Tag: Winter 2005

As Xavier University approaches the 175th anniversary of its founding in 2006, Xaviermagazine is examining key moments in the University’s history. This is part of a series of stories about the people, places and events that have made Xavier what it is today. 

The warm summer months of 1920 marked a new era for Xavier University. Working monuments—symbolic of a decade characterized by its optimism and prosperity—began appearing on the naked hilltops of North Avondale. While the nation’s urban centers flourished and a jazz crusade raged, Cincinnati’s construction companies profited from Jesuit dollars. For the next 10 years, these companies were charged with the task of transforming a 26-acre suburban refuge into the keystone of Catholic education for the Archdiocese.

Even as far back as 1911, however, the Jesuits had recognized the need to expand their campus from Seventh and Sycamore streets in downtown Cincinnati to more spacious surroundings. Factory noise, dirt, smoke and a restricting metropolitan landscape prompted Archbishop Henry Moeller to approve the purchase of the Bragg Estate—a plot anchoring Victory Parkway, between Winding Way and Dana and Herald avenues—from the Avondale Athletic Club in 1911. The three-story, red-brick, Georgian-style clubhouse, which sat on the site of the present Joseph Building, served as the first school building. The Jesuits divided the ballroom into classrooms and converted part of the banquet hall into the chapel, but, to the student’s delight, left the bowling alley intact.

On Dec. 28, 1911, Archbishop Moeller dedicated and blessed the renovated building, renamed Xavier Hall, and later remarked in a letter to University President Francis Heiermann, S.J., “Hence we congratulate your Society and feel deeply grateful that it has secured the beautiful and suitable site in Avondale, in order to extend the sphere of its educational activity. We fondly cherish the hope that, ere long, the site will be adorned not only by a large and flourishing college, but also graced by a Catholic University.”

While the building was the official start of the expansion to the suburbs, the downtown campus remained Xavier’s hub for another eight years, with the former clubhouse being occupied by high school students from the branch academy. In 1919, though, alumni and Jesuits were anxious to move the rest of the college to the Avondale site.

To show their support, the alumni launched a fund-raising campaign, attempting to raise $75,000 and put together a brochure that included the proposed building plans. Writing in Continuity and Change, Xavier University 1831-1981, Lee J. Bennish, S.J., recounts the ambitious initial drawings: “In the first series, the east side of the campus between Northside Avenue (now Victory Parkway) and Herald Avenue (now the campus mall) would have a modest faculty building, student dormitory and classroom building, and the west campus between Victory Parkway and Dana-Winding Way would include the Club House, a gymnasium and outdoor swimming pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, handball courts, two football and a baseball fields, and an oval running track.”

Later plans called for a large chapel, a research laboratory for graduate students, an arboretum and an open-air theater.

Large-scale construction did not begin, however, until April 1919, when the University received its largest gift to date: $100,000 from Mrs. Frederick W. Hinkle, patroness of Hinkle Hall. The three-story Tudor-Gothic structure, modeled after the Xavier family castle in Navarre, Spain, housed administrative offices as well as living quarters for Jesuit faculty, a dining room, chapel, recreation room, roof garden and library.

With an additional $50,000 gift from the alumni to build Alumni Science Hall (now Edgecliff Hall), construction began on June 24, 1919. A little over a year later, the College of Arts and Sciences moved to Avondale, and the Jesuits followed a few months later, enjoying their first meal on campus on Thanksgiving Day 1920.

Once the Jesuits established residency, momentum—and enthusiasm—increased. Subsequent years brought about the additions of Elet Hall, the first dormitory, named after the school’s first president, John A. Elet, S.J.; the library building (Schmidt Hall), which was a gift from 1905 graduate Walter Schmidt and temporarily housed a fledgling Bellarmine Chapel; the Fieldhouse; and the football stadium. The decade closed with the construction of the Biology Building, made possible by William H. Albers, who requested anonymity at the time.

The college had finally established its roots in the suburban community and no further construction took place until after World War II.

