As if that was not enough fun, we went with the Farmer family to see the Kansas City Royals play the Seattle Mariners at Kaufmann Stadium in section 314, on the first base side on June 10, 1986. I still have the tickets for the game that was supposed to start at 7:30 PM. However, a thunderstorm and tornado warning delayed the start of the game for a couple of hours. I went to the men’s bathroom there. Behold, right there in the men’s bathroom was the World Series Trophy that the Kansas City Royals had won in 1985. During the rain delay, they took the trophy from the main concourse with an armed guard into the men’s washroom. What a sight to behold! I told the others about it. They eventually played the game and the Kansas City Royals beat the Seattle Mariners 9-5. However, we were very tired that night when we got back to the hotel. Have you ever seen the baseball World Series trophy in person?
Visiting Dick and Judy Farmer in Olathe, Kansas
That afternoon of June 9, 1986, we took off for Kansas City, or more specifically, Olathe, Kansas, where Dick and Judy Farmer lived with their two boys. We headed south on I-35, off I-80 in Des Moines. Olathe was right off I-35, about 23 miles southwest of Kansas City, but we arrived there late. Olathe is the county seat of Johnson County, Kansas, the fourth-most populous city in the state of Kansas, with a 2020 population of 141,290, not a small town. Olathe was founded and incorporated by John T. Barton in the spring of 1857, who kept thinking that this land was so beautiful, that he named it “Olathe,” the Shawnee name for “Beautiful.” Olathe served as a stop on the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Santa Fe Trail. After the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the trails to the west lost importance, and Olathe faded into obscurity and remained a small, sleepy prairie town. However, in the 1950s, the construction of the interstate highway system had Interstate 35 link Olathe to nearby Kansas City, Missouri. This led to a tremendous residential growth, as Olathe became a part of the Kansas City metropolitan area, a suburb for working class people. The median household income was $96,548 with an 83% white population in 2020. Dick and Judy Farmer had moved to Chicago, more specifically Matteson, IL, and then returned to Kansas to work for an insurance company. While in Matteson, they were part of our pinochle club. Judy was great at singing the lyrics of any tune from the 1960s or 1970s. The next day, June 10, 1986, we had a busy day. We met Dick and Judy with their kids, and went with them to Independence, Missouri to see the Harry S. Truman Library and then his home. In the afternoon, after lunch at McDonalds, we went swimming at the Oceans of Fun Park that still exists today. This water park opened in 1982, in Kansas City, Missouri, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the adjacent Worlds of Fun amusement park. When it opened, it was the largest water park in the state of Missouri, now currently owned by Six Flags. We ended that busy day with a baseball game to watch the Kansas City Royals. Have you ever visited friends on a busy day of sightseeing?
The Great Depression under President Hoover
In late October, 1929, the New York Stock Market crashed with a 15% drop. The worldwide economy began to spiral downward into the Great Depression. President Hoover viewed this as a lack of confidence in the financial system. Thus, it was the fundamental economic problem facing the USA. His response to this Great Depression was widely seen as lackluster. He sought to avoid direct federal intervention, believing that the best way to bolster the economy was through the strengthening of businesses such as banks and railroads. He attempted to put a positive spin on Black Tuesday. In the days following Black Tuesday, the Federal Reserve announced that it would cut interest rates. At the same time, Hoover opposed congressional proposals to provide federal relief to the unemployed, as he believed that such programs were the responsibility of state and local governments and philanthropic organizations. Herbert Hoover had taken office hoping to raise agricultural tariffs to help farmers reeling from the farm crisis of the 1920s, but his attempt to raise agricultural tariffs became connected with a bill that broadly raised tariffs on all goods. President Hoover felt that he could not reject the main legislative accomplishment of the Republican-controlled 71st Congress, so he signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act into law in June 1930. The result was that Canada, France, and other nations retaliated by raising tariffs, resulting in a contraction of international trade and a worsening of the world and USA economy. A series of bank failures in late 1930 heralded a larger collapse of the economy in 1931. While other countries left the gold standard, Hoover refused to abandon it. By mid-1931, the unemployment rate had reached 15%, giving rise to growing fears that the country was experiencing a depression. Hoover allowed his opponents in the Democratic Party to define him as cold, incompetent, reactionary, and out-of-touch. While Hoover continued to resist direct federal relief efforts, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York launched the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration to provide aid to the unemployed. Democrats positioned this program as a kinder alternative to Hoover’s alleged apathy towards the unemployed. The economy continued to worsen, with unemployment rates nearing 23% in early 1932. Hoover finally heeded calls for more direct federal intervention. In January 1932, he convinced Congress to authorize the establishment of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which would provide government-secured loans to financial institutions, railroads, and local governments. The same month the RFC was established, Hoover signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, establishing 12 district banks overseen by a Federal Home Loan Bank Board, like the Federal Reserve System. He also helped arrange passage of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932, an emergency banking legislation designed to expand banking credit by expanding the collateral on which Federal Reserve banks were authorized to lend. As these measures failed to stem the economic crisis, Hoover finally signed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, a $2 billion public works bill, in July 1932. National debt as a fraction of GNP went up from 20% to 40% under President Hoover. He wanted to tax high earners at a 63% rate on their net income. He doubled the top estate tax rate, cut personal income tax exemptions, eliminated the corporate income tax exemption, and raised corporate tax rates, but the USA still had a deficit. Then President Hoover lost to Roosevelt in November, 1932. What do you know about the Great Depression?
