Once a Trojan, Always a Trojan

John A. Hays

Monsignor Edward Connolly, a native of Ireland and destined to be a legend in his own right, arrived in Monroe City in 1919 assigned with the task to open a catholic high school in the small northeast Missouri town. He stayed to lead both the parish and Holy Rosary High School for 55 years. Connolly cut a wide swath of respect and fear, the kind of man you do not laugh at, but he was also the kind you might even hesitate to laugh with, unless you were sure of his permission. 

The school became the town’s intergenerational glue. When the final graduating class marched out into the real world, the school had handed out its last of 668 diplomas. Graduation photos from years past — the final class graduated in 1966 — hang today framed in the main hallway of a brand-new elementary school building for anyone who feels nostalgic.

Monroe City is a well-worn farming community 15 minutes west of the historic Mississippi River town of Hannibal (of Samuel Clements fame) where the land begins to smooth out as it rolls west to the Great Plains and north to Canada on a mostly treeless path all the way to the North Pole. The town loops like a gray scar along an old rail line and late March has arrived with a greening of the flat land so bright it will soon force the eyes to squint. 

John A. Hayes, a 1966 Holy Rosary graduate said the death knoll sounded on a Sunday morning in February of 1966 when the high school closing was officially announced to the parish. There had been rumors of a closing floating for several years. It felt like the “big black cloud” hanging over the school had finally burst. But it was still a kick in the gut. Although Monroe City of the day exuded a distinct Capra-esque cordiality, there was to be no Hollywood ending. It felt unfair and non-ceremonial the way it happened—a 10-minute meeting the previous week between school officials and the Bishop of the Archdiocese of Jefferson City—closing a place that's meant so much to so many people. 

"The announcement was made to the Parish at church that Sunday morning” Hays says. “We students were told a couple of days before. There was a meeting that Monday of that week (of the closing announcement) for all the nuns and we were left in the classrooms without supervision. Some of us senior boys took the opportunity to do a little initiation with the freshman,” Hays recalls with a chuckle. “The next day all the students were called to a meeting with the parish priest, and we thought we were going to be in trouble for the initiation, but they told us the school was closing.”

For a moment the world of Holy Rosary barely moved, a tableau of sorrow and love and pain. Then it was time to end the pity party. When your parish has a grade school to save and there are plans being drawn up for a new church building, then you drop your bad attitude faster than first-period trig--even when you just know if given the chance you would have found a way. 

What next?

“Many people were bitter, some still to this day,” Hays remembers, sipping his morning coffee in the Monroe City farm implement store he has managed since his Holy Rosary graduation, minus one year in the late 1980’s when interest rates on farm loans were running 19% and foreclosures wreaked havoc on tractor sales. “I sold cars that one year, then we reorganized and got back in. Agriculture does not like high interest rates. Inflation, we can survive but not double-digit interest rates.” 

"But I never thought it would end like it did," Hays says of the 1966 Holy Rosary closing. “I guess it is like being on a great basketball team, year after year. Even while you're having the time of your life, you know it can't go on forever, so you just try not to think about it."  Like a callow novice scorched by the Vegas desert sun and $2 blackjack tables, the Holy Rosary parishioners, who had been steadfast for over a half century in their support of their beloved high school, felt knee capped by faceless bureaucrats in high positions. They were not even given a chance to save the school. The numbers, they were told, just did not add up.  

Was there talk of taping up ankles and going at the church leadership to challenge their decision, I ask? No, says Hays. “That is not the way being Catholic works.” Obedience to the church hierarchy’s authority is absolute and a major tenet of the faith. “Challenging a decision made by church officials is just not something that was going to happen.” The ethical upside always wins is his point. “The parish didn’t like it, but we accepted it and moved on.” 

Even Father Connolly, after 55 years, had no say or recourse. A local newspaper story of the time acknowledged his sad acceptance of the closing. The parish belonged to the church, he noted, and he would not be a houseguest to outstay his welcome. 

Once the high school was gone, “all the parish energy went into making the elementary school successful. If anybody could do anything to      help, they did it,” Hays recalls.  Today, the Holy Rosary school has a new building and enrollment has held steady for the past decade. Tests scores are high and the pride that parishioners have in the school is palpable. When students graduate the 8th grade, the transition to the public high school is mostly seamless. 

With all the problems of 1960’s small-town survival that Monroe City had to endured, the closing of Holy Rosary evoked, understandably, a potpourri of discomforting reactions. But Hays says after the initial shock, the parish rallied. “We needed to keep the doors open at the elementary school and we had to do it at a time that the number of Sisters we had for teachers was declining. We now had to pay teacher salaries. We needed funding and we needed a lot of people to contribute.” Schools like Holy Rosary do not produce donor bases that pump millions of dollars into their endowments. “People gave what they could and gave until it hurt,” he recalls. But the school transitioned well to an elementary building only and today 57 years later, Hays points with pride, thrives. 

Going back to the days of Father Connolly, Holy Rosary has boasted of its athletic teams, and still does today. Legend was that Connolly was a friend of Notre Dame iconic football coach Knute Rockne and would once a year attend a Fighting Irish game as the guest of the famous coach. Connolly believed in winning and made demands that his Holy Rosary Trojans respond in kind. He often wore a lucky hat with the Notre Dame logo of “ND,” which he said stood for No Defeats. “We are a big sports town,” Hays says, “and we have a great tradition of athletic success at both Holy Rosary and at the public junior high and when they (merge) in the ninth grade, the high school teams do very well. Sports help bring the two schools together, for sure.” For the first season in the post consolidated era, 1967, the Monroe City Panthers started two senior basketball players who had suited up as juniors for the now defunct Trojans.

