On the first day of February this year, Father W. died at the age of 93. The world did not take much notice of this event but, when I found out about it last month, I did.

My reason for paying attention is that this priest of the archdiocese of Boston was the last survivor among my teachers in high school and college.

Now they have all preceded me in death. Those pedagogues have departed this world, leaving me with varied memories of their classrooms and their personalities.

Now that the last of these teachers has gone, I tend to feel nostalgic about their role in my life. Many of them left traces on my youthful years as I moved toward adulthood. My nostalgia, however, does not obscure my youthful opinions of them, which were sometimes mixed or even negative.

The passage of years has almost never forced me to revise these views.

Father W. represented something of a mix. He taught me French at St. Sebastian’s. To his credit, he inspired me to take an interest in the language and to progress far enough, during two years of instruction, to read uncomplicated material fairly well.

If this progress being was fairly modest, the blame may lie with the lack of discipline in Father W’s class. As I recall it, he could not cope effectively with certain antics spirits among my fellow students. I remember vividly chalk flying through the air─if not exactly at the teacher himself, then at least in his general direction.

Father W would often remonstrate with us, but his appeals for order did not much affect behavior. Chaos used to characterize the atmosphere, not one conducive to mastering the intricacies of a non-native language.

This teacher was fluent in the language and tried to speak a fair amount of it in class. In calling the roll, he would translate our names into the French equivalent, if there was one. A boy named Baker, for instance, he would regularly  dub Monsieur Boulanger.

That’s when I first learned a couple of French proverbs that have lodged in my memory for the past six decades. Every once in a while “À bon chat, bon rat” (tit for tat, in English) and “Tout ce qui reluit, n’est pas or” (All that glitters is not gold) may still jump out of my head.

If you judge these as rather meager leavings from my attempts at speaking French, you possess sound judgment. Despite two years of exposure to the language, I did not retain enough to say much else.

I now know that Father W was still in his 20s, not a whole lot older than his charges but, given his clerical stature and his position as teacher, he then seemed eons removed from our age bracket.

My own relationship with him was friendly. He thought well of me if only because I was not among his classroom tormentors. And, by contrast with not a few of my fellow students, I actually did my homework habitually.

I now know from recent research that Father W received a master’s degree in education from Boston College at the time when he was teaching me French. He was doubtless overworked by a system that, if it provided credentials, did little to impart classroom skills.

But probably, along with his fellow clergy on the St. Sebastian’s faculty, he did not want to be a teacher anyway. Most likely, he had been assigned that role by the archbishop with little regard for his hopes and expectations at his ordination in 1940.

Later on, the record shows that he served in a succession of parishes as what was then called a curate. He then became a pastor, with a 21 year stint north of Boston being his last position before retirement.

He had lasted only four years at St. Sebastian’s. The headmaster may well have engineered his withdrawal. Father W’s classroom discipline problems would have undermined him, and made his life quite unpleasant to boot.

However, I still hold him in affection. To me, he always showed himself decent and genuine. My feelings about him find support in a report of an old friend who lives in the parish where Father W was pastor for those two decades.

On a one to one basis, she says, he was “very sweet and holy.” She does, however, add that he abolished the parish council because he could not get along with a group of parishioners who were independent-minded and wanted change.

My informant also recalls that his favorite hymn was “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” perhaps loved because the pastor himself felt the need of soothing. Whether he cherished that hymn during his teaching days at St. Sebastian’s I do not know, but I could understand him turning toward it.

Richard Griffin