Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

5 Jimmy Walsh Gets Started

5. Jimmy Walsh Gets Started Little Jimmy Walsh—thirteen years old, born the year the Civil War ended—had, then in his second semester at St. John’s, never been flogged, but he had heard about those who had been. He wrote to his parents on March 4, 1879, in one of his very frequent but very short obligatory reports, that there had been quite a stir in the dorms the night before because they had had the first big floggings of the semester. Indeed, one of the boys who had been beaten was at that moment packing his bags and would go home tonight. The chief flogger, he said, was none other than Fr. Raciot, vice president of the college. His method was to hit the boy’s hands with a strap. If the boy refused to hold out his hands, he would pull the offender into his office and “give him a good cowhiding with a rawhide” and then make him again hold out his hands. As might be expected, Jimmy’s parents, Martin J. and Bridget Golden Walsh, of Archbald, Pennsylvania, wrote back and asked their son why someone might be flogged. They had a large brood of twelve children (six of whom lived to adult life) at various stages of their schooling and careers, and they had, in many senses of the word, an investment in Fordham. On August 11, 1878, Fr. William Gockeln, 82 16950-03_Fordham_082-131 6/4/08 11:42 AM Page 82 the president (1874–82), had written to Mr. Walsh and accepted his son James for a straight $300 a year, passing over some of the other fees that St. John’s leveled consistently, with the understanding that Walsh Sr. would recruit more students from “your part of the country ”—the Wilkes-Barre area—for St. John’s. Let’s keep this agreement, said Gockeln, “secret and private” among ourselves. Well, the reason for the flogging was complex, and we can imagine that the parents would really have had to be there to understand. It seems that during night study time, between 8:00 and 9:00, when the classics students had the privilege of studying late while the others had to go to bed, the same Jesuit prefect had responsibility for discipline in the study hall on the first floor as well as in the dormitory upstairs. The boys in the dorm, some in cahoots with the boys downstairs, would make a lot of noise and upset him, and he’d have to run back and forth maintaining order in two places at once. To punish them, he canceled the privilege of night study. This called for revenge. The boys upstairs created a little machine that, when dragged across the floor, simulated the noise of rats loose in the dorm. One perpetrator got caught. Furthermore, five boys stayed out late. Of course, they had to be “thrashed” and were. Unlike his predecessor, Robert Gould Shaw, young Walsh talks of these rituals with awe rather than anger. Walsh was driven in part by the inspirational figure of his maternal grandmother, Peggy Kearney, who wrote to him from time to time and who is one of the reasons that, unlike his student contemporaries, Walsh could speak Gaelic. At sixteen, Peggy had made the ninety-three-day journey from Ireland in a ship the size of the Mayflower, during which time so many died that she was the only woman to survive and reach Quebec in 1826. She made her way to Pennsylvania, mostly on foot, where she married Martin Golden, a miner from County Mayo, and raised an enormous family, including her favorite, Jimmy. Her second daughter, Bridget, married Martin Walsh in 1864, and they opened a family store. When the family store began to fail, the Walsh family moved the business from Archbald to Parsons, but left the oldest boy, Jimmy, behind with a large group of uncles and aunts who encouraged his precociousness. At six, he rejoined his family a “young man” 83 J I M M Y W A L S H G E T S S T A R T E D 16950-03_Fordham_082-131 6/4/08 11:42 AM Page 83 extremely old for his years. The family business thrived, and the Walshes soon became known as one of the two wealthy families in the Wilkes-Barre area. The Walsh boys were quite conscious...