25 years later, St. James ‘fraternity’ hangs tough
“Everybody says it’s pretty much a blue-collar school. Just go up the Delaware River – oil refineries, manufacturing – that was what we were. You had the West End of Chester and the suburban parishes – it was neighborhoodorientated. That was the lifeblood of the school.” — Ralph Galati, Class of ’66
CHESTER » In Mr. John Mooney’s English class, St. James Catholic High School students each committed 20-30 lines of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to memory to perform a class recitation, a fitting exercise at a school whose seal featured a ship to honor of its home city’s shipbuilding heritage.
St. James alumni descended on Eddystone Wednesday to mark 25 years since their alma mater’s closure and celebrate what the Alumni Association has dubbed “Keeping the Spirit Alive at 25” with a Mass at St. Rose of Lima Church and a luncheon at the Doghouse alumni hall.
In that quarter century, the Bulldogs have not suffered the fate of the title character in Coleridge’s poem, wandering the earth to tell strangers cautionary tales from their journey. Instead, the journey has brought them a new home at the Doghouse, a full calendar of social events, and a scholarship fund that has provided archdiocesan high school students over $1 million in financial support.
“It was more of a fraternity than it was a school,” said Alumni Association
President Mike Ritz, Class of ’71, who was elected to a 12th two-year term on Monday night. “You had fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins who went to St. James. Teachers were there 40 or 50 years – you could have someone graduating in ’93 talking about a teacher his father or grandfather had.”
“Everybody says it’s pretty much a blue-collar school,” said Ralph Galati, Class of ’66. “Just go up the Delaware River – oil refineries, manufacturing – that was what we were. You had the West End of Chester and the suburban parishes – it was neighborhood-orientated. That was the lifeblood of the school.”
For some students from the suburban parishes, getting to the blocklong school on 21st Street without paying bus fare could be a lesson in itself. “If you drove down MacDade in the 1960s, it was lined with guys in their jackets and ties, books under their arm and thumb out,” said Ray Didinger, Class of ’64, longtime Philadelphia sportswriter and NBC Sports Philadelphia commentator. “I met a lot of neat people in the course of going to 21st and Potter. I got an education before I ever walked in the front door.”
Alumni chaplain the Rev. Charles R. O’Hara, Class of ’59, celebrated Wednesday’s Mass with a Gospel reading from Matthew, Chapter 5: “You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world,” in keeping with the lamp on the school seal.
“If we are salt of the earth, God will say ‘Well, there are a lot of different kinds of salt shakers,’” O’Hara said in his homily. “People have their own kinds of gifts that they bring … to share in the journey of life; to flavor it in ways that are good and wholesome. That’s the mandate of our alumni.”
The alumni association has worked to fulfill that mandate of “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds” since 1993 with its educational and charitable work, awarding $1,125,000 in tuition assistance in that time and supporting 37 students in the upcoming school year with four-year partial scholarships.
The Legacy Committee, made up of the classes of ‘88-’91, supports the Todd Manga Foundation for Non-Violence through grants to students studying criminal justice or training as a first responder. Manga, Class of ’89, was killed while working as a security guard, waiting to join a police force.
The association’s Varsity Club II supports food banks around the county with its Thanksgiving food drives, and its Christmas toy drive produced $10,000 worth of toys for charities in 2017 alone.
Donations to its choir, the Blue and Gray Voices, support the scholarship fund. The choir has recorded four albums to date – two recorded at the Doghouse – and maintains a performance schedule of two parishes a month along with other civic and religious events.
“St. James alumni are the base, but we like to consider ourselves a full-blown Catholic charity organization,” said Ritz. The association includes non-alumni Friends of St. James members, who enjoy many of the same privileges as alumni.
Along with fulfilling the teachings of charity and stewardess, alumni have put the academics and character development they learned at St. James to use in careers and service to country.
Galati spoke to the Times at the Wednesday luncheon joined by fellow U.S. Air Force aviator and Vietnam War veteran William Creilly, Lieutenant Colonel USAF (Ret.), Class of ’64.
With a looming gradation from Villanova University and letter from the Chester Draft Board, Creilly volunteered with the Air Force. “It’s amazing how much they can teach you in 90 days (of Officer Training School),” he said. “More amazing – I had never been in an air plane until I flew down to Texas (for training). A year later I’m flying at 500 knots, three feet off the wing of another air plane.”
The erudite curriculum at St. James had prepared Creilly for the intensive year of study and training. “Not only the math but the sciences – our physics teacher Brother Dwyer was excellent. Mr. Mooney with the reading, vocabulary and broadening of your mind – it just made a difference.” Following the war, Crielly was sent to Temple University School of Dentistry and served as a dentist for the remainder of his 22 years in the Air Force.
“Sometimes you don’t know how good you are, at that young age (of graduating high school) … a lot of it was good foundation,” said Galati, drawing the response, “This is the guy who’s my hero,” from Creilly.
Galati, who served as an Air Force officer from 1970-78, earning the rank of captain, was shot down over North Vietnam on Feb. 6, 1972. He was held as a prisoner of war for 14 months, meeting future U.S. Sen. John McCain while both were held at the “Hanoi Hilton.” Released a month earlier than Galati, McCain visited Galati’s wife to give her an update on his condition.
A 2009 column from the Times’ Ed Gehart covering St. James Wall of Honor ceremony that year carried the headline “Even as a POW, Galati never lost his Bulldog spirit.” Gebhart wrote: If there was any humor about the horrors of war, Galati managed to find it in his remarks. “I was raw, immature and undisciplined when my plane went down. Come to think of it, that’s what John Mooney put down on my evaluation form at St. James.”
“When I went to St. James, I had a vague idea that writing was something I wanted to try,” said Didinger. “When I got out I know that was the course that I wanted to follow,” he said, crediting the work of English teachers Mooney and Don Bell.
Didinger recounted when the school launched an essay contest his sophomore year, Bell forced him to enter against his objections. “A week later it came over the P.A. system that winner is Raymond Didinger.” After being awarded a $25 savings bond in front of the student body, he thought, “Maybe Mr. Bell and Mr. Mooney are right about this writing thing.”
At an alumni event 30 years later, Bell felt enough time had passed to tell Didinger the truth about the contest opened to the student body of over 1,000 at the time. “I told him, ‘When you made me enter and I won, that had lot to do with crystalizing in my mind that’s what I want to do,’” said Didinger. “He said, ‘I guess I can tell you the truth now – only three guys entered that contest,’ hastening to add, ‘But you did win.’”