Once a small suburban refuge, Avondale has since grown into a center of commercial and residential activity, and the college’s 26-acre foundation has matured into a 140-acre university.

While many in the early 20th century could not have fathomed the outcome, it’s clear that others had always maintained this vision. At the 25th anniversary reception for the alumni association in 1913, William T. Burns, the association’s historian, foreshadowed the school’s progress: “Would it be too much to hope that in the not-too-distant future some alumnus, to take part in a celebration something akin to this one, might take his stand upon one of the nearby hills and gaze with brightening eye and throbbing heart upon the different lecture halls and colleges that dot the spacious acres of St. Xavier University?”

On the morning of Oct. 27, a brief rain showered St. Peter’s Square in Rome, but no amount of precipitation could dampen the moment for William Madges, chair of the University’s department of theology; James Buchanan, director for the Edward B. Brueggeman center for dialogue; Rabbi Abie Ingber, executive director for the Hillel Jewish Student Center of Cincinnati; and Yaffa Eliach, former Brueggeman chair and founder of the Shtetl Foundation in New York.

The four had waited almost two hours for an audience with Pope John Paul II, hoping to gain a papal blessing for their proposed landmark exhibition, “A Blessing to One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People,” which documents the pontiff’s lifelong relationship with the Jews.

And now they stood at the papal throne and presented the pontiff with a leather-bound overview of the project. The pope turned the pages, looked carefully at the photos from his early life, nodded approvingly—and smiled.

When “A Blessing to One Another” has its world premiere at the University on May 18, 2005—John Paul II’s 85th birthday—that smile will stand as the pinnacle in a series of defining moments for a project that has gone into overdrive since September. The 1,500-square-foot exhibition—a partnership between the University, Hillel and the Shtetl Foundation—will feature artifacts, photographs and videos.

Visitors will pass through several rooms representing various stages of the Pope’s life—from his childhood in Wadowice, Poland, to his days as a priest and papacy. There will even be an interactive area where visitors can write prayers that will be taken to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

The exhibition will stay at the University until July 15, 2005, then move to the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., where a replica of a portion of the display will become a permanent fixture. From there, it will tour Catholic and Jewish colleges and universities around the United States before heading to Europe. The project’s defining moments began early on, when the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati—the project’s lead financial sponsor—and the University declared support. In September, the John Paul II Cultural Center came on board and agreed to provide artifacts for the project.

Former President Jimmy Carter agreed to sit on the project’s advisory board. And then came Rome, where members of the delegation spoke with a dizzying array of Catholic and Jewish leaders, and Ingber had a personal meeting with Jerzy Kluger, a Jew who has been John Paul II’s close friend since both were young boys.

“Our trip to Rome was enormously successful,” says Madges, co-director of the project with Eliach and Ingber. “We were well received by all we met. The spirit of affirmation and support for the goals of this project was palpable.”

“A Blessing to One Another” is the brainchild of Eliach, a Holocaust survivor, former Brueggeman chair at Xavier and professor emeritus of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College in New York. Through her extensive research in Europe, Eliach became fascinated with the pope’s historical ties to the Jews—John Paul II grew up in a largely Jewish apartment building, a Jewish family helped raise him after his mother’s death, he regularly appeared in theater productions with Jewish friends, and his closest childhood friend, Kluger, lives near him today in Rome.

The more Eliach learned, the more she realized the story needed to be told. “I felt it would be wonderful, because I believe so much in togetherness, to make an exhibit,” she says.

University President Michael J. Graham, S.J., says the project is appropriate for Xavier on a number of levels. “It gives us great pride, as a Jesuit and Catholic institution, to begin to celebrate now the legacy and the achievements of Pope John Paul II,” Graham says. “His outreach to the Jewish people is one of the epoch-making accomplishments of his papacy, one which will be remembered long into the future, for it has changed forever the tenor of the relationship between Catholics and Jews. The story there to be told is not only one that involves formal visits and diplomatic relations, but is grounded in the early and deeply moving story of the Holy Father himself, and that very human story is by itself a story worth telling.”

