Frank Dunnigan, WNP member and columnist. -

Streetwise - A Shirt Factory Friendship and the Girl from St. Rose

by Frank Dunnigan
December 2009

Note: O. Henry's Gift of the Magi, written in 1905, is a classic Christmas tale with a surpising outcome. It was that short story (coincidentally, part of the 1960s reading list at St. Ignatius High School) that prompted me to compile the following thoughts, after attending the funeral of a long-time family friend.

As we now move deeper into December, and begin to reminisce about the past, it is appropriate to think about how certain events can sometimes impact people in the most unexpected and wonderful ways. As you reflect upon your own days of 2009, pull out the checkbook or the credit card and express a bit of gratitude by sending off a nice little fistful of dollars to any group (or two) that you believe is helping others. As we all know, the greatest gifts don't come from the stores, they come from the heart.

Best wishes to everyone for the happy holidays that all of us recall from days gone by.

Frank and John Dunnigan from St. Ignatius yearbook, The 1932 Heights. - Courtesy of Frank Dunnigan.

It is often said to incoming freshman classes that the friends we make during our first year of high school will be with us forever. It is true that many of the classmates I met at S.I. on Stanyan Street in 1966 remain a big part of my life today. My closest friends, my long-time employer, several of the various bosses and co-workers I've known, my godchildren, and even some of the neighbors in my present 55+ community in Sonoma County all have links back to S.I. in the 1960s. Even more telling, though, in the annals of friendship, is the fact that certain S.I. connections that were made even farther back in time are still positively impacting lives today.

It was a warm August morning in San Francisco on that day in 1928 when a group of boys, each just 14 years old, entered the musty confines of St. Ignatius High School, then housed in the 1906 wooden structure known as the "Shirt Factory" that had been hastily erected at Hayes and Shrader Streets to replace the magnificent campus at Hayes and Van Ness, destroyed in the earthquake and fire some 22 years earlier. Those boys were part of the 23rd and final incoming class to be educated there, as construction on the "new" Stanyan Street campus was progressing toward its final completion and long-awaited opening the following school year.

Calvin Coolidge, U.S. President for the previous five years since Warren Harding's untimely death at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, announced that he was not going to be a candidate in the upcoming election. Herbert Hoover, late of Stanford University fame, was running furiously against Al Smith, an Irish-Catholic from New York, to take the White House. Ford's Model T automobile dominated the streets of the United States, though it was quickly being replaced by the newer, sleeker Model A, whose styling and rumble seat sparked many imaginations, while at the same time, horse-drawn delivery wagons were finally beginning to fade from the scene. Nationwide radio broadcasting, just a few years old, was the latest technology, and the first all-talking motion picture had been released less than a year earlier. The stock market was booming, and times were good for most Americans.

It was against this backdrop that three boys, James Feehan, always known by his middle name of Sherry, and the Dunnigan brothers, Jack and Frank (who would one day become my Dad), all born within a year of each other, trudged up the old wooden steps to the ramshackle dusty white structure—a "temporary" building that had already seen nearly a quarter of a century of young scholars before them. Their families lived a few blocks apart on Page Street, and there was always some talk that those in the older generations might somehow have been distantly related through their cousins. None of the trio could have known on that day how their high school association would be the catalyst that would set the course of their lives and also define the lives of their families for generations to come.

Sherry J. Feehan in St. Ignatius yearbook, The 1932 Heights. - Courtesy of Frank Dunnigan.

By all accounts they became fast friends, attending football games together, participating in extra curricular activities (The Heights yearbook indicates that Sherry and Frank were involved in cross-country, sodality, and the yearbook staff, while Jack rowed for the crew). Their classmates—people like Hank Crane, Jack Donovan, Stan Kearny, Con Murphy, Jack O'Brien, Tommy O'Toole, and the irrepressible Ray Pallas (later with an S.J. attached to his name), were destined to be life-long friends. As teen-agers, they spent time riding San Francisco streetcars to live theater (aka vaudeville) productions featuring acts like Burns & Allen, Morey Amsterdam, and an early version of the Three Stooges with Moe and Larry Fine. They enjoyed weekends together at the old Playland at the Beach, learned to drive with their 55+ year-old Dads, and took the Northwestern Pacific Railroad on vacation with their families to Sonoma County resorts like Johnson's Beach, Monte Rio, or Rio Nido.

