by Mark Bailey
So it is ironic, though not surprising, that however much I heard that refrain throughout my childhood, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I became even vaguely aware of the man who had written the words—Father Edward Flanagan of Boys Town. After all, by then Father Flanagan had been dead for over a quarter century, and though his legacy was still running strong, a great many other ideas and organizations had emerged to address the needs of children. In the shuffle of time and progress, it can be easy to forget the men and women who came first. It shouldn’t be that way, but it often is. And so Father Flanagan, the tall, rangy priest from Ireland who did so much to carve the path, was lost from the telling.
But then life is something of a circle. And in moving forward, it seems you often end up returning to the place where you started. This was true for Father Flanagan. And as for me, I guess I had heeded my parents’ call. I ended up going to work for Save the Children, a nonprofit that, much like Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, is committed to improving the lives of children here in the United States (we are now in 120 other countries too). I joined the organization in 2003, creating early childhood development and school-age literacy programs that serve children and families in some of the poorest and most remote communities in the United States, as well as domestic disaster preparedness and response and recovery programs. Ten years later, to strengthen our ability to effect systemic change, I started Save the Children Action Network, which seeks to build bipartisan will and voter support to ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed. In many ways, it is the same fight that Father Flanagan was waging in what now might seem like ancient history.
But it isn’t history at all. The struggle is very present. I see it every day. “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother”—these are words worth remembering, just as when I first heard them over fifty years ago. And the man behind the words, the life he led and the great many things he accomplished—he’s worth remembering too.
EDWARD JOSEPH FLANAGAN’S birthplace was a whitewashed limestone farmhouse with a thatched roof, wooden floors, and flagstone fireplaces. Despite its simplicity and modest size, the homestead, located in County Roscommon, bore the impressive name of Leabeg House. It proved to be a comfortable, nurturing home for all fourteen of its inhabitants: John Flanagan, a farmer, his equally hard-working wife, Nora, their eleven children, and John Flanagan’s father, Patrick.
Edward was born on July 13, 1886, the eighth child. He suffered a convulsion when he was only a few weeks old, turning blue in the face. His grandfather Patrick, a large, brawny man respected countywide for his skill as an amateur healer for both livestock and people, wrapped his tiny grandson in a blanket, cuddled him next to his chest, and sat by the large kitchen fireplace for hours, praying. The family—tightly knit and devoutly Catholic—firmly believed that prayer was what saved the infant Edward’s life.
When Edward Flanagan came into the world, he had five older sisters—Mary Jane, Nellie, Kate, Susan, and Delia—as well as two older brothers, Patrick A. and James. He later would have two younger sisters, Nora and Theresa, and a younger brother, Michael. All of his siblings except Mary Jane and Kate eventually would immigrate to the United States.
The Flanagans of Leabeg House were well-off by community standards. John Flanagan oversaw a three-hundred-acre stock farm owned by an absentee landlord. Everyone in the family worked the farm, including Edward, who in a 1942 letter to a friend remembered himself as “the little shepherd boy who took care of the cattle and sheep . . . as I was the delicate member of the family and good for nothing else.”
The largest room in Leabeg House was the kitchen, where a huge teakettle hung above the constantly lit fireplace, ever ready to provide hot tea. It was there that the Flanagans gathered for their daily prayers and sometimes performed small family concerts on the instruments—a piano, an accordion, a violin, and a flute—that were kept in the house. It certainly paints a lovely picture. Edward had a fine baritone voice and enjoyed singing.
He always considered his boyhood home a model for what he later would build at Boys Town—a self-contained community in which everyone worked to address its needs and advance its cause. He wrote, “The old-fashioned home with its fireside companionship, its religious devotion and its closely-knit family ties is my idea of what a home should be.”
In the same 1942 letter in which he described himself as “good for nothing else” but being the family’s shepherd boy, Edward also claimed that he probably had “a poorer brain than most of the other members of the family.” The fact was his family realized early on that he was extremely smart, even scholarly. His older brother Patrick, who soon would begin studying for the priesthood (and thereafter always be known as Father P.A.), recognized his younger brother’s sharp mind and began tutoring him, enabling young Edward to skip three grades in the two-room, forty-student Drimatemple National School.
