Shattered Shells: Reflections on a Seminarian’S Fall and Recovery: a Memoir

By Frederick G. Giel

In a poignant memoir flush with humor and regret, the author looks back on the curious journey which brought him to a high school seminary on the University of Notre Dame campus in 1964 to study for the priesthood. There, in the boarding schools cloistered setting, each day was occupied by prayer, studies, silence, and labor, providing a straight and narrow path to ordination. Still, his better angels were unable to distance him from juvenile lapses, ranging from mindless mischief to egregious misconduct.

Spotting the troublemaker, the priests bestowed absolution and encouragement, but after two years, the clerics had seen enough. Expulsion and banishment followed, pushing him into the cold embrace of secular society. Years later, he returned to the same campus to conclude his educational sojournthis time in the prestigious law school. With the benefit of maturity and hindsight, the author reflects on the failings of his past and the lessons learned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524570668

Frederick G. Giel

Frederick George Giel is a graduate of Saint Josephs College (Rensselaer, Indiana) and the University of Notre Dame Law School. During a legal career spanning nearly four decades, he practiced the profession within corporate law departments in Indiana, Germany, Pennsylvania, and New York. Married to the former Karen Lee Feggeler, he currently resides in South Bend, Indiana. They are the parents of two childrenCourtney Danielle (Giel) Flynn (Granger, Indiana) and Jonathan Nikolaus Giel (Broomfield, Colorado)and the grandparents of Taylor Reese Flynn, Alexandra Reagan Flynn, and James Jonathan Flynn. Giel is also the author of Willowgate Park, a well-received work of fiction released in 2015.

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Copyright © 2017 by Frederick G. Giel.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2016920932

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-5245-7068-2

       Softcover       978-1-5245-7067-5

       eBook       978-1-5245-7066-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy and anonymity of the individuals involved. In some instances, composite characters have been created and utilized. Where necessary, timelines have been compressed to maintain narrative flow. Finally, the conversations set forth in this book are derived from the author’s recollections, but they are not written to represent word-for-word transcripts.

cover art by: Dwight Nacaytuna

Rev. date: 02/20/2017

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 First Night

Chapter 2 Where It Began

Chapter 3 Family Ways

Chapter 4 Bright Eyes

Chapter 5 They’re Just Kids!

Chapter 6 The Back Of Her Hand

Chapter 7 Useless Facts

Chapter 8 Breaking Away

Chapter 9 Next Day

Chapter 10 Livin’ In A Pew

Chapter 11 Forbidden Fruit

Chapter 12 The Wrong Crowd

Chapter 13 Gourmet Garbage

Chapter 14 Clothing Optional

Chapter 15 The Day The Music Died

Chapter 16 Deathly Rituals

Chapter 17 An Unwelcome Summer

Chapter 18 Musical Interludes

Chapter 19 All God’s Creatures

Chapter 20 Grim And Grimmer

Chapter 21 Up On The Roof

Chapter 22 Bitter End

Chapter 23 The Outsider

Chapter 24 Enter Owen

Chapter 25 Road Trippin’

Chapter 26 Early To Work

Chapter 27 Playing Politics

Chapter 28 Driving Charlie

Chapter 29 Loony Birds

Chapter 30 Making My Way Back

Chapter 31 Under Pressure

Chapter 32 Home Stretch

Chapter 33 Final Exam

Chapter 34 Soaring Mortarboards

Chapter 35 Departure

Acknowledgments

In memory of

Rev. William B. Simmons, C.S.C.

1927–2011

CHAPTER 1

FIRST NIGHT

Alone in the pew, I knelt in silence, grab-bagging prayers to pass the time. My mind wandered to the vacant seats all about me. Were the others late, or was I early? The benediction service was scheduled for ten o’clock sharp. Tardiness wouldn’t be tolerated, especially on the first night. No excuses. Be there or be gone.

