Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

10 Lou Mitchell Meets G. Gordon Liddy

10. Lou Mitchell Meets G. Gordon Liddy When J. Harding Fisher was a student at Fordham in the early 1890s, the president was Fr. Thomas Gannon, a man with none of the oratorical gifts of his famous successor, but with his own dry view of the world, which he delivered annually to his boys after the reading of grades before vacation: “Boys! Go straight home! Your parents are awaiting you! There are dangers lurking in the city! Go straight home!” Of course, the boys did not go straight home. They made their rounds of the alehouses and sang their songs; some got into trouble, and some of those got expelled. But the early Gannon was doing what most Jesuit presidents did in the broad sense, since they saw themselves not just as professors but as pastors and “fathers”: they drew the line between the values of the world, which were outside the Third Avenue gate, and those of the enclosed community on Rose Hill. But the march of history, including two world wars, the flood of the more worldly wise veterans onto the campus, the commitment to studying the mass media—which tend to overwhelm those who would cling to traditional values—and the astounding development of the Bronx, all had a way of slipping through the fence separating Fordham from the outside world. 202 16950-05_Fordham_181-226 6/4/08 11:44 AM Page 202 Politically, the icons of the 1950s were Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom Fordham men supported over Adlai Stevenson two to one; the Red-hunting senator Joe McCarthy, whom friends fought over daily in the cafeteria; and General Douglas MacArthur, who had promised to “fade away,” but who waited in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers for the right moment to return. We watched the 1952 Nixon “Checkers” speech on TV in the Ramskeller, the new snack bar that replaced the bowling alleys in Bishop’s Hall basement. On Wednesday afternoons, we donned our ROTC uniforms and paraded around the campus, past the newly opened Martyrs’ Court with its modern eight-man suites and common rooms, along much the same route the cadet corps marched in the 1890s, hoping the Korean War would end before we were called in. The 1950s were also the last years in which the Catholic Church projected a strong, some say dominating, image over American culture. Stars such as Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, and Pat O’Brien played tough but charming priests; Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living, with its total audience of thirty million, beat Milton Berle’s TV ratings; and combative “waterfront priests,” such as Jesuit fathers Dennis Comey in Philadelphia and John Corridan in New York took on the mob and inspired On the Waterfront. At midcentury, however, the social forces put in motion by the 1900 arrival of the Third Avenue El at Fordham’s gate—such as the new mass transportation, the apartment-building boom, and both middle-class and the immigrant population booms—were coming to a head, and the first signs of what would become the Bronx’s downward spiral began to appear. In 1904, the First Avenue Subway connected to the Third Avenue El at 149th Street in the Bronx, creating the Hub, a new business center with theaters, and in 1928, an Alexander’s Department Store. In the 1928 film The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson jubilantly tells his mother, “Mama dahlin’, if I’m a success in this show, we’re going to move up to the Bronx,” as if this were the fulfillment of a dream. Indeed, for ambitious middle-class Jews, Irish, and Italians determined to escape the overcrowded tenements of Manhattan’s East Side, a move to the Bronx was exactly that. With its network of six beautiful parks and its splendid four-and-a-half-mile Grand Boulevard and Concourse 203 L O U M I T C H E L L M E E T S G . G O R D O N L I D D Y L O U M I T C H E L L M E E T S G . G O R D O N L I D D Y 16950-05_Fordham_181-226 6/4/08 11:44 AM Page 203 stretching from 161st Street to Van Cortlandt Park; with its luxurious five-story art-deco apartment buildings, its tree-lined separate traffic lanes for pedestrians, autos, cyclists...