“I’ll come anyway,” he laughed. “You’re talking to him. I’m the new Bishop of Buffalo.”
In the Hannan family, the boys became altar boys, choir members, or both. Though Tom, Denny, and Bill, whose beautiful tenor voice invariably assured him the solo in the “Gesu Bambino” carol every Christmas, sang in the celebrated St. Matthew’s choir (under direction of Malton Boyce), I — better at hitting a curve ball than “high C” — never qualified. (Asked later to try out for a singing role with the Mutual Broadcast System radio network, Bill refused. “Fortunately, I had enough sense to turn down a part in a flimsy radio company,” he always explained, “and became a lawyer.”) When we weren’t at St. Matthew’s serving Mass, we were on the altar of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at 1719 Massachusetts Avenue (now Georgetown University’s School of Linguistics) where The Madames of the Sacred Heart ran a select school for young ladies. (At age four, watching my older brothers going off to church for nightly May devotions, I burst into loud, protesting tears at being left behind. Grabbing me by the arm, my brother Frank offered sage, brotherly advice: “Listen, you little dummy,” he said, “once you start going to church you’ve got to keep it up for the rest of your life. Shut up and stay home as long as you can.” And I did — quite happily.)
The Farm
By 1927 my parents, having already acquired the houses on either side of us, decided to buy a farm eleven miles outside of Washington near Norbeck in Montgomery County, Maryland. With sixty acres and a sturdy holly tree farmhouse, it would be, they felt, both the perfect summer escape from the city’s oppressive heat as well as a new, educational venue for their children to learn the value of hands-on labor. And we did. The younger sons, including me, pitched hay, milked cows, and wrestled sheep for shearing which, lacking electric sheers, was done by hand — without question the hardest job of my life. (Properly sheering a sheep requires that he be flipped on his back and held down. If standing, you stand no chance since he’ll wrestle and wriggle free.) It was also an important spiritual lesson. Thanks to those woolly devils, the Gospel image of the Good Shepherd came clearly into focus: sheep do need a shepherd to care for them; otherwise, they collapse in the heat. (Visiting the Roman catacombs as a seminarian, though, I saw plenty of pictures of sheep and the Good Shepherd. There wasn’t a single image of one being sheared — a major oversight in Church tradition!) Besides this, we milked a couple of goats and five cows a day, developing, along the way, hands and forearms like rocks. Coupled with superb fresh food — corn, lamb, ice cream made from cream skimmed off the top of milk from Jersey cows — my appetite, and physique, blossomed.
Overseeing everything, was Milton, an African-American who lived with his wife Victoria, a large, dominant woman, in a house on the farm. Not only did we work under Milton, we also regarded him as family. In fact he was easier on us than our father, who brooked no distinctions when it came to color or class. Once, when a water system needed to be installed at the farm, my father sent out several black workers from Washington to do the backbreaking work — rendering my mother the only white woman within miles of the farm. I thought nothing of it until the day she surprised me with a comment. “Phil, people have been asking if I mind being the only white woman on the farm with all these blacks,” She recounted in disgust. “Well, I trust these black men as much as I trust the white.” Though I never mentioned our conversation to my brothers, the message was clear: whether white or black, those with whom you work deserve trust and respect — until proven otherwise.
In the country, our parish church was St. Peter’s Mission Church in Olney, three miles from Norbeck, where Mass, celebrated every fourth Sunday of the month, was attended by the whole family. One night the pastor at St. Peter’s came to dinner. Afterwards, strolling across the lawn, he announced that he was “measuring the distance for the light poles of a lawn fete.” From this was born an annual summer celebration featuring fried chicken, fresh corn on the cob (from our farm), and cakes of every description. With the Hannan boys responsible for the shucking and hauling of farm produce, neighboring families showed up to help with the cooking and serving. Not about to be left out, friends from Washington caravanned out to take advantage of the Depression price of “seventy-five cents for all you could eat.”
Blessedly, the Great Depression (1929-39) didn’t significantly affect our family simply because those relying on my father’s plumbing services, federal government workers, weren’t fired during these dark economic times. Though business slowed, the Boss never faced a complete shutdown. (Moreover, he made himself available for odd jobs — hanging pictures and fixing floors and roofs.) His goal was keeping employees on the payroll and finding them work — still plentiful in the “big houses” of people like the Duponts who employed thirty to forty maids — all Irish whom they knew wouldn’t steal. As a teenager, I learned my own personal lesson in Depression-era economics. In grammar school, the Brothers, stressing thrift and saving for the long haul, encouraged students to open a bank account with whatever coins they could scrounge up. When I left the eighth grade, my account boasted $100 which, thanks to the crash, plummeted to $6. Devastated, I simply started saving all over again.
In 1965, the Boss, having always planned to give ten of our choicest acres to the archdiocese for a church, finally did so in the name of our sister Mary, who died from breast cancer at age fifty-three. As a result, St. Patrick’s Parish in Norbeck, canonically established in 1966, was dedicated in December 1968 with my mother and her sons present (Dad had long since gone to his reward). Of course, there was no doubt about the name of the church — St. Patrick’s — though whether it was after Irish saints, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle or Patrick Hannan is yet to be determined.
Like all families, we had our share of trauma, sorrow, and loss — most notably the early death from breast cancer of our venerated sister Mary in 1959. Although Mary desperately wanted children, she and her husband, Robert Mahoney were never able to have any of their own. As a result, she simply spread her love across the world, starting in Tanzania where she established eight maternity clinics. While her husband was head of the public schools in Hartford, Connecticut, Mary was a member of the Hartford Housing Authority and President of the National Conference of Catholic Women. To avoid a conflict of interest, she turned down several political opportunities — an offer from Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff to be his secretary of state, as well as Republican and Democratic requests to run for Congress. The Mary Mahoney Village in Hartford, apartments for the elderly poor, are named in her honor. All of these charitable acts were performed in the same quiet way that our father performed his charity work through the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society.
Mary’s death — a huge loss for her husband — devastated all of us. I still recall the tenderness with which my mother personally cared for my sister in her final days spent in one big bedroom of the family home. As mentioned earlier, this was little Mary, the “preemie” who had survived long odds at birth, nursed to health in a room that my father had turned into an incubator. Life had come full circle. Thanks to my brother Frank’s brilliant diagnostic ability, I was graced to be with Mary when she died. Calling on a Sunday evening Frank told me, “Mary will die on Tuesday evening. You should be there for her comfort as well as Mom’s.” And, gratefully, I was. Mary died around nine o’clock that very date.
Early Thoughts of a Vocation
When it came to their children, my parents prayed for a doctor or lawyer — not a vocation. In fact, ironically enough, no one in our large, Irish Catholic family ever had a calling to the priesthood or religious life. Consequently, when I dropped the bomb at the dinner table, conversation ground to a halt — no small feat in a loquacious gang like ours. When someone asked if I planned to accept the scholarship offered by Catholic University (and follow my brother Bill studying law), I decided that the moment of truth was at hand: “No,” I replied, “I don’t intend to go there.” My father was aghast. “What do you mean?” “I’m thinking,” I continued slowly, “about going into the seminary.” My God, did forks drop onto plates! My announcement was a complete and utter surprise.
I can’t recall exactly when or how the idea of a religious vocation began simmering in my mind. Certainly, there was no Eureka moment. Like all boys growing up, I had a million ideas about what I wanted to do. Though I