Past
Mother's death: "My mother died when I was six and this changes you as you can imagine. My dad, with quite a bit of help from my Irish Grandmother, raised four of us. Later he married my mother's sister and they had one child, my half-brother Frank." A very young Bill
Seminary training: "I went to the seminary after finishing the eighth grade. I was going into the 9th and I got an excellent education. We were chosen. We had to take an entrance exam just to get into high school. As a freshman class we were in a fast field at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. One classmate was the son of the mayor of Detroit and another the son of a councilman of Detroit. After three years there the Depression came along and they told us, 'Either come back with tree hundred dollars for your board room and tuition or don't come back next year'. So I stayed out and went to school at St. John's in Jackson, Michigan. I was on the basketball team, kind of a hot shot point guard type of thing. Then I went back to the seminary, after fighting off the girls for my senior year. I played on the college basketball team and I had excellent college professors. I especially loved Latin and English. Then I graduated and I went on to 4 years of schooling in Theology at Mt. St. Mary's in Norwood, Ohio before I was ordained a priest in 1942."
Being ordained and getting a chance to start a parish from scratch:"I had a neat career as a priest. The first day of my first appointment the pastor, Louis Dion, had a heart attack so I didn't have anyone telling me what to do. I kind of ran the parish St. Joseph, in St. Johns, Michigan, for a year. Then I was sent to St. Joseph parish in St. Joseph, Michigan for seven months as an associate Pastor. The bishop then transferred me to Hillsdale, Michigan, were the pastor had a heart condition. This appointment was for the Lenten season, but lasted seven months. Then I went to serve under the man who was supposedly the toughest in the diocese at St. Mary's in Flint Michigan. (Actually he proved to be something of a teddy bear!) I used to go fishing when the pastor wasn't lookin' and I had to get rid of the fish so I used to give them to the nuns and parishioners. Finally, I started a new parish in Flint: Holy Rosary. The school was unique because all the kids in the 7th through 12th grade went a 1/2 a day to Flint Kearsley public school and a 1/2 day to Holy Rosary. It was the best arrangement they could have had both financially and scholastically. It was an arrangement called shared time or dual enrollment. In Flint, just as in Detroit, Whites were moving to the suburbs and I happened to get a parish in the suburbs: a ten acre field to start with. Two of us lived in a rectory that was 20 feet by 30 feet. (It had been a tenant house for a dairy farm.) We slept in two ten by ten bedrooms. An old fisherman friend, Earl, finished the inside in Knotty Cedar. Since it was built on a slab, the floor was extra cold."
Bill's nervous Breakdown: "I helped put on a retreat for senior boys from all over Michigan , held in Battle Creek and like a darn fool I tried to stay up day and night for two nights and three days trying to help solve their problems and I ended up on the ceiling. But I got back down after that. The difficulty is: once you have been a mental patient...there is no such thing as an ex-mental patient. So because of complications I was later sentenced to Pontiac State Hospital, although they threw it out of court 2 weeks later. At the time I neither knew nor understood the legal procedures involved. The two weeks there were rough. I was out at our cottage, near Holly, Michigan, actually having a good time when three squad cars and an ambulance pulled up. Five armed deputies had come to take me to Pontiac. I said, 'Would you mind if I finished my steak?' I later told the psychiatrist I was allergic to drugs and 'don't give me any.' We (psychiatrists and I) didn't agree on things. They were trying to get to my psyche with shock therapy and all that. Well, my psyche was a little bit deeper than that. After I was released from Pontiac I said, 'to hell with this'. After all, it was a pretty good experience because I did do a pretty good job counseling as a chaplain at Mercywood" (mental hospital)."
Going up to the island: "After getting out of the hospital then going back in the hospital then getting out again I said 'I gotta' get out of here'. So I went up to the island to get away and think. The island was 2 1/2 acres of rock in the Bay of Island, Lake Huron, Canada. We spent two years on the island, winters included. It was then owned by eight priests and a bishop. Kathy and I purchased it from them."
Marriage: "Getting married is the highlight of my life. I was up at the island and the woman who ended up being my wife already had a year in at Michigan State University and in the sixties everyone was a little bit crazy and she was crazier than I was. So she came up to cook for us. These young guys were staying at the island with us and they were suppoosed to help us get firewood and stuff. Well, they had stolen my outboard motor, among other things so I kicked them off the island. We were then left alone. Being a gentleman and not wanting to stay on a desert island with a lady I wasn't married to, I asked her to marry me. She agreed and now we have three kids in college. She had heard a sermon I preached and then came by to ask some questions about it and I gave her my little book Songs of a Beachcomber. She loved reading and she read it. That is what makes a good marriage: common interests. She loved my verses."