I glanced down, nervously fidgeting with my new watch, an inexpensive Timex, which came my way as a final send-off gift. I accidentally jammed it against a wall earlier. Scratched, bruised, or busted? I wiggled my wrist and flicked the plastic face with my index finger. The second hand was chugging along, and against my ear, the ticking sounded strong. Satisfied, I dropped my arm and pulled down the sleeve of my bathrobe.

Still, little was going on around me. Frustrated at the empty minutes, I lifted my head, glaring in frustration at the open seats. I was dead tired, but I knew the religious service wasn’t going to start with the laggards milling around in the corridor.

It was nighttime, and the stained-glass window to my left gave no hint of outside light. Growing up, daytime was always kinder. Even the scariest things seemed softer and tamer in the light of day. I heaved a deep sigh, promising myself it would be better in the morning.

In time, I swung my head sideways and eventually turned around. In the back of the chapel, I spotted a priest next to the ancient wooden doors, herding the last of the stragglers to their pews. Meanwhile, I waited in the eerie silence, my eyes darting madly about me, taking in the moment. Memorizing it. Trying to enjoy it.

When the trickle of bodies was exhausted, the doors were slammed shut, the sudden clamor shaking the chapel. I cracked up, but a stern glare from an upperclassman told me to stifle.

Then in a blink, the deafening sound of the church organ swept away the uncomfortable stillness. I glanced at my watch once again. Right on time, just like they promised.

The wooden planks beneath our feet belched a melodic creak as we lifted ourselves from the pews, joining our voices in song. Awash in a soupy blend of Latin hymns and sweet-smelling incense, we rocked slightly on our slipper-covered heels as the priest and servers started the somber procession up the aisle. Finally, the beginning.

It was my first night as a seminarian at the close of a busy day, a day that began at home, a mile or so away. Ever the early bird, my dad was rooting about my bedroom at the crack of dawn, collecting my personal belongings from the modest pile at the foot of my bed. While the rest of us took turns in the bathroom, Dad loaded the suitcase and boxes into the trunk of the family Studebaker for the short drive to campus. After lunch, something cold and quick, we were on our way.

Upon our arrival at the seminary, we were escorted to the basement locker room of the large, three-story building by a cheery junior dressed in a coat and tie. When I noticed he sported eyeglasses even thicker than the blind-as-a-bat spectacles perched on my face, I felt oddly comforted.

"So do you go by Fred or Freddie?" he asked as we descended the stairs.

I looked at my parents, but they fell silent, leaving the decision to me. I had always been their Freddie, but I was a grown-up now, right? Not exactly, but a fourteen-year-old moving away from home ought to have naming rights.

"Umm, it’s just plain Fred," I finally responded in a voice pushed deep. My mother gave a slight nod, and knowing my dad, he would have wiped away a tear.

My personal effects were meticulously arranged by my mother on the locker’s wooden shelves, while my family and I looked on in amusement. Mom was on a roll, and she didn’t need our clumsy hands getting in her way. Thanks to a stack of soapy paper towels and considerable elbow grease, the shelves were surgically scrubbed before being covered with pieces of butcher paper, which she carefully sized, cut, and folded. My underwear and socks would never suffer the indignity of touching bare wood.

As the activity continued in front of my narrow locker, we were increasingly surrounded by other boys and their families in the crowded locker room as they stacked clothing onto their shelves. Their dusty, paperless shelves.

The tour of the building took us to the communal shower rooms, communal restrooms, communal study halls, and communal dorm rooms. The word communal is derived from community, and the latter comes from the Latin words munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together. The word, as a whole, means to give among one another. On the surface, the term is generous and warm. But in our new lives, it was the scalpel that would quickly slice away our individuality and privacy.

Dorothy was right, Toto. We aren’t in Kansas anymore!

After we knew our way around the enormous brick building, there was anxious chatter in the hallways and the parking lot while the farewell ritual got under way. I was aware good-byes were imminent, but I wasn’t ready to let go of my parents, sisters, or older brother. We loitered longer than most, even walking down to the lake for a final snapshot. It’s the last time we’ll be together as a family, my mom mused. I winced, wondering how I missed my obituary.