President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964)
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. Although he was born to a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa, Herbert Hoover grew up in Oregon. His father was of German, Swiss, and English ancestry, while his mother was from Canada. He was one of the first graduates of the new Stanford California University in 1895. After graduation, Hoover took a position with a London-based mining company working in Australia and China. He rapidly became a wealthy mining engineer. In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, he organized and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an international relief organization that provided food to occupied Belgium, from London. When the USA entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the Food Administration. He became famous as this country’s “food dictator.” After the WWI, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to the starving millions in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia. Hoover’s wartime service made him a favorite of many progressives, and he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1920 USA presidential election. He then served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Hoover was an unusually active and visible Cabinet member, becoming known as “Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments.” Between 1923 and 1929, the number of families with radios grew from 300,000 to 10 million, as Hoover’s tenure as Secretary of Commerce also heavily influenced the early development of air travel. He won the Republican nomination in the 1928 presidential election and defeated Democratic candidate Roman Catholic Al Smith in a landslide. In 1929, Hoover assumed the presidency. However, during his first year in office, the stock market crashed, signaling the onset of the Great Depression, which dominated Hoover’s presidency until its end. In the middle of the Great Depression, he was decisively defeated by Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Hoover’s retirement was over 31 years long, one of the longest presidential retirements, since he was only 58 when he left office. He authored numerous works and became increasingly conservative in retirement. He strongly criticized Roosevelt’s foreign policy and the New Deal. In the 1940s and 1950s, public opinion of Hoover improved, largely due to his service in various assignments for presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, including chairing the influential government restructuring Hoover Commission. Critical assessments of his presidency by historians and political scientists generally rank him as a significantly below-average president, although Hoover has received praise for his actions as a humanitarian and public official. What do you think about Herbert Hoover?
The Herbert Hoover Library in 1986
We went west on I-80 to Iowa from Matteson, IL, on our first day on the road west in the summer of June 8, 1986. We, Margaret, Joy, and I, stopped at West Branch, Iowa, a small town of less than 3,000, off I-80, about half way between the Illinois border and the Iowa city of Des Moines. West Branch was the birth and burial place of Herbert Clark Hoover, the only USA president born in Iowa. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum commemorates the 31st president of the USA from 1929–1933, President Herbert Hoover. This library was one of thirteen presidential libraries run by the National Archives and Records Administration. Growing up, my only thoughts about Herber Hoover was that he was the president who led America into the Great Depression. Everybody always made fun of him and loved FDR, who tried to lead the USA out of the Great Depression. However, my stay at this library changed my mind. Hebert Hoover was a very successful man before he became president and had a very successful life after his presidency, since he lived over 30 years after his term as president, to be 90 years old, much like President Jimmy Carter. He was very instrumental in providing food during WWI. After WWII, he worked with President Truman and Eisenhower on various commissions. However, he and President Roosevelt never got along. I have a brochure from that place, plus three postcards, one of his original house, another of his cradle, and still another of his grave. Three more postcards were about his one room school house, his father’s blacksmith shop, and the museum itself. Finally, three postcards were about the Oval Office in Washington, and Hoover using a television for the first time in 1927, as well as a postcard of him and Truman together for the opening of this library. In 1954, over 20 years after he was president, a group of Hoover’s friends incorporated the Herbert Hoover Birthplace Foundation to raise money for the preservation of his birthplace and the area around it. One of their ideas was to build a small museum. With Hoover’s approval, work began in the late 1950s. The Library and Museum was officially dedicated and opened to the public on August 10, 1962, Hoover’s 88th birthday. President Hoover and former President Harry S. Truman were present at the dedication. Hoover explained that there were already three libraries for President Roosevelt, President Truman, and President Eisenhower, that had unique documentation. Today, they were going to dedicate a fourth, his own. I always assumed that every president had their own library, but I guess that it is not true. The original Library and Museum building was expanded several times, with major additions in 1964, 1971, 1974 and 1992. Holding almost 300 collections, this Library is an important center for the study of conservative thought, agricultural economics, famine relief, commercial aviation, political journalism, government efficiency, and reorganization, isolationism, and USA foreign policy. I was impressed on how simple things were, yet there was a lot there. Have you ever been to the Herber Hoover Presidential Library?
