EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter One - 1888-1893
Ancestry and Early Life

Early Memories

As an adult Lord had many keen memories of his childhood:

How young would I have been when I was circumcised?  I’ve no idea; yet the memory was vivid. . . the two kitchen chairs that were placed as I watched them, so that their tops became the support for an ironing board.  I recall walking in a long flannel nightgown and being lifted by our faithful doctor and placed upon the board, now draped with sheets.  The first strong whiff of either still lingers as a vivid memory.  And the catcher’s mask of a basket guard that covered the wound.  I must have been an infant; I remember only graciously gentle hands and our parlor which became my first experience with an operating room.¹

Remembering the Pullman Strike

The Pullman strike laid down its picket lines across the railroad tracks I must pass on my way to third grade.  Then, when the strike grew violent, the National Guard threw up an encampment in the center of Grand Boulevard, and we small youngsters came close to “real soldiers” (as we thought the clerks and carpenters, the druggists and salesmen, in uniform were) to our own thrilled delight.  We were not so thrilled when in the early dawn a roar of explosion broke the silence of our peaceful South Side, and as we ran to school we saw death and destruction in the semblance of a miniature battlefield after the final charge.  The ammunition caisson which had blown up during the night had wrecked the district and scattered the fragments of these volunteer soldiers in horror and death and agony over that peaceful boulevard.  I have never heard of bombings since without feeling that too early I had come in personal contact with the dread thing which is high explosive.²

Other Memories

Daniel Lord later described his parents as “My wonderful mother and my exactly right father.”³

My father always seemed to me a man of abounding physical strength.  He bragged that he had been a tireless farm boy who would without weariness carry his invalid brother on his back across the Herkimer hills.  Modesty personified, he never appeared without a shirt and vest.  The nude-from-the-waist males of the present would strike him as the depth of bad taste.  Yet when he fed coal into an overhead hopper in our basement, I could not fail to see the ripple of his muscles and the ease with which he swung aloft a cast-iron shovel heavy with hard coal.  I cannot recall his ever missing work for a day because of illness.⁴

Aunt Lizzie felt herself ecclesiastically blessed by living in rundown old Jesuit Sacred Heart Parish.  I knew no Jesuits; but to hear her talk of them, I had the feeling that she was spiritually shepherded by something close to the archangels.  I’m sure that predisposed me to my future associates, even if I later learned that archangelic qualities, like Jesuit villainies, can be vastly overstated.⁵    

    Daniel Lord, S.J, would later claim that he also inherited his grandfather Lord’s terrible hand writing.

NOTES

•   ¹  Lord., “A Patient Speaks His Mind,” 4, an unpublished pamphlet in the Jesuit Archives, St. Louis.  Lord wrote openly about the health issues in his life.  “So do you mind if I write to you about my own sicknesses and health?  Both have been important to me.  Both have always seemed clear gifts from God.”  Played By Ear, 341.  “My clinical record at St. John’s Hospital [in St. Louis] makes me a fairly complete textbook.  I was never to be without some sort of illness, recent or impending; and illness was never to hold me back from anything I though worth doing.”  Played by Ear, 348.
•   ² Played by Ear, 369.  The strike was in 1894.  This was probably the summer between first and second grade.  Lord’s reference to the third grade in the quote is confusing.  Perhaps he refers to the railroad tracks he would later cross on his way to third grade.
•   ³ Played by Ear, 19.
•   ⁴ Ibid., 345.
•   ⁵ Ibid., 15.

Chapter 2

Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner