I was. Mary died around nine o’clock that very date.

Early Thoughts of a Vocation

When it came to their children, my parents prayed for a doctor or lawyer — not a vocation. In fact, ironically enough, no one in our large, Irish Catholic family ever had a calling to the priesthood or religious life. Consequently, when I dropped the bomb at the dinner table, conversation ground to a halt — no small feat in a loquacious gang like ours. When someone asked if I planned to accept the scholarship offered by Catholic University (and follow my brother Bill studying law), I decided that the moment of truth was at hand: “No,” I replied, “I don’t intend to go there.” My father was aghast. “What do you mean?” “I’m thinking,” I continued slowly, “about going into the seminary.” My God, did forks drop onto plates! My announcement was a complete and utter surprise.

I can’t recall exactly when or how the idea of a religious vocation began simmering in my mind. Certainly, there was no Eureka moment. Like all boys growing up, I had a million ideas about what I wanted to do. Though I loved sports, especially baseball, I was too small to make the high school team. Eventually, my activities, like the Catholic Students Mission Crusade, generally combined a mixture of social and pious goals. Though geared toward assisting missions, the organization had other attractions as well: meetings and a yearly dance attended by representatives from all Catholic high schools, including the girl schools — a big draw for a guy like me who, enjoying girls, had the usual dates and prom nights, usually at the glamorous Shoreham Hotel.

If anything, the birth of my vocation involved a long, if spasmodic, labor — a struggle more apparent to others than to me. In one instance, Brother Luke, my “homeroom” teacher at St. John’s High School, broached the subject after class. And his advice was chillingly candid: “You ought to think about the permanence of the commitment in becoming a priest. It’s forever. There isn’t any turning back.” On another occasion he put it a little differently. “Hannan, you get too many ideas. Skip every third one” (advice seconded, apparently, by many).

During my senior year, a friend of the family, Admiral Washington Lee Capps, offered to let me take the examination for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Admiral Capps, head of the Board of Strategy for the Navy in World War I as well as supervising contractor at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco (overseeing the construction of the Battleship Oregon and Battleship Wisconsin), was a staunch, flinty patriot married to an elegant Catholic lady. Since the Capps lived in St. Matthew’s parish and had no children, they took great interest in the Hannan boys. Nevertheless, I turned down the Admiral’s invitation to “audition” for West Point.

“Why didn’t you take the examination to West Point?” my mother asked.

“I just didn’t feel like it,” I said evasively. At that time, the U.S. Army with a mere 50,000 troops, was practically an endangered species, offering no future. And though I’d thought about becoming a doctor, lawyer, even architect, I simply couldn’t shake the idea of a religious vocation. I knew I had to make up my mind by graduation since, in our family, there was zero tolerance for drifting through life or taking a year to “think about it.”

Finally, I took action. If I didn’t settle the thought, really run it into the ground, I would never be content in any profession that I chose. Seeking out a friendly priest at St. Matthew’s rectory, Father Edward Roach, I confided that I was thinking about becoming a priest. No sooner had the words passed my lips, than he considered it a done deal. “We have doubts about some young fellows who say they want to be a priest,” Father Roach said, “but not you. However, the only way to find out whether or not you’ve actually got a vocation is to try it.” Toward that end, he offered to take me to St. Charles College in Catonsville, Maryland, a minor seminary near Baltimore, at the beginning of the next session in September 1931.

Though stunned, my parents were obviously proud. While my father immediately told his brother Will how proud he was, my mother was far more cautious. “Of course we’re pleased, Philip,” she said, “but this is a very serious decision and you’re very young,” opening a door in case I changed my mind. I did not. Still, her remarks made it much easier to strike out to St. Charles College, located, ironically, on Maiden Choice Lane near Catonsville. Walking in the door, the only thing I knew about St. Charles was that I was entering a seminary.