The moment of parting arrived, and just like that, they were on their way back home. As the Studebaker drove down the hill, I looked away so my folks couldn’t see the tears. After that, I busied myself, taking in the afternoon’s orientation activities and playing the extrovert I wasn’t.

I was a member of the freshman class at Holy Cross Seminary, a cloistered, all-male high school resting on a hill, overlooking one of the lakes on the University of Notre Dame campus. It was Sunday, September 6, 1964. The boarding school would be my home, and the priests and fellow seminarians surrounding me in the crowded chapel were my family. I didn’t know all the guys yet, but we’d live, learn, work, and pray together, preparing ourselves for the priesthood. No sense expecting support from our parents because we were swimming alone. The fact is, for most of the seminarians, there would be no personal contact with family members until Thanksgiving week.

We shrugged it off, knowing that estrangement from our families was necessary. Our parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents were vestiges of the past; the chapel and the people surrounding us were the new present.

Growing up, the last event before bed was a visit to the kitchen for a cookie and a glass of milk. No more. The religious service on the first night was the new norm. Prayer followed by sleep. Every night. Always in the chapel, where we would be wrapped tightly in our pajamas and bathrobes for the final act of the day.

I gazed about on the first night, noticing the relaxed mood on the faces of the sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They were the seasoned ones, having been there before. Their eyes revealed a tranquility not shared by the flock of freshmen crushed sardine-like into the front pews.

The newbies were in a state of cardiac arrest, our eyes and minds wandering wildly about the chapel while our shaky voices mouthed hymns and prayers. My own tightly folded hands were popping veins to the surface, flooding my palms with warm, silky sweat. Yet why? Nobody held a gun to our heads, and to a man, we wanted to be there, in this Alcatraz of our own choosing. Moreover, the religious service that night was fairly insignificant. A first pitch, the drop of the puck, the crack of a starter’s pistol. Nothing more.

When our families departed, we devoted ourselves to the friendships that would be essential in our closed society. Hellos and handshakes became the order of the day. Class schedules, textbooks, disciplinary rules, work assignments, and other provisions had been distributed throughout the day and in the week before our arrival. I spent considerable mental muscle trying to absorb the materials, in addition to the names, faces, and hometowns that were being flung in my direction.

In the early evening, a festive banquet in our refectory—the word used for a dining hall in a monastery setting—served as the annual welcoming ritual for the freshmen. The dinner was prepared by the nuns who lived and worked in our building. The meal was punctuated by opening remarks from members of the clerical administration, the collars as we would soon call them.

The banquet was followed by the movie Seven Ways from Sundown and a party in the auditorium. After that, we changed into pajamas, bathrobes, and slippers before rushing in silence to the chapel on the second floor; following the religious service, we would march in silence to the large dormitory rooms, where we’d bed down in our uncomfortable army cots.

The schedule on the first day was tightly controlled, which would be an important touchstone in our new lives. From the standpoint of regimen, discipline, and precision, this was a military life without the guns.

We were the Class of ’68, numbering fifty students and being one of the larger freshman classes in the seminary’s history. The incoming group hailed from as far away as Albuquerque, St. Petersburg, and Long Island. But there were also eight of us from neighboring parishes in South Bend, Indiana. In those days, when religion was a more prevalent component in society, the local parishes had large grade schools, which were populated with children from the sizable Roman Catholic families that filled the city’s middle-class neighborhoods. The grade schools were part of a feeder system into the religious life.

My eighth-grade graduating class at Holy Cross Grade School in South Bend numbered 158 students, which was split pretty evenly between the boys and the girls; three of us from the graduating class were part of the seminary’s freshman class.

