Memoirs
Sender: kerry woodEmail: kerrywood007@comcast.net
Posted On: 03/02/2010
Year: 1953-55
My most wonderfully memorable high-school teacher was Reverend James Hansen. (I have included the adverb “wonderfully” in order to exclude teachers who were memorable for all the wrong reasons.) A recent addition to the faculty of St. Anthony's High School in the mid 1950s, he is memorable more for his humor, personality, and boundless energy than for imparting academic knowledge, although his intellectual brilliance was unmistakable.
One doesn't usually attach terms like "hilarious screwball' to members of the priesthood, but in his case the term fits. When he walked into a room, things began to happen and those things invariably evoked smiles if not outright laughter. I'm sure with all his seminary studies and a college degree from Loyola of Los Angeles, he never had a course in education, but he possessed the innate ability to project love, humor, and likeability, which is essential to effective teaching.
Why do I remember, more than 50 years after they were uttered, silly witticisms of his? Once, complaining that his lunch was not settling well, he punned about "imminent ptomaine." He then added, "The ‘p’ in ‘ptomaine’ is silent like the cue in billiards." I have used the same quip countless time when the subject of silent letters arose, often prompting the rejoinder “But there’s no “q” in “billiards’!”
He was one of the several parish priests who taught religion at the four high-school levels. His greatest impact came with his taking charge of vocal music in the boys' school. (Saint Anthony's High during these years was semi-coeducational. The boys' school and the girls' school shared the same campus, but only a few classes were mixed. Brothers of the Holy Cross plus parish priests and a few "lay faculty" were the boys' teachers; Immaculate Heart nuns taught the girls, who had their own glee club.)
A fine musician gifted with an excellent voice, Father Jim took on the glee club directorship with the gusto and humor that sparked his every activity. Whether it was teaching St. Thomas Aquinas, discoursing on Teilhard de Chardin, or knocking out a piano rendition of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, this priest's students were captivated by his enthusiasm and wit. Another of his silly jokes: "Q. When you go to Heaven, how will you be able to recognize Adam and Eve? Ans. They'll be the only ones with no navels."
Father Hansen - half Danish and half Irish, 6 feet two and two hundred thirty pounds of robustious blarney - didn't hold conventional glee club tryouts. Being a member of the school band or glee club in previous years had been a voluntary association with nerdhood. The band uniforms looked funny. There was no distinction associated with membership in either extra-curricular musical organization. To reverse this stigma with the glee club, Hansen approached the popular athletes and student leaders and said, "I bet you can sing, can't you?" He quickly assembled a cadre of respected BMOCs (an old acronym that stood for big men on campus) that other students strove to be associated with, if they could carry a tune.
Glee Club hour, just before lunchtime, was for me the most enjoyable period of the day. I still remember my first day when he divided us into four sections: first tenors, second tenors, baritones, and basses. He then hummed the pitches of a simple chord for us to sing. The resulting sound in that low-roofed classroom moved and enchanted me in a way I can't begin to express. I knew instantly that glee club would be one of my elective classes for the rest of my years at St. Anthony's.
During football season, Father Hansen would compose special vocal arrangements and humorous skits directed at that week's opponent, and we would perform them at the after-school pep rallies. I can still remember his humorous adaptations of melodies from Rigoletto and La Traviata. He wrote new lyrics for the age-old "Oh Bring the Wagon Home, John" and made it into a barbershop school anthem renamed "All Hail, Fair Alma Mater." My junior and senior years Hansen chose me to sing lead tenor in the barbershop quartet, which won for a shy, studious kid some recognition in the student body.
Everyone has favorite songs they associate with their high-school years of sock hops and early dating. I think back not only to "Sha Boom," "Earth Angel," and other R&B standards, but also to some of the glee club's songs, the memory of which still cause the hairs on the back of my neck to do funny things. A popular commercial vocal of that far-off time was "The Three Bells" ("Les Trois Cloches") sung by Les Compagnons de la Chanson. The accent was different, but I can still hear the solo voice of Filipino student Jose Lauchenco accompanied by four-part harmony, singing. "There's a village, hidden deep in the valley, among the pine trees half forlorn . . ." Equally thrilling was Billy Reed's tenor solo on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." I'm sure he's the same Billy Reed whose name remains attached to a restaurant and piano bar in Palm Springs where lots of my high school's alumni reunions are celebrated.
Since it was a Catholic school, Father Jim worked a lot of Gregorian chant and religious polyphonic music into our performance repertoire. I can remember an arrangement of Ave Maria directed by its composer, Richard Keys Biggs, brother of famed organist E. Powers Biggs. A few of us begged to do the hymn to the well-known tune of Franz Schubert, but Father Jim refused, saying that the trite Bing Crosby version had been "written on the back of a beer label."
Father H. became a family friend, visiting our home for a couple of scotches on the rocks and dueling piano performances alternating with my uncle Woodie, who had been a professional pianist. I remember dinner table discussions about the church's celibacy requirement. Father H. said he thought it would "be wonderful" if the restriction were lifted, but that for himself it would be "an either/or." He felt he could not be both a husband and a priest, but that he could picture himself in another life as a father of children and teacher of music.
I moved after college and had few opportunities to contact Father Jim, but I got second-hand reports. I learned that he had been badly injured and lost one eye in an explosion on a motor yacht. A friend reported having telephoned the priest in the hospital to express his devastation at Father Jim's injuries. He said Hansen responded with customary joviality, "Don't worry about the eye. I have another one just like it and it works fine." He had five different eye patches to wear over the missing orb on appropriate days: violet, white, black, red and green -- the liturgical colors
Then there was the early death to cancer of my classmate who had sung bass in our quartet. I was working abroad and couldn't attend the funeral. A brother of the deceased told me that after the interment he glanced back at the gravesite and saw Father Hansen dancing a buck and wing on the newly replaced sod. In response to the brother's quizzicality, Hansen responded, "He would expect it of me."
His intellectual accomplishment extended beyond musical talent. Latin, for him, was not just a language learned of necessity by pre-Vatican II seminarians but a deep linguistic pursuit. Some glee club members complained about the Christmas concert at which we performed not Silent Night but wrapped ourselves around the pronunciation of Stille Nacht, the original German lyrics of the Franz Gruber standard.
Hansen had no formal study of the Spanish language, but he asked his friend and our Spanish teacher Brother Peter Celestine to write to him in that language. Father Jim's Latin made the letters easy to comprehend and he felt more and more comfortable in verbal exchanges with the numerous Spanish-speaking parishioners. When he heard Brother Peter studying Portuguese in preparation for assignment to Brazil, Hansen quipped that Portuguese sounded like Spanish spoken with a harelip.
Father Jim has gone to his reward and I am one of several hundreds who remember him with respect and affection. I wonder if he has been able to single out Adam and Eve by their anatomical peculiarity among others in the place to which he has gone. Certainly there is more good humor and laughter in the starry realm than may have been the case before his arrival.
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