Nine Irish Lives

by Mark Bailey

  Flanagan knew that to raise money for what was to be an entirely self-funded endeavor, he needed to increase the home’s profile. As fate would have it, he turned out to have an uncanny talent for promotion, what one biographer referred to as “the Flanagan Flair.” He launched the Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home Journal, which was sold on street corners by the boys in the home, many of whom had once earned what little money they had as newsboys. There was often an article by Flanagan, explaining in simple, plain English the youngsters’ needs, their achievements, and how he hoped to help them.

  Flanagan’s efforts captured the imagination of Louis Bostwick, one of Omaha’s most prominent society photographers. Bostwick donated his time and talent to record every aspect of Boys Town’s activities. Whenever Flanagan needed a photo of his boys attending the home’s school, which was launched in 1920; or playing baseball or football or wrestling; or tending to the animals on its substantial dairy farm; or learning another vocation by working in the printing house or carpentry shop; or playing in their band or singing in their choir; or meeting celebrities who came to visit, Bostwick was there. His photos went not just to local newspapers but all over the country.

  According to Boys Town lore, early in their association, Flanagan told Bostwick how he had once encountered an older boy carrying a younger one piggyback, and the boy explained, “He ain’t heavy, Father . . . he’s m’ brother.” Bostwick was as moved as Flanagan had been by that simple statement and later had two youngsters reenact the scene and took a picture of it. Although that image—and that declaration—did become the iconic Boys Town’s trademark, the official telling of events is slightly different. In the official version, Father Flanagan saw a picture of two boys in Ideal magazine (one piggybacking the other) with the statement in the photo’s caption. Flanagan was reminded of the earlier Bostwick photograph and only then moved to make it the Boys Town trademark.

  In 1922, Flanagan created a children’s circus—grandly promoted as the “World’s Greatest Juvenile Entertainers”—that traveled the countryside in colorfully painted wagons pulled by horses. It lost money, but it certainly made Flanagan’s boys well known. On its inaugural tour, when a restaurateur in South Dakota insisted that the lone black performer in the circus eat in the kitchen and not with the entire group, Flanagan marched the children out, saying, “If we don’t eat with him, we don’t eat.” That night, the owner of the restaurant went to the show and gave the group a check for $500.

  Flanagan also quickly recognized the potential power of radio, and by 1926, he had an hour-long program called The Boys’ Period. The program featured the Boys Town Band and later its choir, advice to families and children, and inspirational talks by an upbeat young boy billed as Johnny the Gloom Killer. (Over the years, several different kids filled that role.) Johnny had a nationwide following, and Flanagan somehow arranged for Will Rogers, the former cowboy turned political commentator and the era’s most popular stage, screen, radio, and newspaper celebrity, to accept “election” as president of the Gloom Killer Club. Naturally, Flanagan had Rogers photographed shaking the hand of the young boy then portraying Johnny. Flanagan would also use radio to promote his philosophy and urge clemency for youngsters who he had learned were going to be jailed or executed.

  Omaha was a major railroad hub through which many top performers and national figures touring America’s heartland passed. Flanagan “became shrewd, clever and calculating as a fox,” according to one of his protégés. He kept an eye on the local newspapers for any report of a visiting celebrity and then made it his business to corral these figures into visiting Boys Town or at least meeting its residents, if only at the train station. The first such prominent visitor was Éamon de Valera, a leader of the movement for Irish independence and later prime minister of Ireland, who visited Omaha in June 1920 while on a fund-raising tour. He was photographed with Flanagan, several senior Catholic clerics, and a group of barefoot Boys Home residents. It is unclear why the children hadn’t worn shoes—perhaps a not so subtle way of indicating the home’s needs?

  Drawing on memories of his childhood home—that whitewashed farmhouse in County Roscommon where Flanagan and his ten siblings put on their family concerts—Flanagan had a strong belief in the power of music. “I like to think of music as being the language of the soul,” he once wrote, and in time the Boys Town Band was joined by a Boys Town Orchestra and, most prominently, the Boys Town Choir. The Boys Town Band greeted John Philip Sousa, the March King (composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever”), at Omaha’s train station in 1926; three years later, they welcomed band leader Paul Whiteman, dubbed the King of Jazz (and the man who commissioned George Gershwin to write “Rhapsody in Blue”).