At the time we entered the seminary, the sophomore class, which was comparatively smaller in its infancy, numbered only twelve students following attrition over the previous summer. The junior and senior classes were somewhat larger at twenty-five and twenty-seven students, respectively. Not everyone stayed. Most would leave over time at different stages in the journey. But for a seminarian fortunate enough to get past the early years, the odds of going the distance inched up a tiny bit; in the long and lonely sojourn in front of us, even miniscule progress was welcomed.

The seminary was owned by and under the direction of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a religious order of the Roman Catholic Church consisting of priests, brothers, and sisters. The members of the order carry the initials C.S.C. from the Latin Congregatio a Sancta Cruce. The order was founded in 1837 by Blessed Father Basil Anthony-Marie Moreau, C.S.C., in Le Mans, France. In the mid-1960s, many parishes, universities, high schools, grade schools, hospitals, and other institutions were directed and staffed by the C.S.C. order in the United States and other countries. At the time I entered the seminary, there were over two thousand priests and brothers in the order, carrying on its religious and societal interests. Although the clerical population is much reduced since then, some fifteen hundred Holy Cross members work and live today in sixteen countries on five continents, dedicating themselves to parish work, education, and missionary outreach.

Becoming a priest was my childhood dream. Some kids imagine themselves pitching in Yankee Stadium during a World Series with bases loaded, cameras flashing, and slobbering fans rocking the upper deck. I dreamed of Sunday mornings, there at the pulpit, my voice lifting the rafters. It was an aspiration flowing organically from my upbringing—a deeply religious structure at home, a church and parochial school around the corner, parents who dropped to their knees without embarrassment, and priests and nuns coming in and out of my life during the nurturing years. And let’s not forget the assigned seating at the kitchen table, with the Jesus calendar nailed to the wall right above my right shoulder. To be sure, nothing was left to chance in our house.

Even more, there was something mystical that I couldn’t ignore. Beginning in our younger years, we were taught that God calls a select few to the clerical life and that we had to be ever vigilant to recognize a calling. The nuns pounded away at the notion in our grade school, reminding us to listen carefully for God’s voice. Make no mistake, this was serious business. A calling isn’t an invitation to be taken lightly, the nuns warned darkly; it’s a command, and if summoned, one must serve. I remember it sounding pretty scary. Let’s face it, if God could toss Saul from a horse, a stubborn kid on a Schwinn should be easy pickings.

In the C.S.C. order, vows of poverty, obedience, and celibacy are taken upon ordination. Leading up to my first day in the seminary, I had already calculated the personal toll that the vows would impose on me. Poverty looked to be the easiest of the bunch. By the socioeconomic standards in existence in the early 1960s, my family was cemented in the lower-middle class. My mom could live with the middle part but wanted nothing to do with the other word. We are of modest means, she mumbled defensively whenever I asked. "It’s not the same as being poor."

We lived in South Bend, a mile from the Notre Dame campus. As children, we grew up on the west side, along with other working-class families. It was a comfortable enough existence, although it did not go unnoticed that the east side was populated by nicer houses, wider lawns, and a choicer pedigree. The east side was for the managers, and the west side was for the workers. That’s the way my dad explained it one day. White collar, blue collar. The wealthy, the others. Shrug, shrug. We accepted our place in the community’s caste system without complaint.

Growing up in our family, we didn’t want for anything, but we had far less than many families. Still, we had a roof over our heads, three squares a day, and something clean to wear to school. The clothes were generally hand-me-downs, but we didn’t know any better, and if we had, we wouldn’t have cared.

Besides, others had it worse, or so we were instructed. Stop your grumbling, my mother ordered sternly. Some people don’t even have a pot to piss in. Our pots were in the kitchen cupboards with our pans and plates, so her rebuke left me confused.

Every little bit counted back then. Trips to the grocery store were never complete until an inventory of the purchases was conducted at our kitchen table; in that exacting process, the prices stamped on the items were checked off one by one on the store’s cash register receipt just to ensure that the checkout girl (yes, they were always female) hadn’t overcharged our parents. You see, a nickel here and a dime there starts to add up.

