N rH Iu ^ v' M t. i.' \ 'Oi l I iC'i il!nJvoi;ohv I liou*ric.sh [Woroii :hkKi ISSHKIilf! ^"1 '■'I f * Hf c* i ^ r 1 . ^ It was at the annual banquet of the Boston Latin School Alumni Association in November 1998, to which he had been invited to give the opening prayer, when the president of Boston College, Rev William R Leahy, SJ, leaned across the table to me and asked if I would consider succeeding the late Father Charles Donovan as University Historian. Naturally I was both pleased and honored at the opportunity to serve the university in this new capacity, but could not help reflecting that, whether he knew it or not, Fr. Leahy could not have picked a more appropriate occasion to issue such an invitation. Next to being a member of the Society of Jesus and a graduate of Boston College, Fr. Donovan was perhaps most proud of being a “Latin School Boy.” Nothing pleased him more in later years than reminiscing about old times with his fellow Jesuits who had also attended Latin School - Fr. Maurice Dullea (a former BC football captain), Fr. Leo O’Keefe, Fr. Joseph Quane, Fr. James Larkin, Fr. Felix Talbot, and others. A 1929 graduate of the Latin School, the oldest public school in America, Fr. Donovan acquired some of his earliest and fondest impressions of Boston history from the list of distinguished names he saw recorded on the frieze along the ceiling of the school’s assembly hall — Benjamin Franklin, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Charles Bulfmch, Robert Treat Paine, and so many more. Never a mere traditionalist, however, in 1986, some fifty years after his own graduation. Father Donovan wrote a letter to the headmaster suggesting that the names of some more recent Latin School graduates be added to the list. He recommended two: Cardinal John Wright, an alumnus of Boston College who later became archbishop of Pittsburgh, and Leonard Bernstein, noted American composer and conductor. Bom in the Codman Square section of Dorchester, Massachusetts, March 28, 1912, Charlie Donovan was the son of John J. Donovan and Mary E. (Doyle) Donovan. His brother John became a well-known photographer, his sister Doris married his best friend, Charlie O’Brien, and his other sister Estelle became Sister Marie Charles who served Mercy Hospital in Springfield for nearly thirty years. His families were parishioners of St. Leo’s Church, and Charlie attended the Florence Nightingale Elementary School before going off to the Boston Latin School for his high school education. After graduating from Latin School, Charlie Donovan started out as a 17-year-old freshman at Boston College in the fall of 1929, and soon acquired a reputation as a congenial friend and an eager scholar. In his sophomore year he was elected class president, and that same year he also became president of the Marquette Debating Society. The following year he was elected president of the Fulton Debating Society, and received the prestigious Harrigan Award for oratory. By his senior year, Charlie was acknowledged as an outstanding public speaker, both in intercollegiate debates as well as in oratorical contests. In October 1932 he was among the members of the Fulton Debating Society who won a unanimous victory over the visiting debating team from Oxford University and then went on in March 1933 to defeat the Harvard debating team in a unanimous decision handed down by a board of judges composed of associate justices of the Superior Court of Massachusetts. At graduation exercises in 1933, Charles Donovan was awarded the Cardinal O’Connell Medal for general excellence. “Charlie was great!” announced the Sub Turri, the college yearbook. Family members and friends agreed that Charlie was unusually bright and industrious and, after seeing his accomplishments in debating and public speaking in his years at Boston College, were certain that he would become the family lawyer. Charlie had other ideas, however, and in October 1933, a little more than three months after graduating from Boston College, he reported at the Jesuit Novitiate at Shadowbrook, in western Massachusetts, to begin his studies for the priesthood. After receiving his MA degree in English from Fordham [ 2 ] University in 1939, Charlie taught Freshman English at Boston College as a scholastic from 1939 to 1940. Then, after his ordination to the priesthood in 1944, he traveled to New Haven for doctoral work in the philosophy of education at Yale University. This was part of a program developed by the Jesuit Order from 1941 to 1948 whereby fourteen Jesuit priests from Boston College were sent out to earn doctorates at a number of major United States universities. Since it ordinarily took anywhere from 10 to 15 years to earn a Ph.D., Charlie concluded that the leaders of the New England Province had determined as early as the 1930s (at the height of the Great Depression) that Boston College was going to be a major university. In the course of his studies at Yale, relating his work to the general history of higher education in America, Charlie was particularly impressed by the work of Professor John Brubacher and his research concerning the influence of moral philosophy during the colonial period and into the early 19th century. “Yale and its educational program has been a big factor in my life,” he later wrote, “and almost more influential in my present work than in the past.” After being awarded his Ph.D. from Yale in 1948, Charlie got what he called his “first stint of service” at Boston College as chairman of the education department which, at the time, functioned as part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. That was a time when there were only the four original Gothic buildings standing on the Heights - Gasson Hall, usually called the “tower building”; St. Mary’s Hall, where the members of the Jesuit community lived; the Bapst Library, with its tower reminiscent of Oxford’s Merton Tower; and Devlin Hall, the “science building.” Fulton Hall, the new home of the Business School, had just been constructed in 1948 after a fund-raising campaign that asked alumni and friends to “Buy a Brick for Boston College.” Below the Heights, things were not so Gothic. Struggling to absorb the flood of World War II veterans using their G.I. Bill of Rights, three large “war surplus” buildings dominated the south end of the campus on the Beacon Street side. As you walked across the campus from Conunonwealth Avenue to Beacon Street, quipped Fr. Donovan, “you