1986 summer vacation in the wild west
During the summer of 1986, where would we go? I decided, “To go west, young man!” Along the way, we were going to visit the presidential libraries for the USA presidents from 1928-1960, except for FDR from 1933-1945, who was from New York. Thus, we would made stops at the Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) Presidential Library and Museum at West Branch, Iowa, off I-80. We would then head south on I-35 to Independence, Missouri for the Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) Library and Museum, and finally west on I-70 to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (1953-1961) in Abilene, Kansas. We were going to stop in in Olathe, Kansas, just outside Kansas City, Kansas, to visit Dick and Judy Farmer, who were in our pinochle group when they were living in Matteson, Illinois. After our stops in Independence, Missouri, we would head west to Abilene, Kansas, then across the Kansas prairie to Pikes Peak in Colorado. We were going to visit Margaret’s first cousin, Art Klein, in Colorado Springs, and the Air Force Academy. We would head north on I-20 across the Rockies to Denver, Colorado, to visit my first cousins, Frances and John Finnegan in Littleton, Colorado. Along the way, we would visit Estes Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Continental Divide, and Steamboat Springs. We would head further north to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Teton National Park, and the Snake River. Next up was Yellowstone National Park and the “Old Faithful Geyser.” We ended up in Cody, Wyoming, the home of Buffalo Bill. We would visit the Battle of the Big Horn with Custer’s last stand in Montana. Finally, we would hit western South Dakota, with Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills, Deadwood, and the Homestake Gold Mines. Then it would be back to the Kleins in historic eastern South Dakota, with a stop at Wall Drug Store and the Badlands. In Dell Rapids, South Dakota, we would visit Margaret’s mother and father and her brothers and sisters, and their kids. Then we would have the long car ride home. We would have visited with friends and relatives in Kansas, Colorado, and South Dakota. Meanwhile we would have seen the sights in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. This would be a mix of personal visits with sightseeing on the great western or midwestern plains, the Rocky Mountains, and national parks. We would get to see the wild old west, the open prairies, the great sights, and some relatives. Who could ask for anything more?
My daughter Joy gets confirmed
With all this renewed interest in my work on Confirmation, I was confronted with the reality that my daughter Joy was going to be confirmed at the age of twelve. She had been baptized as an infant and received her First Communion and Confession at the age of six, when she was in second grade. She was now in seventh grade. I casually mentioned to her and Margaret that this was not the right way to received Confirmation. Margaret was the junior high teacher at St. Lawrence O’Toole, and always prepared the seventh and eighth grade children for Confirmation. She insisted that they needed to make a commitment. I pointed out that historically, Confirmation was received before Communion, just like in the Orthodox Church, not several years after Communion. Well, I could not convince either Joy or Margaret of my idea. As my daughter said, “they always do it this way.” Margaret insisted on the importance of learning about the sacrament and commitment to the Christian life. I saw that I had a losing cause. I could not even convince my wife and daughter, how could I convince anyone else? However, at the Easter Vigil of that year, Ronnie Schulz, who lived two doors down from us on the cul-de-sac on Allemong Drive, told me that he was converting to Roman Catholicism at the Easter Vigil. He wanted to know if I could come. I had been with him when he lost his bid to be on Matteson Board of Education, 159, to a write-in candidate a few years earlier. I said yes and convinced Margaret and Joy to go with me. I had not been paying that much attention to the Easter Vigil over the past few years. I was happy to know that Ron Schulz was entering the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. I had been a consultant to the group that Trier Professor Balthasar Fischer led to reinstate the catechumenate as a preparation for initiation into the Catholic Church. I was glad to see that it had happened. I wondered if they had put Confirmation as part of the initiation rite. To my great surprise and joy, there it was. Very single person who was baptized that night was confirmed by the local pastor, not a bishop. I was delighted beyond words. What a pleasant surprise! The world-wide Catholic Church had restored Confirmation to initiation, like in the ancient church which I had studied so much, in this new RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. My little contribution to the world wide Roman Catholic Church of over a billion people was this insertion of Confirmation into the adult admission to the Roman Catholic Church. It had happened. If I did nothing else in my life, having Confirmation inserted into the rite of initiation after Baptism and before Communion was a life-long dream come through. I was so mad that I had not kept up this. I tried to read all that I could about this RCIA. I know that Margaret wondered after Church if it was a valid Confirmation since no bishop was there. I later read that the pastor of a particular Church at the Easter Vigil could confirm people, in the absence of a bishop. Adolescent Confirmation was still a reality, but adult Confirmation was now in the right place, between Baptism and Communion, throughout the world-wide Roman Catholic Church. Professor Fischer had prevailed. My little talk had convinced the others on the committee. Each year on Holy Saturday during the Easter Vigil, thousands of people are baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church in the USA alone, using this Order of Christian Initiation of Adults. Have you ever been to a Roman Catholic Easter Vigil worship service?