With that dedication to thriftiness, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that our vacations were humble and close to home, restaurant dining was a rare treat, home furnishings were knockabouts, and the car (never plural) was somewhere just north of clunker status. All told, there wasn’t much in my background that was significantly above the poverty line, and there was nothing to suggest my life would be one of riches even if I chose another career. The vow of poverty wasn’t going to be a deal breaker.

I never gave much thought to the vow of obedience. In my mind, I’d have to obey superiors in any profession, so I wasn’t worried about the requirement. I was already obeying my parents, and that wasn’t overtaxing, except on those unforgiving nights when Mom served liver. Moreover, obeying God was a simple assignment already mastered. After all, it meant adherence to the Ten Commandments and not much more. I had those rules memorized in the first grade, and they never caused much consternation. What I did not immediately appreciate was the fact that there would be a different meaning to the word in the seminary. Each seminarian would be given a specific work assignment during each academic quarter, with each assignment referred to as an obedience. In the secular world, these would be called chores, not that the secular world mattered any longer.

I learned earlier on our day of arrival that I had been assigned to a daily work detail involving the sweeping, mopping, waxing, and buffing of linoleum floors on the main level of the seminary building. Within a matter of days, I would use all my strength to control a heavy-duty, rapidly moving buffing machine that outweighed me by at least two hundred pounds. The machine would win, and the wall I crushed would need some plastering and painting, even though the shiny linoleum floor would sparkle bright. But for now, as I knelt in the chapel on the first night, work assignments and an eventual lifetime vow of obedience were the least of my concerns.

Celibacy was the tough one. The word technically means refraining from marriage, but celibacy is a consequence of the obligation of continence, which means abstinence from sexual relationships. It includes all forms of sexual activity, including Clintonian variations, which would spill into the lexicon decades later. In the context of the clerical vow, celibacy means chastity.

At the time I entered the seminary, I was at a biological age to appreciate and quite honestly lust after the opposite sex. Still, was I giving up anything remotely achievable? To be frank, I was a dweeb in 1964, long before the word was invented. I wore thick black-framed glasses, weighed next to nothing, sported a bad haircut, had a face pitted with blackheads, and froze up at the very sight of a girl. Purely on a comparative basis, I knew the vow of celibacy would be the most difficult of the three. Yet I waved off my misgivings, darkly concluding that celibacy would likely be my lot in life even outside of the priesthood. And there you have it, readers. Whatever I lacked in confidence, I more than made up for in pessimism.

Beyond the vows, there was the matter of religious fervor. I came from a deeply religious household, which was directly around the corner from Holy Cross Parish on South Bend’s west side. As a family, we worshipped regularly. There were Masses, rosaries, retreats, novenas, benediction services, Stations of the Cross, stacks of holy cards, biographies of saints, bottles of holy water, a family Bible, and other morsels of our Catholicism occupying every nook and cranny of our childhood home. The family rosary was never enough for me growing up. When I went to bed, I always recited an additional one by myself. I really wanted to stop doing that, but I was fearful something bad would befall me or my family—a flood perhaps, or a plague of large locusts. I’m not kidding.

I always thought of myself as committed to my faith, but my spirituality was an economy-class variety. My friends in grade school would have described me as religious, but the other über descriptors—pious, saintly, and godly—were never aimed in my direction. Still, I felt it was enough until that first night. There in the crowded chapel, teetering precariously on my tired legs, I was witnessing an entirely different stratosphere of praying. My mind was bouncing off all types of thoughts and distractions, while most of the seminarians surrounding me seemed moments away from levitation.

Nonetheless, I was comfortable that I too had a calling. Besides, I always imagined myself as a maverick priest who would someday spread the Word of God in ways transcending glassy-eyed prayer. Heck, I imagined immodestly that I might ride the horse all the way to the papacy.

