Many years ago I came across a small article in the Chicago Tribune with a list of things
that someone had determined would lead to a meaningful life. I clipped the article from
the paper and for many years it hung on a bulletin board in my office at work. At some
point, in moving offices or leaving the job, the list was misplaced and all that remains of
it is my memory of one item that seemed odd to me at the time: Learn your local history.
I think of this often now as I am immersed in Ascension lore. I have lived in Oak Park
since 1988, which makes me a newcomer by Oak Park standards. A Wisconsite, I
arrived in Illinois by a circuitous path through Florida and Alabama and with a checkered
resume. Never would I have foreseen my position as the keeper of the history of a
Catholic elementary school in a Chicago suburb. Understand, I do not claim that
history as my own and I welcome anything that any of you can tell me to correct my
misapprehensions or fills in the myriad gaps in what we know. But I take seriously my
responsibility for keeping it.
And I have found out how it makes my life meaningful. It links me to the past in a most
immediate way: it connects my life with other people who shared a way of looking,
literally, at the world around them. Bill Kevil (’33) looked out his classroom windows to
check on the model-T he bought with classmate Bob McDaniels in eighth grade. Chuck
Collins (’32) told me about watching the construction of the church in 1927—fascinated
by the workers throwing hot rivets up to the men on the scaffolding. The parish offices
are in the former convent so my office was home to one of the Ursulines, one who left all
good will in the walls. All of us who dwell there currently agree that the Ursulines were
happy at Ascension—good spirits abound.
We share these stories with anyone who has the patience for them—shocking but true,
not everyone shares this obsession—but particularly we share them with students. They
have heard stories of how an alum’s death in Vietnam affected his family, making both
the war and the family more real to them. They honor the memory of Tim Carpenter
(’71) every spring in their conjecture about who will win the Carpenter Award this year.
How much deeper are their experiences of Ascension, knowing that our gym was Mecca
in the Oak Park basketball world of the 1970s? Knowing that there is still a boxing ring
from the 1950s, carefully stored in the gym basement? (There are rumors, squelched
annually it seems, of a swimming pool there, too.)
I hope that their opportunity to hear these stories makes a difference to them. I know that
the school is stronger for our having mined, even superficially, some of its rich history.
And I know that my own life has been enhanced by the chance to learn about your lives
at Ascension. Thank you.
