Author Will Visit Prairie Trails Library
SOUTHWEST NEWS HERALD
February 20, 2008
By Dermot Connolly
Author John Ruane will discuss and sign copies of his memoir about growing up in St. Bede the Venerable Parish in Chicago’s Scottsdale neighborhood at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21 at Prairie Trails Public Library, 8449 S. Moody Ave., in Burbank.
The first printing of the book, Parish the Thought, An Inspirational Memoir of Growing Up Catholic in the 1960s, which was published last year, is almost sold out, but 100 books are being held for the signing at the library.
“During my talk, I’m going to be relating some of the funny stories I have included in the book,” said Ruane, 51, who was an altar boy while attending St. Bede’s along with a brother and three sisters. After finishing there, he went on to graduate from St. Laurence High School in Burbank in 1975.
“I get calls and e-mails every day from people a lot younger than me who say the altar-boy stories sound like they could have happened up until the 1990s, at least,” he said.
In the book, he tells of growing up as the second child in a family of five. His mother died when the children were young, leaving his father, an Irish immigrant, to raise the children alone. He also died prematurely, and the book brings the story from those struggles to the 1980s, when Ruane and his wife, the former Charlotte Danhoff of Burbank, brought their first child, Megan, to St. Bede.
The Ruanes now have four children and live in Roswell, Ga., where he has a marketing communications business. Besides Megan, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Alabama, they have Sean, 17, who plans to attend Lewis University in the fall, and 12-year-old twins, Maggie and Kelly.
“The inspiration for writing the book really was the realization that with everything changing so much, my four kids would not have the same type of school experiences as I had,” said Ruane, who said the family returns to the area often to visit relatives in the southwest suburbs.
“I thought that time period of the 1960s and ’70s really needed to be recorded, and reported on,” said Ruane, a former reporter who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times in the 1980s.
“When we were growing up there, we thought it would be like that always, but it is all different now.”
He said that when writing the book, he got some background information from a former priest who was stationed at the parish at the time, and the only names he changed were those of classmates, to protect their privacy.
Joining him at the book-signing will be the local Irish band, “ Three Men in Kilts.” All three members of the group, Marty Connolly (no relation of this reporter), Bill Hannigan and Dan McGuire are St. Bede alumni, and Connolly is even mentioned in the book. They will perform traditional Irish music before Ruane’s talk and during the signing.
The four got reacquainted when they appeared together on an Irish radio program last year and found they still had a lot in common. The Irish trio credits the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Bede for inspiring their musical talents at a young age while Ruane credits his fifth-grade teacher as the first person to encourage him to write.
“When I first heard the Kilts perform on the Irish Hour radio show, I was really impressed,” said Ruane. In Parish the Thought, Connolly is described as “the coolest altar boy on the face of the Earth, able to blow his fallen locks back over his head with the greatest of ease.”
“The four of us are proof that good teachers can have a very positive and long-lasting effect on some of their students,” said Ruane.
While at least one priest mentioned by name in the book doesn’t come across in the most favorable light, Parish the Thought has been well-received by the church hierarchy, with even Cardinal Francis George contributing a nice “blurb” to the back cover.
Ruane said he was honored when the current St. Bede pastor, the Rev. Bill Stenzel, invited him back last year to speak to the students.
“He has been really positive about it. It felt funny to be back at the church, talking about things I wrote about that happened right there,” said Ruane.
Fellow Southwest Side native John R. Powers, who wrote the popular novels “Last Catholic in America” and “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up” also contributed a blurb praising Ruane’s work.
“It was nice of him to do that. I don’t think my book is anything like his,” said Ruane of Powers’ fictionalized accounts of life in the Mout Greenwood neighborhood in the 1950s and ’60s that gained fame when one was turned into a play. “He is a little older than me, but between us, I think we covered the subject pretty well,” said Ruane.
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