Sister Sue

Sister Suzanne Walker, a Holy Rosary 1964 grad and all-conference basketball selection herself, has for the past 47 years labored in love for her alma mater. She retired this past spring from her role as principal. She is another Holy Rosary legend. “I just know it is time for me to step aside,” she told me last spring.  Sister Sue was for almost a half century for the Holy Rosary community, the face, the spirit, and the keeper of the faith; always the rock, always the leader. The community has embraced Sister Sue, as she is known by all, because she is like the school itself: parochial, proud, tough, and determined to win in the end. In the local rural vernacular, always a work horse, never a show horse. 

In 2016, the parish raised the funds to build a new school. It was a Herculean task, just the kind Sister Sue seeks out. The fundraising and the successful completion, under budget, is fondly known today amongst the parish faithful as the “Miracle on Locust Street.” 

“We needed a new building for two reasons,” Walker says. “The old school was getting to the point that the maintenance could not be maintained without huge remodeling expenses. We had no handicap access. The heating system was falling apart. But a new school also sent a signal, ‘Holy Rosary is here to stay. We are not going away,”’ she says with pride.

School closings are often dark bookmarks in a community’s history. It strips a town of a critical part of its identity. It comes down to kids and to have kids in a community you need jobs for their parents. “You gotta feed ‘em.” If there are no jobs, it doesn’t matter how effective and decorated the school is.   And like many post-World War II farm communities, Monroe City in 1966 was bleeding population. The 1960’s were tough on the nation’s farmers, as were the 1980s. It was especially hard on the local agriculture, says Hays. “When Holy Rosary closed, foreclosure rates were up, and the same thing happened again in the 80’s.”

When in one year nearly 100 Holy Rosary students shifted over to the public high school, Hays notes, the stress now placed on its resources was significant. “They needed to build, and they needed more resources and teachers,” Hays says. “Mr. (Galen) Lankford (long time MC Superintendent of Schools) worked very closely with our school board, to make it work. Coach Dan Mudd went over to the public school. Throw in that Washington school had just recently closed its elementary school and integrated its students with the white elementary school, and Monroe City school district was now (bursting) at the seams.”

John A. says the HR class of 1966 never fails to organize legacy “5” and “0” year reunions. The 50th reunion had over 60% of the class in attendance. When the DJ hit is just right that night, Simon & Garfunkel and The Sounds of Silence or the Mamas & The Papas strumming Monday, Monday - a step back in time required only the closing of one’s eyes and the years just peeled away. It was a magical return to a simpler time. 

“Most of us did not have cars,” Hays says, “so we didn’t cruise. We hung out downtown at the Creamery, the Monroe Dairy. After ball games it was packed with both Monroe City and Holy Rosary students.” A buck and four bits would get you a tenderloin, French fries, and a shake. And a dime would hold court on the pin ball machine, the bells clanging and the score twirling. The cool guys knew how to “jack” the tilt and play for free. 

When Holy Rosary closed, a key component to the Monroe City community was yanked away. The school was not only a place to provide faith-based education, but it served a larger civic function.  Think of a 1960’s version of Cheers and that was Holy Rosary High School, where everybody knows your name. Hays remembers feeling “at home” there; it’s where he “fit right in.”  He says to this day he has reoccurring dreams of a high school basketball career that ended over a half century ago. His coach, Dan Mudd, told me that Hays was a player who could sense what his team needed most and supply it without muss or fuss. The famous late St. John's coach, Lou Carnesecca, said he wanted a team of Supreme Court justices, players who never gave anything away with their expressions, and that says Coach Mudd was also John A., the last of the long line of Coach Mudd’s scrappy back court players to prowl the Monsignor Edward Connolly Gymnasium. According to the old coach his hard-nosed guards could have run a fast break in a broom closet. 

“I just can’t get the place out of my system. There were about 25 people in my graduating class, and we were all family, still are,” said Hays.  Even though he was a member of the last graduating class and would avoid the trauma of finishing his high school career in a foreign public-school setting, the closure “was hard and traumatic for my class, as well.”

1966 Holy Rosary Trojans

Hays says the life of a Holy Rosary grad belies and validates a Holy Rosary education - in the foundation of industry and humility on which it was built and is maintained. On that long ago day in 1966, a community of believers that loved unconditionally it’s no-frills bare bones budget high school, was trapped staring down both barrels of a shotgun when the leaders they had faithfully served pulled the trigger. The blast shattered dreams. 

That may be true, taking the wide perspective of it all, but Monroe City is small-town Middle America, hovering in the embattled grain belt of the Midwest sporting a work ethic as pervasive as the prairie wind and as clinging as the pasture cockleburs that stick to the legs of a pair of work Levis. This work ethic is a generational legacy and that takes born character. It's not something you can sprinkle each morning on a guy's Cheerios. 

There are always chores at hand for the Holy Rosary congregation, mostly a farming way of life to be claimed every spring and reclaimed every fall. Parts might be lost, but they'll be found again. Life here endures. When all is said and done, Hays proclaims, it is a congregation of survivors. “We never quit on the church or our school, even when we were hurt, and we never will.” 

Once a Trojan, always a Trojan.