MY FAVORITE PRIEST

A classroom hero
By James Gilhooley

n “Those, who can, do. Those, who can’t, teach.” So glibly spoke an escapee from a business program. But don’t you believe it. It only seems like yesterday morning. However, my hand rushing across my bald head reminds me it was early September of 1943.

I was a properly awed 13-year-old about to begin my long studies for the priesthood at Cathedral College on West End Avenue in Manhattan. Along with 130 other intimidated freshmen, I sat in the third floor combination auditorium and chapel.

The large faculty of priests sat on the stage in front of us. I had not seen so many Roman collars in one place since the previous year’s Holy Name rally in the Polo Grounds. Among the priests in the left rear was a strikingly handsome man. He looked as though he had been ordained a half hour earlier. I learned later that he was 28 years old. The muscles breaking out through his black suit made him look like an early Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was not hard convincing myself that such a person had to be a dynamite teacher. I prayed I would be in his class even if it had to be physics. God indulged me and into the green-walled Room 103 the next morning walked Father James Lynch.

His subject, he told us, was English and, in particular, grammar. I knew whatever he would teach would be news to me. I could not tell a noun from a pronoun even with a serious assist from a Seeing Eye dog. The syntax which he spoke of sounded like cold medicine that my mother gave me the month before.

I did not realize that morning that I was listening to one of the three great teachers I would have in my 12-year seminary education. It is a judgment in which many of his students down the years concur.

In short order, participles, adjectives, and even gerunds became my best friends. Diagramming a sentence on the blackboard ceased causing me to break into an uncomfortable sweat. I began to conjugate verbs with all the aplomb of a child prodigy. Father Lynch’s class had become an hour of charm.

Though my Irish mother might not agree with me, the $5 monthly tuition at the College had become for me the best bargain in Fiorello LaGuardia’s New York City.

Father Lynch invited a classmate (now Msgr. Patrick Carney of Hartsdale) and myself to work out with him one evening at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. It was half court basketball, which he let us win in a two-on-one game, and a swim. Yet, more than half a century later, it remains a night to remember—this eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with a classroom hero.

Freshman year became history too quickly. My final mark from him was something out of Fat City. I would never have Father Lynch in class again. And my future contacts with him would be minimal. Yet, he left his mark on me for a lifetime—a love of words for their own sake and a desire to move them around a page gracefully.

Bill Moyers’ line about Joseph Campbell fit Jimmy Lynch like that famous glove: “A good teacher is the most valuable treasure you can have in life.”

With distress, I learned in 1988 that he had become seriously ill while visiting his family in Arizona. This one-time illiterate, now 58, wrote him a gushing fan letter. I told him he was one of the best teachers I ever had and what he had meant to me.

A friend told me after his death that my message had probably meant a great deal to him. I have no way of knowing, but I would like to think it did. My only regret was that I had waited more than four decades to write it.

In any event, the T-shirt message worn by a bright education major on Mount Saint Mary College campus would bring a smile to Jim Lynch’s face: “Those, who can, teach. Those, who can’t, go into business.”

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