Moreover, Graham says, because Xavier seeks to be known as a champion of interfaith relations and dialogue, it is especially significant for the University to be involved with the project with the Shtetl Foundation and Hillel. “Our hope is that our interfaith collaboration—to tell the wider world the story of the pope’s own interfaith commitment—will itself teach others about the importance of dialogue and collaboration across gulfs that may look as wide and divisive to us today as that gulf between Catholics and Jews may have looked 50 or 150 years ago,” he says.

Ingber, who lost his grandparents and two uncles in the Holocaust, and whose father was all too familiar with Christian anti-Semitism in Europe, sees the exhibition as near-miraculous. “To know that we literally have gone from my grandparents’ understanding of what the church represented in their lives to their grandson meeting with the pope and celebrating in the building of an exhibit that recognizes and honors this incredible, unique and changed relationship between the Catholic church and the Jewish community, I don’t know how to characterize that as anything less than a miracle,” Ingber says. “And I place the positive responsibility for that sea change in the peaceful hands and blessings of John Paul II.”

For the larger Jewish community, Ingber points to the pope’s work in confronting anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and in responding to the reality and integrity of the State of Israel through his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and visits to Jewish communities. “Throughout the world he has built a bridge that we hope will only continue to be strengthened and will carry the foot traffic of people committed to peace and brotherhood for generations to come,” Ingber says. “This exhibition tries to anchor that bridge as firmly as possible.”

Madges points out that the project is significant for a number of reasons: John Paul II is the first pope since the first century to visit a synagogue, as well as being the pope who established diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel, the pope who, more than any of his predecessors, committed the church to work for reconciliation between Jews and Christians. “This exhibit sends a signal that we’re doing the kinds of things a Catholic university and a department of theology should be doing,” Madges says.

The project also fits naturally into the Brueggeman center’s focus on dialogue. “We’re trying to make it more than just an exhibit,” Buchanan says. “Our hope is that it will be an experience that has a spiritual dimension to it and that stimulates people to begin to think more deeply about and engage more actively in interreligious dialogue.”

Graham says the University is committed to raising at least $100,000 from private sources for the project. “The Jewish Foundation has stepped forward to match this amount and has issued an additional challenge to us to raise even more—and this we will energetically do,” he says.

“We hope that the collaboration of Xavier University and the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati will inspire other local individuals and institutions to come forward with additional financial support of this important exhibit,” Madges says. “The premiere will attract national attention, and it would be great to show the world that we are a religiously and ethnically diverse city committed to collaboration and reconciliation.”

Xavier basketball is more popular now than ever, but the program has always attracted a litany of talented and touted players. Some have gone on to the professional ranks; others have simply gone on. As this year’s season gets underway, we tracked down some former players to find out what they’ve been doing in the years since they left campus.

[divider] [/divider]

HANK STEIN ’59

Whatever happened to Hank Stein? Stein was Xavier’s first All-American and the most valuable player on the 1958 glory team that clinched the University’s—and Ohio’s—first college basketball championship by sweeping the National Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden. He was selected in the third round of the 1959 NBA draft by the St. Louis Hawks and then disappeared. At least, so it seemed. After being cut by the Hawks before the season started, Stein hung up his Chuck Taylor hightops and went into business. He never played ball again. A native of Louisville, Ky., he married a Cincinnati girl and became an underwriter for the Cincinnati Insurance Co., retiring as a vice president after 31 years.