They were the first S.I. class to make the move to Stanyan Street in the Fall of 1929—the start of their sophomore year. (In a nice twist of history, I spent my first three years of high school on Stanyan Street, before making the move as a senior to the new Sunset campus in the Fall of 1969.) Back in those closing days of the heady 1920s, few could have envisioned the fate that the U.S. economy would suffer in the coming weeks, with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. Fortunately for these students and for many others, their parents could still afford to send them to S.I., in spite of the drastic decline in the U.S. economy.

The story wound on through the boys' high school years, which were marked with drama contests and dances, grades and graduations, and with the exception of the ever-growing Depression, their experiences were not especially different from those of S.I. students in 1855, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1970, or even 2010. There were still tests to be studied for and worried about, new modes of transportation zipping along the streets of San Francisco that caught a young man's eye, plus the usual high jinks of teen-agers. In addition, for the years that Jack, Sherry, and Frank attended S.I., there were more than a dozen Catholic girls' high schools in the city, and S.I. boys throughout time have always been keenly aware of those institutions and their charming inhabitants.

Graduation day finally arrived, and the three migrated, almost en masse with many of their classmates, to the hilltop campus of the University of San Francisco, where they spent another four years together through a more rigorous academic course, this time fully played out against the worsening background of the Great Depression.

There were always recalled stories of having attended Cal and St. Mary's football games in the fall of each college year, and the long waits (sometimes 10 minutes or more) to drive a car onto one the trans-bay ferry boats—when were they going to get those bridges built? Vacations found them driving east on old U.S. 50 to Tahoe or south to an almost-rural Palm Springs, while old black-and white snapshots bear quiet testimony to the many hours that they all spent enjoying each other's company. They followed the big bands of the day, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, and at various places around the Bay. The boys generally attended as a large group—in those days, both sides of the gender gap seemed to feel that there was safety in numbers. Likewise, the girls who had recently graduated from all those now long-gone Catholic girls' schools—Star of the Sea, St. Vincent's, St. Brigid's, St. Peter's, St. Rose, and Presentation—also came and left in groups, perhaps with a few couples pairing up after the dance for rides home to the neighborhoods.

Frank Dunnigan, Sherry Feehan, Jack Dunnigan at Treasure Island, 1939. - Courtesy of Frank Dunnigan.

Somehow college graduation came within sight, and as the summer of 1936 dawned, the boys walked off the stage, diplomas in hand, and into gainful employment, much to the delight of their families during that difficult time. The Dunnigan brothers began clerking at the post office with Sherry doing the same at a major San Francisco banking firm—first jobs with companies that were destined to be their life-long employers.

Just as they were getting settled into their working lives, World War II intervened and managed to temporarily derail everyone's plans for the future. Although a few of their contemporaries had already settled into marriage and family life prior to the war, like millions of others in that "greatest generation" they were still single, and they put their lives on hold to volunteer their services, and were soon scattered around the globe, supporting their country in its most serious challenge. Correspondence among them raced back and forth among duty stations, and a very few of those letters survive to this day. Eventually the hostilities came to an end, uniforms were shed, and life began to resume its old 1936 pace once again, with everyone back to their old employers, though considerably older and wiser.

Many of their friends took rooms in converted old houses around town while they were on the "52-20"—government lingo for the stipend of $20 a week for 52 weeks that returning service personnel received from the federal government, circa 1946. These three guys never took the money, and all returned to their old jobs immediately, while settling back into their family homes with parents and siblings.

Eventually, among this trio of almost-confirmed bachelors, marriage was on the horizon, and Dad was the first to take the plunge with his long-time girlfriend Katherine, whom he had met at Siegler's in Lake County in 1936. Mom came from a large, extended Mission District family of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws that had been scrutinizing Frank for years. The circle of friendship that began with three boys, suddenly expanded to include someone new.

Sherry was the next one down the aisle, in 1949, when he married Geraldine, a girl from the Sunset, and an only child, who had beautiful penmanship and a knack for writing the world's best letters. They, too, met before the War, when Sherry's youngest sister introduced him to her classmate just after the two girls graduated from St. Rose Academy in 1935—once again proving that old parental adage of "be nice to your siblings—they have friends that you might like to date." The circle widened again and everyone welcomed Gerry warmly.