On the first night, the journey was finally under way, and for several minutes, I actually relaxed. I was confident in my ability to analyze the priesthood as both a religious calling and an eventual occupation. The vows of poverty, obedience, and celibacy were thoroughly considered in the years leading up to my arrival. They’d challenge me, but if they were part of the package, so be it. I told myself that I was in it for the long haul. I knew there would be years of study, prayer, reflection, loneliness, and work, but I was prepared to accept all of it on my way to ordination.

Stop, wait!

Just then, it happened again. Right before the religious service ended, the panic set in—the doubts, the sweat, the galloping heart rate. I grabbed the pew in front of me to hold my balance, and I asked myself a simple question: How on earth did I end up here?

CHAPTER 2

WHERE IT BEGAN

It was there in my dad’s garden all along, right smack in the middle of his tomato plants. I was a first-grader at the time, down on all fours, ripping at the weeds that were crowding out the vegetables. Given the choice, I would have been elsewhere, but chores always came first.

Chores.

I hated the word. It was a polite term to dress up the involuntary servitude imposed on us for a meager allowance. Anyway, it was my lucky day. Between the tomato plants, I spotted an arrowhead in the dirt. My dad was working a hoe over near the back fence, digging down for another row of string beans. I approached him with my find. This isn’t a real arrowhead, is it? I asked, desperately hoping it might be.

He kneaded it between his fingers, flicking off a grungy layer of dirt. Of course, it’s real, he replied. There used to be Indians throughout this area, even in what is now our neighborhood.

Heck, I really wanted to believe the guy, but he was an active conspirator in the other hoaxes that defined my childhood. One by one, they were knocked down—Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and then the Tooth Fairy. Who was next? Smokey Bear? If I couldn’t trust Dad on the others, how could I possibly have any confidence in his Indian tales? He sensed my skepticism and disappeared into a stack of boxes over the weekend, eager to prove his point.

I remember the grin on his face when he reemerged with a thick clump of papers in his hands. To keep things simple—remember, I was young, somewhere between wearing diapers and memorizing multiplication tables—he called the pile of documents his property records, but I’d later learn he was showing me something lawyers refer to as an abstract of title. The cover page displayed our Diamond Street address in South Bend.

He took me through the stack, page by page. The dusty old manuscript started with a conveyance on August 29, 1821, from the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi nations and ended about twenty transactions later with the names of our parents as the current owners as of November 30, 1949. My jaw dropped. Jumpin’ Geronimo, we were on Indian land!

Yeah, Indians. And sometimes Injuns. We actually called them that back in the day. Native Americans? Don’t get silly. If somebody had asked me as a first-grader to define Native Americans, I would have mentioned wolves, deer, and squirrels. I think the nuns would have agreed.

South Bend was originally settled by fur traders in the early part of the nineteenth century, and the activity was concentrated on the shores of the St. Joseph River for mercantile reasons. Long before the traders arrived, the valley had been populated by American Indians, most recently by the Potawatomi tribe.

Growing up in the city, we saw the Potawatomi name plastered all about. It was on a school, a zoo, a street, a park, and a variety of other locales in and around South Bend. I suppose it seemed surprising back then because we never ran into any actual Indians in the grocery store or at the corner bus stop. My dad assured me they were a part of our history, and the arrowhead and property records eventually proved his point. I shouldn’t have been surprised. When you grow up in a state named Indiana, surrounded by Illinois (from the Algonquin), Michigan (from the Chippewa), Ohio (from the Iroquois), and Kentucky (also from the Iroquois), the history and heritage are pretty hard to ignore.

The Indian tribes divested land and nearly everything else as the outsiders moved in, and the natives gradually disappeared. Located there on the southernmost bend of the river, the city became South Bend, and the shores of the river attracted factories and commerce, which used the river’s water for electrical power and transportation.

