Occasional Papers 59

 [What follows is from a manuscript handwritten by Bernard Daly in 1974.  The only changes made have been in punctuation. Alfred Isacsson, O. Carm.]

It is a curious thing that at my age - sixty-three last birthday - that I should find myself taking up a pen to write a history.  I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have done it, if I ever come to the end of it.  But just the other night, Dick [Nagle] and I went down to Middletown for Mass and dinner and so many there mentioned that a few of us older guys should put some of our remembrances on tape.  They said there were many things that had happened in the past in the province and in Middletown that they knew so little about. Of course they heard Bert [Forrester] and myself talking about a few of these things and I realized that of that company only Bert and myself could remember these particular events.  And what is surprising, there are many more things to recall before ever Bert arrived in Middletown.  You see I was there two and a half years before him.  In the whole province, I think only Carmel Lynn and Albert Daly were there before me. 

What about Mel Daly?  Did he ever spend some time at St. Albert=s?   Did he go directly to Ireland?  Must find that out. [Mel came to Saint Albert=s in 1920 but was there only ten months and was sent to Terenure College, Dublin, Ireland, in 1921.   He studied there, did his novitiate in Ireland and went to Rome in 1923 to begin his philosophy studies. AI ]  

I had better search back into the past even if I have to refer to myself more frequently than I would really like to, but then I imagine someone will sift through this whole thing and separate the wheat from the weeds.  What if they don=t find any wheat?  That=s possible but perhaps this meager effort might inspire someone else do something better.

In the autumn of the year 1923, I was in the last - the eighth - grade of grammar school.  Graduation was to be at the end of January, 1924.  But I never did graduate.  So you see here is someone trying to write a history of a province of the Carmelite Order and he did not even graduate from grammar school.  This is how it happened.

Roger=s School was especially blessed with two principals.  One was named Earl E. Wilson and he was really the principal.  The other was Mr. Peter Daly who was the janitor but he it was who had an extraordinary influence over the children.  Mr. Daly=s two sons, Billy [Father Mel] and Walter [Father Albert], had already gone off to the Carmelites.  Billy was in Ireland and Walter went up to Middletown in September, 1923.  In Mr. Daly=s mind every boy at Roger=s School should join the Carmelites, especially if he belonged to St. Mary=s Parish and was of Irish descent.  The Carmelite priests that he had met were all Irish and he came from County Mayo himself.  Anyway, Mr. Daly often talked to me about being a priest and about Middletown.  But that wasn=t all.  When I brought the matter up at home, my mother knew about the Carmelites and about their first establishment in New York and about their saying Mass in the brewery on 29th Street.  She had been born and raised in 30th Street (327 E. 30th).

There must have been a great deal of talk between my parents and the Peter Dalys and with my relatives in new York.  I don=t recall too much of it. But there came a night in Late November when my mother, my Aunt May and myself walked down Second Avenue from my grandmother=s house on 37th Street (309 E. 37thSt - opposite St. Gabriel=s Church) to 29th St. and the old priory. (The building on 29th St. is at this writing still standing but it is waiting to be demolished.)  The first Carmelite priest I met there was Father Finbar O=Connor.

Father O=Connor was very gracious.  He was the Commissary General of the Irish Carmelites.  He was most enthusiastic about my going to Middletown, in fact it was he who suggested that I go there immediately after the Christmas vacation.  I could in that way have the companionship of Walter Daly on the trip to Middletown.  After talking to us for a half hour or so, Father went upstairs for a young priest just ordained who had only a day or so before arrived in New York. It was Father Vincent Smyth whom I was to know quite well later.  I was most impressed by meeting such a young priest.  His youthful good looks and charm had something to do with it.  He said he would see me at St. Albert=s where he had been assigned. Altogether it was a satisfactory meeting.  Little did we realize that Father O=Connor (Doc O=Connor) would be dead less than four months later.

Another item I remember is this.  My Aunt May was perhaps trying to impress the priests about the strength and duration of my vocation because she kept telling how even as a very young child I would always answer when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, Aa piest, a piest.@  I was somewhat resentful about that and felt like denying it not only because I did not remember any such utterance but because even then I hated baby talk by grown-up people.  Anyway I had never heard it before and even now I don=t believe it to be true.  There were other stories invented, I think, by members of the family and others concerning the early indications I gave of a calling to the priesthood while all I can remember is my wanting to be a cowboy.

Going away to school was something that I thought I knew about.  After all I had read all the Rover Boys series. (There were really two series of them.  One about Dick, Tom and Sam and the other about their offspring.  I forgot their names.)  I loved reading their books to the detriment of my school work and piano practice.  I even used to take my coaster wagon all the way down town to purchase any number of these and similar books for a nickle a piece at Finney=s, a second hand store. (My sister, nearly three years younger, used to read them too.)  I thought that like Colby Hall there would be adventure, entertainment and perhaps even a villain like Dan Baxter at St. Albert=s College, as it was called.

There was a great deal of preparing.  Trips down to New York: shopping at Hearns on 14th Street, traveling bag, sheets and pillow cases and other things.  Then there was Christmas and New Years and departure day.  The trip to Middletown from Stamford was not as easy as it seems today.  It began by taking the trolley to the Stamford Railroad Station where we got the train to Grand Central in New York.  My grandmother lived on 37th Street so we usually stopped there for lunch.  Then in the afternoon we took the Second Avenue trolley to 23rd Street and there we got the crosstown car to the ferry.  The ferry trip was a long one, down the river to the Jersey City Terminal for the Erie Railroad.  The train took us to Middletown after a two hour ride.  There we took a taxi to St. Albert=s, only twenty-five cents in those days.