As early as the age of eight, Flanagan said that he wanted to become a priest. Maybe he was inspired by his older brother’s example, or perhaps, as family lore would have it, by the prediction of an elderly traveling priest who, upon meeting Edward at their church, noticed the boy’s thoughtful appearance, put his hands on Edward’s head, and said, “Someday Eddie will be a priest.” Certainly, Edward was nothing if not determined. He sought additional tutoring in Latin, Greek, and French from his pastor and, at the age of fifteen, entered a private high school called Summerhill College, located in the Atlantic seacoast town of Sligo, about fifty miles from his home. It was the same school Patrick A. had gone to before entering the seminary.
Edward had never been so far from home, never experienced the strict, harsh, and seemingly uncaring regimentation of an institution such as Summerhill, and never seen sights such as hungry, homeless boys rummaging for food in the garbage behind the houses of Sligo’s wealthy residents. It seems to have had a profound effect on him, as he never forgot the deep loneliness he felt at Summerhill. He buried himself in his studies, graduating in three years with honors in Greek, history, and geography. He also took time to play handball, a sport he loved, and ran track, until an ankle injury ended that. He put his fine baritone voice to use in the Summerhill choir.
In January 1904, the same year Edward received his high school diploma, his older brother Patrick graduated from the Dublin Seminary and became a priest. Because at the time Catholicism was so central to Irish identity and a religious career so highly regarded, there were too many young Catholic priests for the country’s parishes. Many newly minted priests agreed to serve overseas, including Patrick, who was sent to far-off Omaha, Nebraska, to become the founding pastor of the Holy Angels Parish. Although Omaha had a wide variety of immigrant communities, some said the immense Irish population made it simply just another Irish town—“O’Maha” without the apostrophe.
Edward had expected to attend the same Dublin seminary as Patrick, but his journey to becoming a priest would have many more twists and turns. Shortly after he graduated from Summerhill, his sister Nellie—already happily living in New York—returned to Leabeg House for a visit and recommended that the family send Edward to the United States to complete his studies.
Edward’s parents agreed, and late that summer, when Nellie was ready to return to New York, her younger brother accompanied her and Father P.A. aboard the SS Celtic, a ship owned by the famous White Star Line—later owners of the doomed Titanic and equally doomed Lusitania. Thankfully, their crossing proved less eventful. On August 27, 1904, Edward Flanagan—a lanky, six-foot-tall eighteen-year-old with light-colored hair and intense blue eyes under bushy brows—went through the gates at Ellis Island, as had tens of thousands of Irish immigrants before him.
NEWLY ARRIVED IN the United States, Edward stayed with his mother’s relatives in Yonkers, New York, just north of Manhattan. He applied for admission to St. Joseph’s Seminary, also known as Dunwoodie, which was located in Yonkers. He was told that he had to get an undergraduate college degree first, so he enrolled at Mou
nt St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland (now known as Mount St. Mary’s University). After Edward graduated with a BA, he again applied for admission to St. Joseph’s. This time he was accepted and officially became a seminarian in the Archdiocese of New York.
Unfortunately, Edward’s long struggle with poor health resumed. He developed double pneumonia and was bedridden for much of his time at St. Joseph’s. One of Flanagan’s teachers, Father Francis Patrick Duffy—who would earn national fame during World War I as the chaplain of the Fighting 69th, the New York–based Irish-immigrant infantry regiment founded in 1849 and noted for its battlefield bravery in every conflict since the Civil War—often visited the sick young man to help him with his courses. Edward’s physicians, though, urged him to drop out of St. Joseph’s. The future Monsignor Aloysius Dineen, who would succeed Duffy as the Fighting 69th’s chaplain, was a classmate of Flanagan’s at St. Joseph’s and recalled that no one at Dunwoodie “would ever have voted Flanagan the one most likely to succeed. I think the majority view would have been that he would wind up as a pastor of some little country parish, where the world would never hear of him.”