Rev. Paul Turner (1952-)
Rev. Paul Turner has a website today that says, “Paul Turner is pastor of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City, Missouri, and director of the Office of Divine Worship for the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph. He holds a doctorate in sacred theology from Sant’ Anselmo in Rome. He is a consultor for the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. His publications include Ars Celebrandi: Celebrating and Concelebrating Mass (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2021), Words Without Alloy: A Biography of the Lectionary for Mass (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2022), and Present for God’s Call: An Overview of the Rites of Institution and Ordination (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2022), and dozens of other titles. He wrote the introduction, emendations, and annotations for the reprint of The Liturgical Year by Adrien Nocent (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013). He is a former president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, a member of Societas Liturgica, and the Catholic Academy of Liturgy. He is the recipient of the Jubilate Deo Award from the National Association of Pastoral Musicians and the Frederick McManus Award from the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions. He serves as a facilitator for the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. As pastor of diverse parishes, he spent many years ministering in a state prison, serving a Hispanic and multi-ethnic community, and providing assistance to the homeless. He plays harpsichord, piano and organ. He enjoys the Kansas City Symphony and the Kansas City Royals. He answers questions about the liturgy daily on his blog.” He also has written over 117 books and pamphlets. In my book, Confirmation at an Impasse: The Historical Origins of the Sacrament of Confirmation, (New York: Linus, 2011), I wrote about him, “In 1993, Paul Turner published an excellent English translation anthology of the historical texts on confirmation, building on his earlier work on confirmation at the time of the Reformation. In 2000, Turner tried to come to grips with this vexing question that keeps occurring around confirmation, the correct age of those to be baptized, confirmed, or receive communion, in Ages of Initiation. Historically, the three sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and communion have been given either all together at a single occasion, or at two different occasions, or on three separate occasions. Turner has clearly shown the present-day dilemma of the various ages or ways of receiving Roman Catholic confirmation: 1) RCIA adult confirmation; 2) emergency infant confirmation; 3) the age of reason confirmation; and 4) the maturity teenage confirmation that may range from 10 to 18 years of age. He also dealt with this confirmation dilemma in greater detail in his 2006 revised and updated version of Confirmation: The Baby in Solomon’s Court. Historically, Paul Turner has shown what Christians have done over the centuries. This age-old question of “maturity” is tied to the new twentieth century problem of the “initiation sacraments,” and whether confirmation is an initiation or a commitment rite. Turner has also studied the question of “Adolescent Confirmation” that arose in the 1970s and reached its peak in the 1990s with a series of articles edited by Arthur Kubick. Turner’s 2003 article on “Confirmation” in the second edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia is an excellent instructive overview. His book on the history of the catechumen and his web site both deal with the question of the initiation instruction and education. Have you ever heard of Rev. Paul Turner?