As the 1940s drew to a close, Frank and Sherry and found themselves living in identical houses in St. Cecilia's Parish—Sherry & Gerry on Vicente Street near 17th Avenue, and Frank & Katherine just around the corner on 18th Avenue. Between October of 1950 and January of 1952, the two families welcomed a total of three children, and the circle now embraced a whole new generation.

Joe Feehan, in Santa's (elder Frank Dunnigan's) lap, Frank Dunnigan, standing left. Mary Grace Feehan, standing right. - Courtesy of Frank Dunnigan.

As kids, Mary Grace and her brother and I were close—in fact, young Joe Feehan, just three weeks younger than I, managed to upstage my own baptism in January of 1952, by deciding to be born that very same weekend. My own christening party became an extended celebration, with Joe's birth becoming the topic of conversation among all the relatives, friends, and neighbors of both families who knew the happy parents. We kids were back and forth to each other's homes almost daily, playing, attending birthday parties, and holding sleepovers, as the Moms ran the homes while the Dads went off to work downtown each day. We three were closer than cousins—more like siblings—not unusual, considering that our birthdays all come within 15 months of each other. The Dunnigans and the Feehans attended church together at St. Cecilia's, whose construction we watched daily all through 1955 from Mary Grace & Joe's front window just across the street, enjoyed Christmas parties in each other's homes, during which we were tucked into Mom & Dad's bed together, all in our flannel jammies, vacationed on the beach at Santa Cruz, barbecued on weekends in places like Adobe Creek and Agua Caliente, and visited Marin Town and Country Club to escape the summer fog.

My Uncle Jack was the last to marry, when he was 43 years old and wed Theresa, an outgoing blonde school teacher—the baby in a family of six older brothers. They met while Jack was vacationing with "the group" (including all of us pre-schoolers) in the summer of 1955 at the Russian River. Everyone liked Terry, and we all turned out on a Saturday morning two years later to help celebrate their marriage. I still have a snapshot of Mary Grace, Joe, and myself, standing in the crowd outside the church, all smartly attired in our Sunday best, and ready to pummel the happy couple with tiny fistfuls of rice. The newlyweds were past the time of having children of their own, but along with Sherry's three unmarried sisters, and Katherine's two married brothers and unmarried sister, they all doted on us baby boomers, and were extremely generous—not just with gifts, but also with their time—taking us out, reading to us, playing with us, talking to us, listening seriously to us, and generally just keeping watch over all of us. The circle of three had now grown to a small village of extended family and friends.

Then, in another unanticipated event, the State of California revealed its so-called "Western Freeway" plan, which would have sent four lanes of southbound traffic almost directly through the middle of the Feehan family's living room. Frank & Katherine's nearby home would literally have been in the shadow of that monster freeway. The fight was on, with St. Cecilia's pastor Monsignor Harold Collins leading the revolt against the State of California's bureaucrats. Ultimately, after several long years of struggle, the anti-freeway forces won out, but not before many people, including the Feehans, opted in the late 1950s to make the move to the then-new subdivisions of Millbrae, some 20 miles to the south.

Even after their move, we still visited back and forth between San Francisco and Millbrae for occasional Sunday night dinners, though the three men remained in touch more than the rest of the families, with regular monthly lunches downtown. Christmas cards were still exchanged among the families over the years, as the three friends moved ahead in their respective careers.

In the 1960s, the grandparents' generation began to pass on, and the lobbies of Arthur J. Sullivan, Carew & English, and Duggan's became frequent meeting places. Sadly, Jack himself became a widower in 1965, in his early 50s, when Theresa, also in her 50s, died suddenly. Everyone consoled him, but deep down, all were shocked that something like this could have happened to someone so young, someone their own age.

The 1970s continued to be a time of change for everyone. Jack, Frank, and Sherry noted that their children were all in college at the same time, and were amazed when their 40th S.I. reunion, held at the then-new Sunset campus, came about in the summer of 1972. Practically every living graduate from their class was in attendance, and that gathering was THE topic of conversations and phone calls among all the participants for weeks afterward. They were nearing the end of their working careers then, and they continued to keep in touch after their retirements in the late 1970s.

