Chrome Dome & The Cub Reporter

You might remember from my March 30 post (Hoop Dreams At St. Joe's) that I moved from Illinois to Iowa in January, 1961, in the middle of my eighth grade. My school in Illinois, St. Joe's, had two rooms of eighth graders, about twenty boys and twenty girls in each room. My new school in Iowa, Our Lady Of Lourdes, also had two rooms of eighth graders, but the guys were in one room and the girls were in the other. Just my luck! Things did not improve on the social front when I started my high school career at Assumption High in Davenport. Assumption was neither co-ed nor all-guys; it was "co-institutional," a term which was foreign to me. That meant that both boys and girls attended the school, but the sexes were physically separated within the building. Woe was the male student who was caught by the nuns in the girls' wing! The upshot of all this was that from January 1961 until September 1963, I did not have a girl in any of my classes. I decided to do something about that.

At Assumption there were only a couple of courses which, due to the small enrollment therein, were offered on a co-ed basis. Those classes were held in a room off the hallway which ran between the boys and girls wings. One such class was journalism. You would think that the guys would be elbowing each other out of the way to register for journalism, if for no other reason than having the pleasure of being in the company of the fairer sex. In reality, such was not the case. For one thing, journalism was offered only to juniors, and those who applied for admission into the class needed to have achieved at least a B in freshman and sophomore English. The second reason was that the teacher, Father Wiebler, was one tough hombre, maybe the toughest teacher in the school. But I took a chance, applied and was admitted. I had no delusions of grandeur to become the next Grantland Rice or Edward R. Murrow. (I would have written "Woodward" or "Bernstein," but of course no one knew who they were until the 1972 Watergate break-in.) Journalism was simply going to be a step up in my moribund social life, a means to an end.

Almost every priest at Assumption had a nickname conferred upon him by the students. Wiebler's was "Wilma." I don't know the genesis of that nickname, but I do know we never had the guts to call him that to his face. Wilma was pretty much a celebrity, at least in the state of Iowa. Assumption did not have a yearbook. Instead, the student newspaper, The Knight Beacon, was published eight times throughout the school year, and the eight issues were kept in a faux leather binder - - red one year, white the next - - which the students could buy in the fall. When completed, the eight issues of The Knight Beacon were deemed to be "a book of the year." Not a yearbook, mind you. A book of the year. That was not a misnomer mistake you'd make in front of Wilma.  The Knight Beacon was his baby, and rare was the year when Assumption did not win some award for having one of the best student newspapers in the state, if not the entire Midwest. This made Wilma a legend in his own time. It also resulted in his standards for excellence remaining in place. The pressure on the newspaper staff was palpable. No student wanted to be responsible for a poor showing by The Knight Beacon.

The journalism class was taught with one goal in mind, viz., that the juniors would learn how to help the seniors (the previous year's journalism students) put out The Knight Beacon in the highly professional and accomplished manner that had become an Assumption tradition. Almost all of the articles appearing in the paper would be written by seniors, but on a rare occasion Wilma might bestow upon a junior the honor of submitting a story for publication. I was the recipient of such an honor, but it almost cost me my teeth.

In October, my assignment was to do an article on how the freshmen ("freddies") were getting along at AHS, now that they'd been high schoolers for a month. I needed an angle or a hook for the story - - I did not just want to interview a dozen random freddies - - so I found out the names of some Latin I students and gave them a call. At the time I was taking Latin III from Father Mulligan, aka "Chrome Dome," a thirty-something Irish tough guy who looked and talked like a longshoreman. He was not big on pleasantries, and assumed that because we were third year students our mastery of Latin was at hand. I knew Chrome Dome taught a couple of periods of Latin I in addition to his Latin III duties. Since the point of my assigned newspaper article was focusing on how freshmen were adjusting to high school life, their ability to fare well in Latin, a language they probably hadn't studied before in grade school, seemed like a good take-off point.

I conducted my interviews by phone. After intoducing myself, I should have begun the conversation with a general softball question. Instead, for many of the phone interviews, I started off the conversation with something like this: "So, how are you and Father Mulligan getting along?" What I meant to ask was "How are you getting along with your Latin studies?" but unfortunately my phrasing left a little to be desired. As luck would have it, word got back to Chrome Dome the next morning that The Knight Beacon was going to run an expose on unloved teachers, and that I was the reporter! Chrome Dome was waiting for me when I showed up for his class that afternoon.

He stuck his head in the door and called me out into the hallway. At that point I had no idea why he wanted me outside the classroom. He grabbed a large chunk of my upper shirt with his clenched fist, brought it up to my chin, and slammed my shoulder blades into the metal locker behind me. The veins were popping through his neck as he got right in my face. "I hear you've been trying to stir things up against me with the freshmen!" It wasn't until then that I realized how my phone conversations from the night before could have been interpreted. My mind was racing, weighing whether I should plead ignorance, innocence or stupidity. The thought of insanity never crossed my mind, but in retrospect that might have been a good choice. Amazingly, I also quickly pondered if I would be able to block a punch, in case he decided to throw one. I would not have been his first human punching bag.

I stammered a few unintelligible sentences and then thankfully heard a shout from a familiar voice. It was the voice of Father Charles Mann, the principal of the school and, coincidentally, the teacher I had for Latin I and II my freshman and sophomore years. Surely my guardian angel must have prompted him to walk down the hallway at that precise moment. Father Mann, who of course was nicknamed "Charlemagne" (get it?), may have kept Chrome Dome from killing me right outside the classroom. The crisis subsided long enough for both Chrome Dome and I to tell our sides of the story. I apologized to Chrome Dome and went back in to the classroom. After a few minutes, Charlemagne went on his way and Chrome Dome, still seething but not to the boiling point he had been moments earlier, returned to the classroom and conducted class without so much as a sideways glance in my direction. Yes, he had calmed down a little, but I was persona non grata. For the rest of that semester, things in Latin III returned to normal. It must have killed Chrome Dome to give me the "A" that I deserved.

My journalism career ended before it started, kind of like the glory days of my basketball exploits at St. Joe's. Wilma had a senior write the story about the freshmen, and I was assigned a less glamorous task which has escaped my memory. Less than three months later, my family moved from Iowa to Minot, North Dakota. My new high school, Bishop Ryan, did not offer journalism, so I was never put in the position of having to lie about my newspaper experience.