saw a bit of Oxford and a bit of Resurrection City.” As the newly-appointed chairman of the education department, Fr. Donovan had taken over a unit that had originally been created by Boston College in 1919 to help alleviate the shortage of male teachers in Boston’s high [ 3 ] schools after World War I. As time went on, the department expanded its offerings to include courses for hundreds of diocesan teaching Sisters in extension programs at the downtown cathedral center. During 1923-24, lay women were also admitted to evening lectures given at the Boston College High School building in the South End, until 1926 when a formal Graduate School was established to provide graduate courses in education for men and women - but always in the same downtown location. The first break in the long tradition of allowing only male students to take courses on the Heights came in 1945, when a School of Nursing was established, with the strong endorsement of Cardinal Cushing. The school was still located at 126 Newbury Street, in downtown Boston, and therefore the females were “not very visible.” With this development, however, and with the increasing need for meeting more difficult certification requirements, Fr. Donovan made a strong case for a four-year, coeducational college of education. “There is no reason why in so strongly a Catholic center as Boston and Massachusetts,” he wrote to the president. Father Keleher, in February 1951, “Boston College should not have a good and flourishing school of education, to exercise a beneficial influence on education and educational policies in this part of the country.” Charlie got more then he bargained for. In the fall of 1951 the young priest was summoned into the office of the rector (he was rarely called the president in those days), Father Joseph R.N. Maxwell, and informed that Boston College had decided to start a separate School of Education the following September, and that he had been chosen to be the dean. Furthermore, he was told, the school would be co- educational, and he should set about sending out announcements and begin recruiting a freshman class as soon as possible. The founding of the School of Education was a “momentous decision,” wrote Fr. Donovan later, obviously still somewhat bewildered by the whole experience, but it was carried out in an almost “deadpan” manner. Nevertheless, he went ahead, sent out the announcements, and recruited 180 young people for the first class - “one of the most talented and interesting classes in the School of Education while I was dean - the Class of 1956.” At first, the idea of bringing women onto the Boston College campus raised quite a few hackles - “it was not in all quarters a popular move,” recalled Fr. Donovan in a [ 4 ] masterpiece of understatement. “It was an experience I was totally unprepared for,” he wrote. “I often felt in the early years that I was sort of running interference.” But gradually things worked themselves out, male students became accustomed to seeing young women in sweaters and bobby sox walking across the campus, and in the long run the introduction of women proved to be “no big deal.” For the first three years of its existence, the School of Education was located in Gasson Hall, tucked away in cramped quarters off the Rotunda in space that now houses the Honors Program. At one end were several tiny faculty offices; in the center was a curriculum library; at the other end an office for the dean of women and a small area for faculty meetings. Fr. Donovan took some pleasure in the fact that his new college started out in the impressive “Tower Building,” the “signature building of the campus,” but quickly made it known that he had to have his own separate building. It was not so much the inadequacy of office space that made a new building so essential. “The reason was mundane but compelling,” he wrote: “plumbing.” With 100 young women already in the freshman class, it was clear that soon as many as 500 female students would be hving on a campus whose sanitary facilities were designed exclusively for an all-male population. It simply would not do. The response came with remarkable speed for such undertakings. On October 7, 1954, ground was broken for what would become Campion Hall, on the Beacon Street end of the campus. In September 1955, only a year later, the building was ready for classes, so that the members of the first class Fr. Donovan enrolled in his School of Education were actually able to spend their senior year in the new building. In the meantime, Fr. Donovan was busy developing the curriculum for his new school, recruiting a professional faculty, and bringing in experienced administrators. He always considered himself fortunate in obtaining the services of two recognized experts in the field of elementary education early in the school’s development. Sister Josephina, former supervisor of all schools run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, was an invaluable addition to the program in its early stages, while Dr. Marie Gearan, former director of teacher-training at Lowell State Teachers College, also became an immediate asset to the fledgling school. He designed a 4-year curriculum for elementary school majors, as well as providing 10 major areas of concentration for students preparing for teaching careers in secondary schools. At the same time, however, he made certain that in addition to these professional [ 5 ] courses, students would also be required to take such traditional liberal arts subjects as English, history, theology, mathematics, modem languages, and the fine arts. “In one respect I am determined that this school will be the most Jesuit school on the campus,” he wrote, “because we are going to emphasize grammar, writing, and expression,” disciplines he always felt were at the heart of the Ratio Stiidiorum. Reflecting upon what he felt were the limitations of his own early educational upbringing during which his knowledge of such things as music and art was confined to the field of literature, he was determined to expose education students to the beauties of classical music and the fine arts, not only for their own edification but also “for the benefit of the school children they would later influence.” Toward this end, he brought in Dr. Ferdinand Rousseve, who had degrees in art and architecture from MIT, Chicago, and Harvard, to teach courses in the Fine Arts and become the first black member of the Boston College