Though he basked in the glory of the 1958 season as 10,000 fans greeted the champions on their return home, Stein got what he needed from basketball and moved on. “I think anybody that plays sports takes the competitive nature of sports into the business world. That’s the biggest thing I got out of it—how to compete.” He and his wife Nancy had five children, one a Xavier graduate and another, Eileen, a former basketball player at the University of Dayton. Stein dutifully rooted for Eileen’s team, even against Xavier, but he’s a lifelong season ticket-holding Musketeers fan. A mild heart attack two years ago led to a 30-pound weight loss, but he still carries about 200 pounds on his 6-foot 1-inch frame, watches his diet and does laps around Cincinnati’s Sharon Woods Lake. “People ask, ‘Whatever happened to Hank Stein?’ Everyone who sees me wants to know if I still live in Louisville,” he says. “I just kept a low profile.”

[divider] [/divider]

RALPH LEE ’86

A jet roars past Ralph Lee’s office window, partially drowning out his voice. “The Boeing planes are the loudest,” he says. Lee’s office overlooks two runways at the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. For the last nine years he’s been with Comair Inc., and in September became the airline’s vice president for human resources.

“I had a human resources class with Dr. Lawrence Donnelly,” he says, “and that’s when I realized this is what I wanted to do.”

And it’s exactly what he’s done since graduating in 1986, minus a one-year stint as an assistant basketball coach at the University of Maryland and three years as vice president for in-flight services for Comair. He’s also stayed close to Xavier basketball, doing color commentary for locally televised games in the late 1990s.

Work and family commitments forced him to put away the microphone, but he still takes his sons, Cameron and Kyle, to a couple of Musketeer games a year. He also pops in a video on occasion to show them his glory days—he still holds the Xavier record for most career assists.

“They just look and say, ‘That’s not you, Dad.’ When they realize it is me they’ll start telling me what I could have done better. Or they’ll say, ‘Man, you were skinny,’ or ‘How come your shorts were so small?’ ”

Today, he says, his only court time is one-on-one games against his pastor. “When he wins he says, ‘The Lord takes care of me.’ Says, ‘It’s divine intervention.’ ” Lee pauses and smiles. “But he very seldom wins.”

[divider] [/divider]

JIM BOOTHE ’57

Until seven years ago, Jim Boothe, 69, was still playing recreational league basketball games, plying the skills he’d honed when he was team captain in 1957. It was during one of those games that he realized he no longer had what it takes. He wasn’t contributing as much as he was getting in the way. It was time to hang it up. “I cry sometimes I miss it so much,” he says. “It was a big moment when I knew I couldn’t play anymore.”

It was the end of an era that included scoring 1,085 points for the Musketeers—despite being the shortest man on the squad at just 5 feet 7 inches.

After graduating, Boothe taught and coached at the high school level. He returned to Xavier 17 years ago to teach. Six years later he became chair of the department of education, his current position.

Being on campus makes it easy for him to keep up with the Musketeers, both old and new. He and his wife, Marilyn, attend every home game, and he stays close to those with whom he shared so many memories—although the number is slowly dwindling. Recently, he attended the funerals of former coach Ned Wulk and former teammate Dave Piontek. They’re gone, but their memories continue.

“Basketball is a link,” Boothe says. “The relationship with your teammates is something you never outlive.”

[divider] [/divider]

JOE SCHOENFELD ’81

Joe Schoenfeld is the first to point out that he wasn’t the best player during his career at Xavier. He rode the bench his first two years under coach Tay Baker, then earned more playing time his final two seasons with coach Bob Staak, who arrived with an up-tempo style that demanded lots of substitutions. What makes Schoenfeld’s story special is what the 1981 graduate has done with the lessons he learned from Baker, Staak and Paul Frey, his coach at Cincinnati’s Elder High School.

An accounting major at the University, Schoenfeld stayed on campus for a year after graduation, earning his teaching certification while working as a graduate assistant under Staak. The next year, he became a substitute teacher at Elder, eventually moving into a full-time position. He took over as varsity basketball coach in 1991. Since then, his teams have won three league championships, one state title and one state runner-up title.

“If I hadn’t been at XU, I’m not sure I’d have taken this path,” he says. “I always said, ‘If I could make school as enjoyable for my students as my coaches and teachers did for me, that would be great.’ I wake up every morning feeling pretty grateful.”