  New York Yankees Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, fresh from their 1927 World Series triumph, also visited. As a child, Ruth, the son of a Baltimore tavern owner, was considered by his parents to be ungovernable. When he was only seven, they sent him to be raised by the clergy at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic orphanage and reform school in the city. There, Xaverian brother Matthias Boutilier taught him how to play baseball and became his surrogate father.

  Ruth told the youngsters that they should never be ashamed of their time at Boys Town. He would visit them several more times over the years, with his last visit near the very end of his life, when he was dying of cancer. Ruth said he simply wished to see Flanagan and his community one more time.

  Flanagan believed sports were essential to a boy’s development. Baseball had been the first team created, but the Boys Town football program was particularly successful. In the 1930s, they had one of the country’s leading high school teams, going undefeated in forty games between 1935 and 1940. Huge crowds filled the stadiums at out-of-town games. Flanagan himself was part of the draw, often appearing before the games began to demonstrate his skill at placekicking.

  As with every other activity at Boys Town, the football team was integrated. This led to a showdown in 1946 with the Blackstone Hotel in Miami. The Boys Town team, with a 10-and-0 record, was supposed to play the Florida state champions, Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic High School of Miami. The hotel offered to let the Boys Town team stay there for free—provided no black players were on the roster. Flanagan and his coach said they would never leave any of their players behind, including their African American quarterback, Tom Carodine. The hotel backed down, and Boys Town went on to win 46 to 6.

  Flanagan also was not shy about finding prominent people where they vacationed and showing up with his boys. In August 1927, the Boys Town Band serenaded President Calvin Coolidge at his vacation retreat in Rapid City, South Dakota. Coolidge apparently liked the concert enough to ask the band to come back the next year. (Flanagan also made sure that two African American members of the band were in the photo with Coolidge, just to emphasize that they were as much members of Boys Town as the white children.)

  Not long after the second concert for Coolidge, Flanagan began to impress upon his boys the remarkable rise to the presidency of Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, a poor farm boy orphaned in childhood. In August 1929, a year after Hoover’s election, Flanagan took forty boys to West Branch, Iowa, the president’s humble birthplace, and gave a speech noting that Hoover’s ascent “beckons to America that it must not be inattentive to its unfortunate young. . . . It is a forceful reminder that tucked away in an orphan mind may be the genius to guide the destinies of a great nation.”

  Of all the presidents during his time, Flanagan would develop his closest association with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In November 1932, while campaigning for the White House, FDR and his wife, Eleanor, stopped at Boys Town for a tour. Mrs. Roosevelt said it was “one of the most beautiful places” she’d seen while crossing the country, and FDR was equally impressed. After becoming president, Roosevelt would meet with Flanagan a number of times and seek his advice on juvenile issues.

  But no matter how crammed his schedule, Flanagan never lost focus on the children in his care. O
scar Flakes, an African American youth who arrived at Boys Town in 1922, recalled that Flanagan “was mother, father, everything to a young boy. He would wrestle with us, run with us, horse-ride with us . . . do anything a youth would care to do . . . shoot marbles with us.”

  Flanagan would even spar with some of the boys. Once, when a boy knocked off his eyeglasses, Flanagan’s mother, who was living at Boys Town at the time, shouted, “Come on you big kid, get in the house. Get in the house!” Flanagan dutifully obeyed.

  In 1936, Boys Town was incorporated as a village and placed on all of Nebraska’s maps. “Boys Town is not by any stretch of the imagination an orphanage,” Flanagan would write a decade later. “It is a complete community in itself—the smallest incorporated city in the country—with its own first-class post office, its own grade and high school, trade school, print shop, gymnasium, church, movie theatre, swimming pool, farm, infirmary, athletic field, dining hall, and apartments.”

