A Eulogy for John J. McLaughlin

Long time ago, they don’t have Latin, Greek or jug. Today’s snowflakes couldn’t take it.

Heard the knife attack story and the call in the hall that God bleeds. We were nuts.
Didn’t know he was a bad driver however as a server at the Jesuit residency I knew that more than one or two bottles left the table as a late night refreshment. So extra wine does not surprise me.

I haven’t watched the Group in year or so, but I had to laugh with Pat starting off this article with “Issue 1” was thinking he would end with John’s usual “Bye bye”

Crossfire was excellent. But Bob Novak had this overarching theory that all of society’s ills could be cured by lowering the capital gains tax rate.

I graduated in 1964. I have been back only once to visit the very best teacher I had ever had after he had suffered a stroke. He was living in retirement in the Rice Mansion on the campus.

The teacher was Fr. Edmund Welch. A left-handed professional baseball player (a pitcher) until he was more than forty years old with never an invitation to MLB spring training, he did not retire until his pitching arm was falling off.

He was my sophomore homeroom teacher and he taught us Latin (repeating Freshman basics, moving to Caesar's Gallic Wars and then to junior year material from Cicero's Orations), English Literature, American Literature, and Math (the Algebra I that we did not learn from football coach Joe Bosley, the Geometry that we were scheduled to learn that year, and some of the Algebra II that we would not learn from the Assistant football coach, Earl Lavery who had been a Baltimore Colt in the greatest Championship Game in history against the 1958 New York Football Giants).

He took a whole month to teach us how to take SATs and he had a marvelous bag of tricks for how to rack up scores far beyond your knowledge or even aptitude. My home room had 43 students (another thing today's snowflakes would have trouble tolerating), took PSATs after Fr. Welch taught us how, and of 86 scores (43 English, 43 Math) only one score was below 60 (SAT equivalent 600).

Fr. Welch was also famous for his rigorous regimen of homework and his reaction to any foolish failure to learn from it. As Father would say, what does not go in one end (your head) will go in the other (your backside via his pair of squash paddles. One was padded in foam rubber. The other not padded at all. He would put both behind his back and let the miscreant choose. Amazingly, no more than 3% of the time did the miscreant choose the hidden hand with the padded paddle.

When I visited Father Welch in about 1968, unnannounced since I just happened to be in the neighborhood, he was not in good shape. He had had a serious stroke. I asked him how things were at the Prep. In response, chords stood out in his neck, blood vessels in his instantly red forehead, he began to seethe. Finally, he got a grip and said firmly: NOT WELL! Baking courses! Modules in Modern Dance! And other horrors.

Other standards: Eugene Ondeck sneaking through the halls ad then shouting: Jug, Mister! if anyone talked in the hallways. Dean of Discipline Fr. Lawrence O'Neill roaming the halls with a golf ball which he would insert at your beltline and, if the ball, did not fall unobstructed to the floor: Jug, Mister! No pegged pants at Prep.

Finally, in my freshman year and your sophomore year, Prep's undefeated (and usually unscored upon) state large school football championship team. They invited at least three out of state Catholic powerhouse football teams to their schedule and slaughtered all three. The quarterback was Eddie McCarthy, killed in an auto accident just a couple of years later when he was quarterbacking the Yale football team.