Edward left school and made his way to Omaha to join his brother. While he recuperated there, the New York Archdiocese sent him a letter releasing him to the Omaha Diocese. By the late summer, the supervising bishop in Omaha thought Edward’s health had improved enough to send him to the prestigious Gregorian University in Rome. Flanagan arrived in Rome in October 1907, but within a few months, the damp and cold winter had affected his frail lungs. He returned to Omaha just a few months later, determined to rebuild his strength.
In all of this, one can’t help but feel how desperate Edward was to become a priest. But this time, he decided not to rush his recovery and instead became a bookkeeper for the Cudahy Packing Company. Cudahy was then among the largest meat-processing plants in the country. As it turned out, this would prove a critical period in Edward’s life. During his nearly two years at Cudahy, he received excellent business training—a whole different skill set that would come in handy down the road.
In the fall of 1909, his health restored, Edward enrolled at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where the brisk, clean mountain air proved good for him. His family also believed that Innsbruck’s water changed the color of his hair from blond to dark brown and caused it to begin thinning. Almost three years later, on July 26, 1912, Flanagan was finally ordained a priest at St. Ignatius Church in Innsbruck. The next day, after saying his first mass for his fellow seminarians, Father Edward J. Flanagan began his journey back to the United States. He was twenty-six years old.
INITIALLY, THE BISHOP of Omaha assigned Father Flanagan to a small, rural parish in O’Neill, Nebraska, largely populated by Irish immigrants (who had named it), but within a year he was transferred to St. Patrick’s parish back in Omaha. There he began what many considered a foolhardy effort to help the huge number of homeless migrant farm workers who were flooding into the city. It is funny, but ideas that we’ve come to think of as visionary often start off as foolhardy. Maybe audaciousness requires you to discount reality. Regardless, this would not be Flanagan’s last such effort.
With the approval of his bishop—but with no financial support from the diocese—Flanagan founded what he called the Workingman’s Hotel in an abandoned two-story, forty-bed hostelry in an unsavory part of town. Decades later, he told biographers, “I was a very rash and enthusiastic young man. I’d never thought much about money before, you know. Now I was to find out it could be mighty important.”
He may have been “rash and enthusiastic,” but he was also clearly an intelligent, driven entrepreneur. He raised funds from a variety of sources, including the St. Vincent de Paul Society, his own family, friends, and local merchants. He also enlisted the farm workers to fix up the old hotel and managed to round up additional cots. All told, his total initial expenses came to $150, and before long, more than one hundred men had moved in. Those who had money paid ten cents for a bed and five cents for a meal, but Flanagan never turned away anyone who needed shelter or food. He manned the front desk, and before long, the Workingman’s Hotel became a refuge for not only migrant farm workers but destitute men of every kind—from alcoholics to drug addicts to the chronically homeless, all were welcome. It was not uncommon for him to cram one thousand men a night into the hotel, including the attic and basement.
When Flanagan made a detailed study of some two thousand of the men who had stayed at his hotel, he found that many had come from broken homes or large families unable to care for them. They had been unloved and abandoned, beginning in their childhoods. As he would later write, after three years of operating the Workingman’s Hotel, he realized he had “put the cart before the horse.” He now wanted to shift his focus to helping youngsters “still in their formative years.”
And so it was that in the fall of 1917, Flanagan began searching for a place he could convert into a home for boys. He was soon introduced to a real estate agent named Catherine Dannehy (who would go on to spend more than twenty-five years working for Boys Town). Dannehy knew of an old, dilapidated two-story redbrick house that she thought would serve the purpose. The monthly rent was ninety dollars, in advance—a large sum for a poor priest. But Flanagan was nothing if not scrappy, and he quickly found an anonymous friend who was willing to loan him the money.