  The town also had its own government and held elections for a boy mayor, who then appointed other boys to various town positions. True to form, Flanagan once arranged for one of Boys Town’s newly elected mayors to meet with New York City’s colorful Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in Manhattan and be photographed together at La Guardia’s desk.

  Regardless of his far-flung activities, Flanagan’s priestly duties remained central to his being. At Boys Town, he maintained a regular schedule of religious services. Recitation of scriptures, spiritual reading and prayer began at 6:00 a.m., with Flanagan always the first to arrive in the chapel. Similar services were held daily at noon and after the evening meal. Following the morning service, Flanagan met with his staff to discuss the day’s upcoming events, then headed off to other meetings. As Rev. Peter Dunne, a Boys Town school dean, recalled, “He was a whirlwind of activity.”

  THROUGHOUT MY OWN career focusing on the needs of children, I have tried to attract sports stars, movie stars, music stars, business leaders, and politicians much like Father Flanagan did, though with much less success. I’ve written articles under my own byline, coauthored opinion pieces with famous people, and regularly posted about Save the Children’s work on Facebook and Twitter—all in an attempt to call attention to children’s needs. I have even produced videos with Hollywood stars for Save the Children’s website and YouTube. Despite all this work—and believe me, while it may seem a little glamorous, it is still work—there are large swaths of Americans I have found very difficult to reach.

  For Flanagan, on the other hand, Hollywood came calling. It seems the seed for a movie was planted by a story titled “The Boy Who Shot His Father” published in the then-popular magazine Liberty. The article, by a prolific journalist named Edward Doherty, recounted not only the tale of a fifteen-year-old boy who murdered his father because the man had abandoned his family but other stories of abused and neglected children who found sanctuary in Flanagan’s Boys Town.

  A screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer named Eleanore Griffin thought the story on Father Flanagan would make a terrific movie. She went out to Omaha to interview the Irish priest, now over fifty years old. Initially, Flanagan was cool to the idea because he feared MGM would turn the story into another Oliver Twist. But when Dore Schary came onto the project, he convinced Flanagan that a great film could be made. It would next take some persuading to get the internationally renowned movie star and Academy Award–winning actor Spencer Tracy to accept the role of Father Flanagan. Two years earlier, Tracy had won much acclaim portraying a priest in MGM’s 1936 blockbuster San Francisco. Now, despite the rave reviews, Tracy said he didn’t want to play another man “with a collar turned backwards.” He finally relented when his good friend Eddie Mannix, MGM’s powerful general manager and vice president, convinced him to do it.

  Flanagan worked closely on the Boys Town script with Griffin and Schary, who won an Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1939 for their work. The story has some basis in fact but is mostly filled with fictional characters. Among them is a tough, streetwise kid named Whitey Marsh, played by then-seventeen-year-old Mickey Rooney, who comes to realize the value of Boys Town, and a small child nicknamed Pee Wee, portrayed by seven-year-old Bobs Watson, who idolizes Rooney’s character and forms an unlikely bond with him that is the sentimental center of the story. (Watson’s signature talent as a child star was his ability to cry buckets of real tears on cue. He had ample opportunity to display it in Boys Town.)

  Although well experienced in the ways of publicity, Flanagan agreed to sell the movie rights for a scant $5,000, believing that a successful film would prompt a flood of contributions. Instead, the public who flocked to the theaters assumed Boys Town already had plenty of money. The movie earned MGM more than $2 million. But Boys Town had to spend the full $5,000 it received to fix up the campus after the fifty-eight-member movie crew had left. Flanagan ruefully told a reporter for the New York Times, “Next time I come to Hollywood, I’m going to get myself an agent.”

  But Flanagan didn’t have to go to Hollywood, as, once again, Hollywood came to him. Having hit box office gold with Boys Town, MGM naturally wanted to make a sequel. It was to be called The Men of Boys Town, with Tracy again portraying Flanagan. This time, instead of an agent, Flanagan got something better—his old friend, attorney Henry Monsky, who negotiated a $100,000 fee for the movie rights.