Correspondence about my doctoral thesis on Confirmation in 1986
Just when I thought that no one cared about my doctoral thesis on the Origins of Confirmation, I got a couple of letters that showed that someone cared about it. During the mid-1980s I got a letter from Rev. Paul Turner, who wanted to write his doctoral thesis on the history of Confirmation. He wanted to know if he could read my thesis. I had no idea how he found out about it. However, I decided to send it to him. He returned it to me a couple of months later. He told me that there was nothing left for him to do since all he would do was repeat my work. He later published a work at Collegeville in 1993 called the Sources of Confirmation: From the Fathers Through the Reformers that translated into English many of the original text documents that I had cited in my work. However, he also did some work on Confirmation at the time of the Reformation, since my work only went up to the 13th century. Another letter that I got was from the Graduate Theological School at Berkeley, California. They wanted to know if I would give them permission to make a copy of my doctoral thesis. I decided to call them to find out what this was all about, since they listed a phone number and name. Why did they want to make a copy? I wanted to know how they got my original work. I then called and spoke to the person who sent me the letter, the Libarian at the Graduate Theological Union, at Berkeley. She had obtained a copy of my thesis from the University of Notre Dame. However, she told me that Collegeville, Minnesota, also had a copy. I wondered how they got copies. She had no idea. She only wanted my permission to make a copy for her library. She had assumed that I gave permission for the copies at Collegeville and Notre Dame, but I had not. I was happy to give her permission to copy my thesis. The more people who read it the better, since so few people cared about it. The only thing that I could figure out is that Professor Balthasar Fischer from Trier, Germany, had given permission to Notre Dame and Collegeville, since he had been a visiting Professor and Summer Professor at those places in the USA. I have since personally seen my thousand-page manuscript bound in 4 volumes at the University of Notre Dame library, where it dominates the section on Confirmation with the title the “The Origins of Confirmation”. I later found out that in 1984, Dr. Gabriele Winkler, a liturgical scholar, writing from Collegeville, Minnesota, in Worship on “Confirmation or Chrismation? A Study in Comparative Liturgy” cited my work five times in her article. Besides, in 1985, Dr. Gerard Austin, OP, published Anointed with the Spirit – The Rite of Confirmation: The Use of Oil and Chrism (Pueblo) that cited my work in the bibliography with the following comment “This extremely thorough study is available through the University of Notre Dame library.” I knew him from Trier in the late 1960s. Thus, in theological academic circles, the value of my work on Confirmation did not go unnoticed. Has something that you did fifteen years earlier still had an impact later?
The results of the Chernobyl atomic blast
The radioactive fallout from the accident was concentrated near Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. At least 350,000 people were forcibly resettled away from this area. After the accident, traces of radioactive deposits unique to Chernobyl were in nearly every country in the northern hemisphere. The response involved more than 500,000 personnel as the worst nuclear disaster, and the most expensive disaster in history. In 2016–2018, the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement was constructed around the old sarcophagus to enable the removal of the reactor debris, with clean-up scheduled for completion by 2065. The nearby city of Pripyat was not immediately evacuated and the townspeople were not alerted during the night about what happened. However, within a few hours, dozens of people fell ill. Evacuation began one and a half days before the accident was publicly acknowledged by the Soviet Union. At first, the Soviets only conceded that a minor accident had occurred, but once they began evacuating more than 100,000 people, the full scale of the situation was realized by the global community. This was the first time that the Soviet Union had officially announced a nuclear accident. A Russian commission was established later in the day to investigate the accident. This delegation soon had ample evidence that the reactor was destroyed and that extremely high levels of radiation had caused several cases of radiation exposure. Eventually, there were 135,000 long-term evacuees. However, between 1986 and 2000 the total number of permanently resettled people from the most severely contaminated areas rose to nearly 350,000. Estimates of deaths resulting from the accident vary greatly due to differing methodologies and data. The Russian government commission was concerned that the molten core would burn into the earth and contaminate groundwater. In the months after the explosion, attention turned to removing the radioactive debris from the roof. Soon after the accident, the reactor building was quickly encased by a mammoth concrete sarcophagus, with a lifespan of only 30 years. This was the world’s largest nuclear fuel storage facility, expected to hold more than 21,000 fuel assemblies for at least 100 years. This land would be habitual again in approximately 300 years to multiples of 20,000 years, because of the half-life of Plutonium-239. Although it is difficult to compare the Chernobyl accident with an air burst nuclear detonation, it was estimated that Chernobyl released about 400 times more radioactive material than the combined atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. However, the Chernobyl disaster released only about one-hundredth to one-thousandth of the total radioactivity released during nuclear weapons testing at the height of the Cold War. The Chernobyl tragedy has inspired many artists across the world to create works of art, animation, video games, theatre, and cinema about the disaster. Filmmakers have created documentaries that examine the aftermath of the disaster over the years. No one believed the first newspaper reports, which patently understated the scale of the catastrophe and often contradicted one another. After Chernobyl, the role of nuclear energy and power in human life has become a subject of much debate and discussion. What do you think about nuclear power?
Gene Finnegan Remembers Living Eighty Wonderful Years 