Soon after, the city became known for a university with a French name, which emerged right outside the city’s border, and an automobile company situated just blocks away from a bustling downtown. Neither the college nor the automobile company was considered elite back in 1950 when I was born. There was a notion that Notre Dame might eventually take its place as a premier institution of higher learning if it had more books, smarter professors, different students, larger buildings, and smaller football players. In contrast, there was never a belief that the car maker would ever be anything other than second tier, what with the top rung of the ladder being hogged by the car companies with Detroit roots.

Although the automobiles have not been manufactured in South Bend for more than a half century, Studebaker Corporation’s impact on the city’s life, culture, and people has been indelibly etched. For many decades, the company was the heart and soul of a growing Midwestern industrial center. And it wasn’t just cars. Studebaker shared the local stage with Oliver Chilled Plow Works, which filled agricultural needs, and the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which sourced its wooden cabinets from a local factory. Beginning in the 1920s, Bendix joined the party, servicing the auto and aviation industries.

The automobile legacy began a few years in advance of the Civil War. It started with the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company in 1852 when the company originally produced wagons for farmers, miners, the military, and others. Later, as the Studebaker Automobile Company, it entered the automotive business in 1902 with electric vehicles and in 1904 with gasoline ones.

South Bend flourished as the production plants grew. Waves of immigrants—German, Irish, Polish, and Hungarian, followed much later by African American and Latino—were absorbed in the neighborhoods on the west side of town near the factories.

In the city and surrounding area, families formed, and babies were born. Little boys grew up to be strong men, and they fed the automotive beast with their sturdy backs and calloused hands as soon as adulthood was reached. Small-timey? Not a chance. At the time I was born, some four hundred thousand cars and trucks were being manufactured annually in the community. In its heyday, a new car body was stamped out every few seconds. However, as the years passed, competing with Detroit for dollars and market share went from difficult to impossible. And as for style, it wasn’t even a contest. Near the end, the Studebakers were said to be clunky, boxy, and unattractive; today they are described as being ahead of their time.

Significantly, from the standpoint of my family, Studebaker Corporation was the catalyst that brought Francis Giel, our father, to the community where Theresa Kagel, our mother, was raising her siblings in a fatherless household. But for the cars, this book would be missing its author and its story.

Our dad was born on the last day of December in 1907. Ordinarily, that would have meant an income tax deduction for the entire year; however, Dad predated the constitutional amendment, which gave birth to the federal income tax. He was the youngest of six children, and with his oldest sibling already twenty-one years of age and his youngest nearly eleven years old, our dad was an unexpected surprise to his parents. He grew up on the family farm in Scottville, Michigan, but he was pretty much alone over the years as his siblings abandoned the farm for the outside world.

Dad’s schoolhouse was a one-room building, cramming together all eight grades under the care of one teacher, and she was no stranger. Indeed, the young lady up at the blackboard was Cecilia Giel, our dad’s older sister. Sadly, she passed away from a sinus infection—yes, those things happened—when he was only sixteen years old. By that time, he was already done with school, thanks to pressure dressed up as encouragement from his own dad. You can’t go to school forever, his father warned, especially if you’re going to be a farmer.

For the next six years, our dad was there with his own father, working the farm and tending to the chickens, milking cows, and work horses. Although agriculture was his father’s avocation, the passion wasn’t shared by Dad.

As he grew older, Dad missed Louie, his older brother, who had already relocated to South Bend to build cars. Despite the age difference, our father and his older brother spent considerable time together on the farm when our dad was younger. In fact, Dad and his brother were youthful entrepreneurs at one time with a tiny business selling skunk pelts. It required trapping and skinning expertise, along with extraordinary luck, because the skunk had to be sacrificed and stripped before it sprayed its captors. If Dad and Uncle Louie were sprayed, which occurred frequently, they buried their clothes in the loose, wet soil near their lake before heading back to the farmhouse with their prized furs.