  Over the course of these productions, Flanagan and Tracy formed a genuine friendship that endured for the rest of Flanagan’s life. When Tracy won the 1939 Academy Award for his portrayal of the priest, he sent the gold statuette to Flanagan with an inscription on it: “To Father Flanagan, Whose Great Human Qualities, Kindly Simplicity and Inspiring Courage Were Strong Enough to Shine Through My Humble Efforts. Spencer Tracy.” It is still on display at Boys Town.

  The success of Boys Town did much to inform a vast audience of the guiding principles behind Father Flanagan’s efforts. He had been writing and lecturing about them for decades—and battling against bureaucrats and politicians who ignored or opposed him—but now his name truly was box office gold, and his words, and his philosophy of focusing on the individual boy, carried extra weight.

  In a 1940 speech titled “To Cure, Not to Punish” given to the National Conference of Catholic Charities in Chicago, Flanagan summarized his philosophy:

  The juvenile court, which a generation ago was greeted with much enthusiasm as a cure-all for juvenile delinquency, has utterly failed. . . .The reformatories the nation over, instead of rehabilitating youth, actually have become schools of crime. . . . It is the duty of each family to provide security, protection, and direction for their children but when the home fails it is necessary for the community to devise ways and means to prevent delinquency. . . .

  Further, I would say that each police department should assign a certain number of picked men in plain clothes to work with juveniles exclusively, under the direction of this social service bureau. These men are to visit the homes of these boys from time to time and seek out the causes of their misdeeds and work to an end of helping the boy, instead of carrying a club of punishment over his head. . . .

  Of course, it will cost money, but even now thousands of dollars are being squandered in the manner in which we are handling juvenile delinquency through our juvenile courts and reformatory system. There is an old saying, “Crime does not pay,” but the public is finally learning that it pays the crime bill in taxes. I am certain that under such a set-up as I have outlined here, the cost of rehabilitating youth will be greatly decreased.

  I have reread these words countless times, and each time they give me goose bumps. They are so prescient and powerful, reflecting the very experience I had working with juvenile delinquents in Baltimore in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The juvenile court system was under-resourced and overwhelmed. The facilities where the kids were sent were called “training schools,” but they were little more than jails. And instead of plainclothes policemen who visited and worked with troubled juveniles “from time to time�
�� with the goal of “helping the boy,” Baltimore hired social workers who too often were able to do little more than push paper because of an overwhelming caseload.

  Flanagan was clearly not in favor of the state supplanting the role of the family, but he was a hard-nosed realist who understood that sometimes the family needed help. And his realism recognized the reluctance of the electorate to invest in rehabilitating troubled youth, so he made an economic argument: pay now or pay a lot more later.

  When he spoke these words, he was still running Boys Town. To speak up against the power structure and prod people to do something they don’t want to do takes guts, especially when the victims of the situation are overwhelmingly poor and powerless. And it takes special courage to do that while trying to raise funds for your own work from the very people you are prodding. It is much easier to complain privately, while still seeking both the private and public resources to do one’s work. I often hear colleagues say words to that effect: “Do the best you can, but don’t rock the boat.” “The system will eat you up, and then you won’t be able to help any kids.” Or countless times, “You can’t push rich people too hard to change their lifestyle, or they’re not going to help you at all.” Clearly, Father Flanagan thought otherwise.

  WHEN THE JAPANESE attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the news had a personal impact on Father Flanagan: four Boys Town alumni were serving in the military there, two of whom were killed—George Thompson, on the USS Oklahoma, and Donald Monroe, on the USS Arizona. Just six months earlier, Monroe had written to Flanagan that the movie Boys Town had been shown on the ship. “Everyone enjoyed it,” Monroe wrote. “All the boys on the ship ask me was Boys Town just like in the picture? I told them that was you up and down.” Monroe was an African American cook on the Arizona; his body remains entombed on the sunken battleship, now a national monument in Pearl Harbor.