Living on the island during the winter: "When we stayed over the winter the water would freeze in the building at night- solid in the pail- because the building wasn't insulated well. An Indian, Gus and I tried to insulate it but it was built on cedar posts and we had to put visquine around it and shovel snow around it. It was cold. We had only a little sheet metal stove to heat the whole building. So anyway, staying the winters on the island gave us so much time on our hands. The winters were forever. I wrote a lot of poetry and we worked in macrame'. And we were working out things, being the first year of our marriage. We had a hole in the ice for our water. It was such an experience to stay there. And the windchill factor was 60 or 70 below and you'd hear the ice expanding and booming! And same thing with our cabin...even the nails and the wood would make noise from expansion and contraction." the island outhouse.
Children: "After we married we wanted to foster care for Indian kids. We were always having them over for parties. We'd bring in two boatloads of kids for a Halloween party or something and we were also fishing guides for Indian girls. They did well too, because they had the best damn white guides around. We went into Little Current, Ontario to meet with a social worker about foster caring for Indian kids and she took one look at us and decided: 'We can't let these kids live with two crazy people like these. We decided to have our own kids and pretty soon we had three of them. Now they are in college. When Melissa, the oldest was born we decided to come to Howell, Michigan to make a living. I had worked as a substitute teacher for a while in Canada, then I took a job at Brighton High School as a hall monitor. Later I got a job as a grounds keeper then I became a janitor, and I was a janitor for 14 years. Melissa just recently got an award for being first in her class for Special Education and I told the head of MSU, who was presenting her the award, 'tell them she is the daughter of a janitor.'"
Life as a teen: "When I was a teen, life was tough in many ways. It was durring the Depression. I used to caddie in Grand Rapids. I earned 50 cents for 18 holes and 35 cents for 9 holes. Then while I was in college, again during the Depression, my uncle was superintendent of streets in Grand Rapids and I got a job for 50 cents an hour pumping catch basins and spreading tar and pea gravel on roads."
Temptations as a teen: "They used to call me 'Wild Bill' and stuff like that. I was never a conformist. Practically everybody I knew smoked and I was a basketball player so I didn't smoke. I pole vaulted to get high. It was the only way to view the outside world above the Seminary shrubbery."
Comparing teen life then with teen life now: "We didn't have all the temptations that youth has today. Of course, we didn't have TVs. We had crystal sets and one-tube sets that ran on flashlight batteries and earphones. That's why my ears are like this. And the music was a bit different. My favorite was Horace Hieght and his band had a triple tongue beat on the trumpets. Alvino Ray played with him on the steel guitar. We were much more sheltered and protected than kids today are."
Risks taken: "A couple of times I could have drowned in Lake
Huron: It wasn't frozen yet one year in January and we motored to the Great
Cloche island to break trail in and see if we could go ice fishing on a
frozen inland lake. Coming back to the island a wind came up and not only
blew our boat from where it was beached but also sent a following sea almost
over our 12 footers' stern as we were towed back to our island. Another
risk was when we were waiting for the ice to form so we could walk into
the marina at Birch Island. I was checking the ice everyday because I ice
fished a lot and I knew quite a bit about ice but I forgot that the Great
Lakes are a water-shed and the water is moving. We were walking to the marina
and I had a rope tied to Kathy and an Indian girl, Linda. Her white boyfriend
called 'Cherokee' was checking the ice ahead with a big stick. We got half
way across and one of the Indian ladies hollers from the shore, 'Is Alphonse
with you?' (he was a good friend). We said, 'no, what about it?' We eventually
found out that he had set out to visit us across the ice the day before
and he went through the ice. Whew! We went in and offered our condolences
to the family and started back instead of getting our groceries. I tied
the rope to the women as a safety measure. The next time we tried to cross
to the mainland my wife saw water forming in the tracks she made in the
snow and she was terrified. We back tracked on the safe ice to the island."
Quitting the priesthood: "I didn't agree with the church on different things: birth control and divorce and remarriage among others."
The island: Five of us friends bought this two and a half acre island in Lake Huron back in 1944. We each put 500 dollars in. So we bought this island and a partially finished building and a lot of lumber. This Indian friend, Donald, finished up the building and we took more guys in as we added onto the building. But, what happened to the island? I have kids in college so we had to sell the island and this millionaire bought the place."
