Assumption High School - Crusader Purple Raider Yearbook (Windsor, Ontario Canada)

Page 28 text:

♦♦♦♦♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ With a keen wit and a keen mind, Father John McIntyre moved fast through life. Anyone who ever saw him mounting the four flights of stairs to the old Jews Flat at St. Michael ' s will vouch that there was a symbol of his spirit. He was a dying man during his last few years at Assumption, but he could not rest. He worked in the Bursar ' s office, handling the books and records: not an easy job at Assumption College. He was not in the public eye here, but before his breakdown, he was intensely active at Basilian schools in Detroit and Toronto. A good teacher, a tough teacher, he was always interested in the problem students, the boys on the verge of expulsion. Somehow, he under¬ stood them. He let them talk, let them bring their troubles in the open; then he made suggestions. They were practical suggestions too, bred of long experience, not impracticable theories or dry sermons. There are graduates successful today, who were once given up by other staff-members, even by their families. When you meet them they talk of one Basilian only: Father Johnny McIntyre. You could talk to him, they say. When people say that about a priest, they imply many things: understanding, patience, sympathy, charity, friendliness and generosity. Perhaps especially generosity. When death came, Father McIntyre fought it with little more than his nerve. He lay on his death-bed grinning weakly at the worried faces about him. The source of that final courage was an invincible faith. When he was blessed by priest friends, his right hand would creep weakly and slowly up to make the sign of the cross. He always found strength for that. Loyal himself, he had faith in the loyalty of Christ. It is perhaps more than coincidence that his skill at showing people how to meet problems successfully never lessened. He was practical even to the end: for by his own death he showed us how to die.

Page 27 text:

1 4 REV. W. I. STOREY, C,S B. Battered was the word tor Father Bill Storey, He had a broken nose and a tough appearance, masking a deeply humble spirit. He was a veteran of the class-room Years at Toronto, Detroit and Houston had given him skill at handling any situation He taught Physics, Chemistry and Botany, and his chalk-covered cassock at the end of a day revealed the fire and enthusiasm that twenty-five years teaching had not quenched. He drove himself hard. Too hard, perhaps After school he worked on the grounds. The hedges were neat because he cared for them. The flowers that grew along the edges of the walks, and formed vases of beauty in the vast green spaces surrounding Assumption, were his flowers On winter week-ends, his sturdy little figure in the black top-coat with the tumed-up collar, could be seen waiting for busses to take him on those long tiling trips to parishes in Michigan. As you watched him pulling down the old bent fedora over his eyes, you ' d th ink sometimes that his little frame could never stand the buffeting. The time came in lune, 1944, when his heart suddenly gave out The students had gone home for the summer, but they came back to fill the Church with all the other friends of Father Storey. They felt his death deeply, these students whom Father Storey had challenged to harder and manlier work in the years past Somehow the thought remains that there is one memorial you cannot erase: the memory in the hearts of many boys of a IMe hard-working priest with a humble, lovable heart that was never closed to those about him

Page 29 text:

by DESIRE BA RATH PAGE TWENTY-SIX