Jack remained a widower for many years until he met Edythe, a petite, attractive widow his own age. They married in 1979—both 65 years old—and Edythe was drawn into the group, openly admiring everyone's long-standing friendship of 50+ years.

Sadly, the original circle of friendship was broken in 1980 when my Dad died unexpectedly at age 66 from a heart attack. At S.I.'s Golden Diploma ceremony two years later, in 1982, Jack was there with Edythe, Sherry with Gerry, and Katherine—my Mom, now widowed—asked me to attend with her and to accept my father's award. Everyone enjoyed seeing their old friends again, Sherry and Jack talked on and on in a form of verbal short-hand, as though no time had passed since their days together at the Shirt Factory, but we all sensed that the specters of advancing age and physical infirmities were beginning to creep in as the group was then approaching age 70. The Golden Diploma ceremony that Sunday morning in the Orradre Chapel on 37th Avenue was to be one of the last purely social gatherings involving everyone.

Jack's health began to decline soon after that, and following a long convalescence, he died in 1988 when he was 74. We kids, while forging ahead in our own lives and in our careers, had been out of touch with each other for years. We were now keeping a watchful eye on all those in the older generation, and family communications were limited to the correspondence that flowed between the Moms.

The decade of the 1990s was filled with more losses, as almost all the remaining relatives in the parental generation—those wonderful aunts and uncles and older cousins to all of us—took their leave, one by one, year after year. Our Moms kept up the friendship and the correspondence, attending funerals as they could, and consoling one another as that decade drew to a close, just as they themselves were beginning to slow down.

By the start of the new millennium, the three of us adult children were all deeply involved in the daily care and well-being of the older generation. My mother, my Aunt Edythe, plus the two Feehan parents, were now all past 85, and they all gradually beginning to withdraw even more from the active lives that they once led.

My own mother, Katherine, the girl with the large family, out-lived all of her parents, siblings, cousins, and virtually all of her in-laws, remaining active until the last few months of her life, dying in 2002, when she was nearly 90, at her long-time Parkside home. Among the boys of the group, it was Sherry who enjoyed the greatest span of years, surpassing his 90th birthday by the time he departed this life in 2004, but just like his friend Jack, only after a long period of infirmity. Edythe slipped away in 2008, in her mid-90s, still as petite and attractive as when she and Jack were married almost 30 years earlier. The long story reached its final conclusion in July of 2009 when Sherry's wife, Gerry, that wonderful girl from St. Rose, with the perfect handwriting and the thoughtful letters, died quietly with her children and a group of devoted caregivers at her side, in her long-time Millbrae home at the age of 91.

It had been a busy week for me, but I knew that I had to make the trip to be there for Gerry's funeral, and when I arrived, I saw my oldest childhood friends, Mary Grace and her brother Joe for the first time in many years. Standing outside that peninsula church on a warm, sunny morning, we embraced one another, calling out and responding to childhood nicknames that I will not repeat here. We knew that we were all together because of that St. Ignatius link, and although we had generally left funeral attendance and condolence correspondence up to our parents before this, we all knew deep down that we wanted to maintain the continuity of friendship, begun so long ago by our parents, aunts and uncles, and lovingly nurtured by our mothers in their final years.

Riding together to Holy Cross Cemetery (where Gerry was to join all the others from the original group), we began to catch each other up on our own lives, though we knew some of the general details that had been circulated by our parents over the years. Our high school days had been spent at Notre Dame-Belmont, Serra, and S.I., and college saw us scattering to Santa Clara, USF, Idaho State, Notre Dame de Namur, and San Diego State. We all caught bits of news about each other over the years, seeing each other at an S.I.-Serra football game, attending the rosary for a deceased grandparent in the 1960s, or hearing stories from college classmates and mutual friends who had crossed paths with the other family.

As we returned to a reception at the Millbrae house afterwards, we each began recounting some of the successes and difficulties that had come our way over the years. We were not at all a group of braggarts, since we quite honestly shared some of life's more disappointing moments—corporate downsizings and the like—that had impacted each of us. How we overcame these situations (or how we just coped with those that could not be overcome) was always the key point of each story. We remembered early on that the three of us had always enjoyed a familial closeness dating back to birth—yet without any sort of jealousy or rivalry.

