A Boystown Transformation - Transcript
[Narrator]
My father kept a box... a metal box with a sticker on the lid.
Small, silver and worn it was both remembrance and torment for him. Within its tight confines lay the regrets of his boyhood, the memories of his mother’s grief and desperation and the confidence of a Catholic priest. He kept it hidden for years, or at least I never saw it for that long.
One night, sitting in our car in the summer as I recall, he unburdened himself to me. He asked for my understanding of another fifteen year old boy who decades before made an unforgiveable mistake. That boy had taken another man’s life in a fit of rage. After an exchange of words and a gunshot the young man walked into the nearby café and called the police, explaining that he had just killed someone. That young man was my father.
He spoke of his mother, how she had come to the jail to bring her teenage son different clothes to wear. How she had sobbed and prayed to save his life. It was 1939. My grandmother had seen a movie about a place where boys could be helped, run by a priest in Nebraska. She begged for her son’s life and my father was released to Father Flanagan of Boys’ Town. The newspapers of the day as far away as Chicago followed the ordeal and later I would find my father’s face, gaunt and afraid at fifteen, staring up at me from old newspaper headlines.
Father Flanagan brought my father to Boys’ Town in 1939. Away from his home and a certain death sentence. Some forty years later I could still see regret in my father’s eyes and the gratitude in his voice as he spoke of an incredible journey guided by this Catholic priest.
He said he was lonely at first in the small village made famous by Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney, so lonely that he ran away. He slept in cornfields and walked at night, reaching home only to be re-arrested almost immediately.
In desperation, my grandmother traveled to Omaha to plead another chance for her son. To me she had always seemed cold and distant, yet to my father she seemed a savior. Begging another chance for her son’s life as her wet boots stained the floor of Father Flanagan’s living room and the priest scowled in disapproval.
Boys’ Town took him back, yet Father Flanagan did not hesitate to remind my father that he had saved him from the electric chair. In 1941 my father graduated from Boys’ Town High School, his stutter preventing him from being class valedictorian. He shook J. Edgar Hoover’s hand at the ceremony, yet my father never smiled more than when he recounted Father Flanagan’s approval as he accepted his diploma.
Four decades later sitting next to my father, I came to understand the youth of fifteen who had done a terrible thing. What could I do but forgive him?
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