Saints and Sinners: The virtue of good guidance
While some people want sainthood for the late Pope John Paul II, I have two nominations of my own: the late Mary Kerr, a high school principal, and Amos Alonzo Stagg, the late legendary football coach.
Once upon a time (hard as it is to believe) a bad boy was a kid who carried matches in his pocket or skipped school.
That was Jack Donovan’s weakness. Going to school was never on his list of “things to do.” Consequently, he spent a lot of time in Miss Kerr’s office.
Mary Kerr was our high school principal. Those of us who grew up under her stern and watchful eye at Garfield Heights High School in Ohio developed a vivid sense of right and wrong — a sense of what was expected of us. If we did wrong — if we failed to live up to what was expected of us — we faced the prospect of ending up “in Miss Kerr’s office.”
When that happened (and it happened to me once) it wasn’t all that bad. But we left her office with a sense that the wrong we had done had not gone unnoticed and that it was not expected to continue.
If Jack Donovan didn’t hold the record for the most times called into Miss Kerr’s office, he was a leading contender for the honor.
Strangely, Jack was never seen in her office in the spring, that season of the school year when the Huck Finn types could be counted on to lose their way to school. Spring was baseball season and Jack loved baseball. He was a star hitter and centerfielder on the high school team. If he wanted to play, he had to have his eligibility card signed each week by all his teachers; that meant showing up for class.
It was the only strategy ever devised by anybody to get Jack to go to school with any regularity.
Well, he grew up to be the mayor of the city where we lived and later was an executive with a big public utility company.
Jack and Miss Kerr had remained good friends until she died. Their paths crossed often when they lived in the same city. He was grown then and he ruled City Hall but she was always “Miss Kerr” to him.
My other candidate for canonization, remembered as a great innovator in college football, is Amos Alonzo Stagg.
Stagg’s University of Chicago football team had won another game one afternoon. Later he and his wife Stella celebrated with their usual victory snack of figs and milk. Afterward, Amos Alonzo Stagg was outside cutting the grass. It helped him to unwind.
He could always think better too when he was walking along behind the lawn mower. Whenever he wanted to unwind, he would say to Stella, “I think I’ll cut the grass.”
“He mows the lawn to death,” said Stella. Stagg was still pushing the lawn mower when he was in his 90s. When his family tried to get him to switch to a power mower, he refused.
It might have been one of the reasons he lived to be 103. Yard work, according to the latest medical findings, has several health benefits.
In his long career as a coach, which didn’t end until he retired at the unbelievable age of 97, Amos Alonzo Stagg raised not only his own two boys. He raised thousands of others.
Stagg’s Chicago football teams had five unbeaten seasons, won seven Big Ten titles and tied once for the national championship.
Stagg was 81 in 1943 when his little College of the Pacific team almost made it to the Rose Bowl after beating UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley. At the end of the season he was voted “Coach of the Year.”
When he was 100 they threw him a party. Somebody asked him, how did he want to be remembered? “I would like to be remembered as an honest man,” Stagg said.
Stagg invented the forward pass and the T formation and it was his idea to put numbers on the backs of players’ jerseys.
Stagg ate and slept football. Stella would vouch for the latter. With his plain living and commitment to developing the finer powers in others, he is for us an example of a saint’s “more excellent way.”
(George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.)