Though he never revealed the name of that friend, it is almost certain that the founding benefactor of Boys Town was a prominent Jewish attorney in Omaha named Henry Monsky. Monsky, who was one of Flanagan’s closest confidants, shared the priest’s interest in caring for poor children—religion was beside the point. Flanagan’s sister Nellie would later say that the money had come from a Jewish friend of her brother’s. In fact, Flanagan himself once let slip that a Jew had been the one to help him found what became Boys Town. In 1937, when Flanagan was talking to the movie studio MGM about a scriptwriter for a potential movie about Boys Town, he told the studio, “Don’t send me any Catholics. Why don’t you get hold of a young Jewish kid? He’ll know what I’m talking about.” When Flanagan got his wish and screenwriter Dore Schary, an Orthodox Jew, was assigned to write the script for Boys Town, he told Schary why he had asked for a Jewish screenwriter. “How do you think I got into this business? How do you think this place was built? Because a Jewish man understood what I was doing and gave me the money.”
As for Monsky, he would later become the international president of B’nai B’rith, as well as the head of the American Jewish Conference and a member of the Boys Town board. He and Flanagan would remain close until Monsky’s death in 1947.
On December 12, 1917, with the borrowed ninety dollars, Flanagan opened Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home at Twenty-fifth and Dodge Streets in Omaha. The first residents were five boys aged eight to ten; three of them were orphans, and two were homeless youngsters paroled to his care by the city’s juvenile court. Flanagan’s staff consisted of two nuns and a novice from the School Sisters of Notre Dame. All the furnishings—aged chairs, tables, cots, and beds—were obtained by Flanagan, who had gone asking door-to-door.
By Christmas Eve, about twenty-five boys were living in the house. Flanagan didn’t have food for a proper Christmas dinner, or even a simple meal, when a large barrel filled with sauerkraut arrived from a local grocer. “I wish it were something else, boys—dear,” said Flanagan, who habitually addressed each child as “dear.” It didn’t matter—the kids gobbled it right up.
Segregated Omaha had a wide variety of immigrant communities, and the cast-off kids from all were welcome. So too were the “tagged boys,” who arrived on foot from far away with a card pinned to their clothes that simply said “Father Flanagan Boys Home, Omaha, Nebraska.” One Omaha politician, outraged that black children lived alongside white ones, complained, “If God had intended people to be all the same, why did he make them of different colors?”
Flanagan had a potent reply: “And could you tell me—what is the color of a so
ul?”
“I see no disaster threatening us because of any particular race, creed or color,” Flanagan later wrote. “But I do see danger for all in an ideology which discriminates against anyone politically or economically because he or she was born into the ‘wrong’ race, has skin of the ‘wrong’ color, or worships at the ‘wrong’ altar.”
A year later, the number of children in the Boys Home had grown to at least 150, far too many for the residence. And so Flanagan moved to a much larger building, the abandoned German American clubhouse on South Thirteenth Street. No one wanted the two-story, half-block-long building because of the fierce anti-German sentiment during World War I. Over the next three years some 1,200 boys would live there, only 386 of whom were Catholic.
By 1919, the year Flanagan became a United States citizen, most of his family had settled in New York—and a few had joined him in Omaha. His nephew Patrick was now working alongside him, and his sister Nora would become his lifelong secretary. He would soon be on the move again, this time to Overlook Farm, some ten miles west of the city. The 160-acre site would come to be known as Boys Town and would ultimately expand to encompass 1,300 acres. And when Flanagan’s father died at the age of ninety-four, his mother, who was ten years younger, also moved there to live with him.
AT ABOUT SIX feet one inch in height, with ramrod-straight posture, Father Flanagan seemed tall even when seated. He had a large brow and long jaw, but despite this, his soft eyes, warm smile, and smooth baritone voice conveyed a remarkable tenderness. “When you first met him, you could feel this warmth,” recalled Margaret Takahashi, a Japanese American who encountered Flanagan during World War II. “I’ve never felt that from another human being. He was so full of love that it radiated out of him.” That said, Flanagan could also be tough, and brusque, especially when dealing with juvenile authorities or state officials whose actions frustrated him. “When he spoke to you, his piercing eyes under thick eyebrows, studied you eagle-like,” recalled Father Clifford Stevens, a 1944 graduate of Boys Town who went on to become a priest. “When he laughed, the whole room rocked with his laughter, and when he was angry, he was like a bull.”