Introduction to Maryhurst Prep

In the early spring of 1958, my freshman year in high school, I was invited to Maryhurst Preparatory School, located at 1101 South Kirkwood Road. The purpose of the visit was to determine if I liked what I saw enough to want to become a Postulant in the Society of Mary, which was the first step toward becoming a member of that religious order. It was also a chance for the powers that be to see if they thought me an acceptable candidate, though that idea came to me only later, after several years had passed.

One of the Brothers picked up me and another boy whose name is lost in the fog of time and off we went to Kirkwood, an old established satellite community southwest of the City of St. Louis. Right off the bat we were each assigned to the care and supervision of a Maryhurst freshman. Mine was Gerry M., a tall, gangly slightly overweight boy who had a sweet smile and a quiet, even disposition. We hit it off immediately despite the great difference in size and temperament. He was over six feet tall and probably came close to 200 pounds. One of the first things we did after a brief orientation indoors was to tour the grounds.

By way of introduction, prior to 1920 Maryhurst had been the country estate of a rich industrialist named Brown who was an amateur but serious horticulturalist and silvaculturalist. He had an abiding love for trees, shrubs, and flowers and sufficient money to indulge himself fabulously by transforming the previously unremarkable rolling uplands into a storybook garden. He converted a large portion of the not quite 100 acres into an arboretum, which he called Brownhurst (hurst being the German word for forest), featuring plants from all over the world, even exotic orchids. After the Marianists acquired the property, much of the original equipment and facilities remained and were put to a variety of uses in the newly renamed Maryhurst Preparatory School, which was a boarding school where the boys lived from mid-August through mid-June.

By 1958, Maryhurst was a boys’ paradise filled with baseball diamonds, soccer-football fields, tennis-basketball courts, swimming pool, park-like woods, apple orchards, modern print shop, and fields of potatoes, strawberries, corn, beans, carrots, lettuce, etc. And even a chicken house with assorted feathery residents busily providing eggs. The front part of the property was dominated by the main building, a five-story, reddish brick structure that resembled a less architecturally complex and much more attractive version of Chaminade High School, a Marianist institution several miles to the north in the City of Frontenac. To the first-time youthful visitor it was an awesome sight. As you entered the property on a gently curving drive from South Kirkwood Road, ball fields were on the right and a large forested park filled with maple, hickory, pine, and oak trees was on the left. Owing to the profusion of trees, the building could not be seen clearly until you were almost on top of it.

That first sight is forever burned into my memory. Towering above and seemingly into the distance it was, and remains in my mind’s eye, one of the more impressive buildings I have seen, although nothing of its architecture could be called remarkable or even distinctive. The brick was dark reddish brown and the shape of the building vaguely a 1920s institutional gothic, but at the same time it was warm and non-threatening. It occupied a gentle rise amid a sea of greenery punctuated by flowery jewels cared for by the postulants, under the mock-stern eye of Brother Frank Perk, an older Working Brother who functioned as the chief gardener and farmer. The formal front of the building contrasted with the relaxed atmosphere of the rear, with the kitchen, scullery, receiving area, and curving service drive where I later learned to play volleyball and the most viciously competitive game of four-square (also known as bounce-ball) ever witnessed.

On the day of the tour my guide, Gerry M., led me all over the grounds. Among the sights were a number of structures located several hundred yards from the main building. Almost hidden by a grove of enormous evergreen and oak trees was an old wooden tower that served fifty years before as a vertical greenhouse. Gerry said that Bro. Frank had told him that the lower stories were part hothouse and part nursery and the upper were used for storage and contained a complex, mechanical system that may have watered orchids and other delicate, tropical plants.

Naturally, the second I laid my eyes on this incredible structure I was fiercely determined to explore the inside. Equally naturally, Gerry told me it was locked, no doubt wanting to protect himself in case anything went wrong. But that meant nothing to me. I was certain he wanted to get inside as much as I did but was afraid to risk the consequences. I never hesitated. After all, I was an invited guest. A visitor. What could they do to me, even if I violated the rules? All I had to do was to plead ignorance, especially if Gerry was cool enough to keep his mouth shut.

I climbed the steps and tried the door. Sure enough, it was locked. As soon as I saw the little smirk on Gerry’s face I knew I’d be inside within three minutes. Having smashed many windows in the course of my young life (and also having learned to replace the glass properly under the lash of my father’s harsh gaze and impatient instructions) I knew how to take them apart as well. Using my trusty Boy Scout knife — which was always in my pocket and was not against school regulations to carry it, different times indeed — to pry a strip of old, brittle putty loose, I simply pried a lower pane out of the glass panel in the door, and carefully set it on the step. I then reached through the opening and released the lock from the inside. In less than a minute I was standing triumphantly in the middle of the first floor in the building.

Poor Gerry stood on the small porch for a couple seconds, locked in the horns of a nasty dilemma. If he followed me in he was in deep shit for breaking the rules. But if he didn’t and I got hurt while he stood uncertainly outside with his thumb up his ass not knowing what to do, then he would be in really serious trouble. So he quickly followed me in, determined to keep me out of as much trouble as was humanly possible. Ha! Little did he know, as later years at Maryhurst would prove.

We walked around every floor, finding a junkman’s paradise. Flower pots of all sizes lined the stairs and the landings. Old, dusty, cob-webbed equipment was everywhere. Neither of us had a clue as to what it was originally used for and didn’t care. In the middle of a bone-fide adventure you don’t stop to pose unanswerable questions.

It didn’t take us more then a few minutes to get all the way to the top floor — it was either the sixth or seventh story. In the middle of the nearly empty room was a rickety ladder leading to a trap door in the roof. In a blink of an eye we were standing together at the top of the ladder, peering out the trap door we had forced open over the landscape below. We were rewarded with an incredible view that with passing time has ceased to exist. The old farm buildings looked strangely out of proportion from that perspective, so radically different from the way they appeared a few minutes before as we walked past them.

The entire grounds of Maryhurst and far beyond spread out like a blanket before us. Visually, it was a magic carpet ride. The roof of the main building floated in a sea of green trees. A group of Postulants playing baseball looked ridiculously small and downtown Kirkwood, about a mile distant, was all but obscured by early spring vegetation and by topography’s swells and swales.

When we finally came to our senses and wandered down from the tower we were tired yet thrilled by our adventure. Cobwebs and dust stains covered our clothes so we cleaned off very carefully because I didn’t want Gerry to get into trouble, and neither did he. He made me promise not to tell anyone what we had done or, “It will be my ass,” as he succinctly put it. I remember being so impressed by his casual use of vulgarity that I momentarily forgot my excitement. What he couldn’t know was that I had been hiding all sorts of good times from my parents and was already an expert in dummying-up around authority figures.

The rest of my impressions of that day are vague. I sat in a study hall for an hour reading a novel while everyone around me did homework. The desk was one of those relics from the 1930s, attached by long wooden runners to the desk in front and the one behind. Each desk had an inkwell for old-fashioned ink pens and a hinged lid that lifted straight in the air so the monitor at the front of the room could see instantly if you were opening it to retrieve some contraband. That’s about all I recall of that magical day but that experience was more than enough to make up my mind. I was ready for a new high school.