In 1929, Dad left the family farm in Michigan to join his brother in South Bend. Barely in his twenties, our dad heard the clarion call of the automobile factory. However, soon after Dad arrived, Uncle Louie lost his sight in one eye as a result of an industrial accident at the Studebaker plant. Owing to bitterness over the incident, Uncle Louie convinced his younger brother to look for work elsewhere. Dad found jobs in and around South Bend, but in the early years of the Great Depression, the work offered little in the way of dollars or stability. Eventually, he located a position at Saint Mary’s College, the all-girls school across the road from the Notre Dame campus. In his new position, Dad tended to the crops, mended fences, hauled coal, labored in the boiler plant, and buried the nuns when they died. It was a hardscrabble existence, but it put food on the table. In time, Uncle Louie and Dad were able to move their parents from the Michigan farm to the South Bend area.

And then as fate and the angels would have it, Dad found our mother one night on the dance floor of the Palais Royale, an opulent dance club that opened in South Bend’s busy downtown in the 1920s. Mom was a South Bender by birth, entering the world in 1915 in the family home on Oak Street. In fact, while our Grandma Rose was delivering her infant on the second floor of their wood-framed house, friends and neighbors were gathered on the first floor for the wake of Grandma Rose’s mother. Life and death, happenstance and fate.

Mom was the eldest of four children, spending her childhood and a portion of her adult years on that cobblestoned street with the wooden outhouse in the backyard. Growing up, she was an accomplished violinist and an excellent student with a promising future outside the home. Sadly, life changed forever when her father died in her teen years. Her widowed mother, our Grandma Rose, went into an emotional shell, leaving Mom to raise her siblings. With the assumption of ever-increasing responsibilities on the home front, high school graduation concluded our mother’s formal schooling.

When our parents originally met, the country was moving toward war. Their brief relationship ended when Dad was drafted. Our mom spent the war years in the early 1940s working for a credit bureau located downtown and volunteering her time in the community.

There was a civic event one evening to bid farewell to a large number of young men who were going off to war. Mom was an organizer of the event, and in the course of the evening, she was asked to offer a toast. As she later related, public speaking was not her forte.

She stepped up to the microphone, looked out at the enlistees and guests, and paused to collect her thoughts. Then in a strong voice and with her glass held high, she declared, Here’s to bigger and better privates! The audience heard something in the salutation, which our saintly mother never intended. By the time the laughter subsided, she had already resolved to leave future toasts to others.

Throughout the war years, our father was stationed with the army in Africa and Italy in a sound surveillance division immediately behind the infantry. On June 6, 1944, the day that will be known forever as D-Day, as the allied troops were storming the bloody beaches of Normandy, Dad and his unit were hunkered down on the floor of the Pontifical Palace, the summer residence of Pope Pius XII in the Italian city of Castel Gandolfo. Decades later, when asked how he and his fellow troops spent that day and night, he looked away so I couldn’t see the tears in his eyes. Well, he offered quietly after a pause, we prayed.

When the war ended, he returned to South Bend. He and our mother found each other once again and got married in 1947 at Saint Mary Catholic Church on South Bend’s west side. Fittingly, it was the church for German Catholics. If they had been Polish Catholics, they would have gotten married at Saint Hedwig Church; and if they had been Irish Catholics, the nuptials would have been at Saint Patrick Church. The three churches were clustered together in the same neighborhood, but the nationalities worshipped and married separately. Society’s melting pot was still decades away in South Bend’s ethnic neighborhoods.

The postwar years brought peace, but prosperity was slower to follow. Dad had the benefit of a steady job at the South Bend Supply Company, a local source for plumbing and electrical supplies, while our mom was a full-time homemaker once the babies began arriving. Our parents were still living in Grandma Rose’s house on Oak Street when my older brother, Bob, was born in 1948, and if Mom had had her way, the living arrangement wouldn’t have changed anytime soon. With her responsibilities to her own mother and younger siblings, stubbornness came easy. Mom said she wouldn’t move.

And that was when I stepped in. Well, it wasn’t a real step because I hadn’t been born yet. But I was in the womb, and with only four months until my escape, my mother was forced to contemplate her own. I was the first word