During that post-funeral reception, we explained the S.I. connection from more than 80 years earlier to the various guests who were present. It was my first visit to that Millbrae home in nearly 50 years, yet it was exactly as I remembered it, with only a few nods to the present era, such as a microwave in the kitchen, a laptop computer on a desk, and a security alarm system sign out front. As the rest of the guests took their leave in mid-afternoon, the three of us kicked back and shared more of the intimate and not always happy details associated with the various medical and family issues that had confronted our parents in the last years of their lives, recalling the many situations that had gone well, along with some others that had not. Each of us had been closely involved in the day-to-day care of our parents, aunts, uncles, and elderly cousins for much of the previous two decades, and it seemed to be a relief for all of us, whether recently bereaved or not, to share our thoughts and emotions about such times with our oldest living friends. Surprisingly, there was no reticence or hesitation, in spite of our lack of regular contact with one another over much of our adult lives, and we talked on effortlessly throughout the entire afternoon. As one of us said, we quite literally picked up where we had left off on that day in 1957 (we were five, six, and seven years old at the time), when the Feehan's moving van rolled down Vicente Street to far-off Millbrae.

As the daylight dimmed to evening, we each went on to acknowledge that in addition to our ever-evolving employment situations (by contrast, our fathers and uncle had each enjoyed life-long careers with a single employer), marriage has also been elusive, with the social landscape littered just a bit by a couple of unhappy attempts. This, too, was quite an irony, since the original trio of friends had enjoyed a collective 100+ years of happy married lives with their respective spouses.

We all realized that we were now racing headlong toward our 60th birthdays in 2010, 2011, and 2012, and that we had no children among us, nor any nieces, nephews, or in-laws to help cushion our slide into rapidly approaching old age. We each acknowledged our good fortune in having many cousins, long-time friends, and extended family with whom we share a loving closeness, though certain geographic distances exist that sometimes limit our contact with them and with their children and grandchildren.

We continued chatting, laughing, and comparing notes, learning that among the three us, we had amassed over 50 years working for various divisions of Bank of America, were all avid book readers and excellent conversationalists, and that all of us liked Italian food and sushi. All the while, though, we were holding back (and occasionally letting out) a few emotions, while exchanging parental reminiscences, and realizing that our reunion was destined to be permanent—a thought that pleased each one of us immensely.

So here we are, having spent 12 hours together for the first time in years, followed by several weekend visits as each other's houseguests—our first "sleepovers" in well over half a century. We've done weekend outings and dinners together, have begun calling, emailing, and texting regularly, and have also been sending each other newspaper and magazine clippings that we know the others will appreciate (things like retirement financial planning and medical advice—the sort of things that older relatives once sent to us). We're finding and copying old photos that detail our young days together, along with others that tell the tale of our families.

With the death of that girl from St. Rose, it seemed as though the final chapter was about to be written to the story of a friendship that began in 1928. Whoever would have thought that her passing would spark a sequel of sorts—the happy reunion of three baby boomers, all born at St. Mary's Hospital in the early 1950s, with childhood years spent together in San Francisco's Parkside District, long before life introduced its many inevitable changes and challenges. We will forever more be each other's friends, advocates, and confidants.

We've all acknowledged that in spite of having been dealt some tough hands to play in our six decades on earth, all of us have been fortunate in this game of life, and we have all achieved certain successes that were once so very far off. With no direct descendents to worry about, we all agreed that the institution responsible for bringing our families together was an appropriate beneficiary for at least some of the personal good fortune that has come to each of us. With Christmas upon us, we continue to search for just the right gifts for family, friends, and each other, yet it only took one brief stroke of the pen in our individual checkbooks to acknowledge St. Ignatius College Prep and the tremendous gift that the school has given to us. By giving a bit back to that remarkable institution, we are taking our parents' friendship of years gone by, combining it with ours of the present day, and extending it into perpetuity, by helping to provide a quality education to the children of our friends and neighbors throughout the Bay Area.

Our story is now a happy continuum to the one that began on that warm August morning in 1928—so very long ago—when three young boys started out from their homes on Page Street and began the long climb up the hill to the unknown world and to the new lives that awaited them within the halls of Saint Ignatius.

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Page launched 20 December 2009.