faculty. As someone who had acquired his own master’s degree in English literature from Fordham, courses in English, too, occupied a good deal of his attention, both in recruiting new faculty members and designing special courses. “Teachers,” he said on one occasion, “need a good, old-fashioned course in grammar.” But, perhaps because of his own prowess in debating and public speaking during his undergraduate years at the Heights, he was, in his own words, a “near- fanatic believer” in the importance of articulate oral expression. He made a speech course obligatory in his school’s curriculum, and later took great personal pride in the fact that “speech, as an academic discipline at Boston College, got its start in the School of Education.” Fr. Donovan also sensed that at this particular time the welfare of persons with mental and physical handicaps was to become an increasing national concern, and that steps should be taken to begin developing professional training in special education. In 1962 he brought in Dr. John Eichom to develop a peripatology program to prepare personnel to work with handicapped people, and [ 6 ] eventually established the Campus School at Boston College for some seventy multi-handicapped children and young people who could not be adequately served by their local communities. And, all the while, Fr. Donovan himself took a prominent role traveling all over the country and visiting many parts of the world (on a visit to West Berlin during the Cold War period, his professional colleagues dubbed him “Check- Point Charlie”) pubhcizing the accomplishments of the School of Education and establishing himself as a leading spokesman for Jesuit higher education and the role of the hberal arts in a modem university. He spoke frequently at professional conferences and regional meetings of Jesuit deans; he was an active member of several national accrediting teams; and he published regularly in the Jesuit Education Quarterly y the Journal of Teacher Educationy and the Catholic Educational Review y as well as being a frequent contributor to America and Commonweal. He also found time to serve on the boards of tmstees at Fairfield University, St. Peter’s College, and Loyola University of Chicago. Despite his almost round-the-clock involvement with issues of higher education, or perhaps because of it, in 1961 Father Michael P. Walsh, president of Boston College, appointed Fr. Donovan to the office of Academic Vice-President. This was a relatively new position, one designed to view academic policies and institutional decisions from a university perspective, and one for which Fr. Donovan was uniquely qualified. He continued to function as dean of the School of Education, but after 1966 he began to devote full time to the vice-presidency, moving into a new office on the ground floor of a former private residence on College Road, now owned by Boston College. He named it Hopkins House after the young English Victorian poet - and Jesuit - Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose works of literature inspired Fr. Donovan throughout his life. In the letters he wrote periodically to the faculty, especially those at the beginning of each academic year and at Christmas time, he always included appropriate lines from Hopkins to best convey his deep- felt thoughts and sentiments. His new position was an especially appropriate and sensitive one in view of the growing restlessness of the campus during this particular period of time. In the wake of the conflict in Vietnam, the Boston College campus was caught up in the wave of rebellions that erupted on college campuses across the country, with sit-ins, teach-ins, marches, and [ 7 ] demonstrations protesting against the country’s various military, corporate, and academic establishments. “The 60s, with its student strikes and Vietnam protests,” he later recalled, “was one of the unhappiest of times.” But student activists did not stop at international issues and foreign affairs. They also called for a greater student role in shaping campus policies and determining the relevancy of academic requirements at colleges and universities all over the United States. At Boston College, many student groups demanded an end to courses in theology, the abolition of all required subjects, and the elimination of the traditional grading system. The increase of civil-rights agitation all over the country were reflected on the Heights in February 1970 when African-American students took over Gasson Hall; and the final explosion came two months later when Boston College students launched a “strike” over the announcement of a $500 increase in their tuition costs. The disruptive tactics of the student rebels, the strident harangues of their campus leaders, their violation of confidences (such as “bugging” the trustees’ meeting), and the outrageous nature of their academic demands, all ran counter to Fr. Donovan’s innate sense of civility, courtesy, and propriety. They were troublesome and unsettling years when Fr. Donovan, with quiet reserve and steady determination, served as a vital center of balance and reason, holding things together, maintaining academic standards, adapting to changes, but always preserving what he viewed as the essentially Jesuit character of the university. “I can’t say I’m thrilled by the core,” he said in response to a modified version of the old Ratio Studiorum, “but I’m happy that we have preserved a core at all, considering that a lot of colleges were abandoning requirements and common subjects altogether.” He carried out a very essential role by chairing the president’s Committee on University Priorities that worked out necessary changes in university programs, analyzed the university’s financial status, and recommended future academic directions for the university. With the appointment in December 1970 of John R. Smith as the new financial vice-president, the fiscal situation of the university began to show demonstrable signs of improvement, and with the arrival of Father J. Donald Monan in September 1972 as the twenty-fourth president of Boston College, the indications were that the university had weathered the worst of the storm. “The rebellion and the clamor for power of the 60s [ 8 ] generation is over,” Fr. Donovan commented with obvious relief. “Students are now more willing to let the administration administer, and the faculty teach.” In 1968, Fr. Donovan had been given the additional title of Dean of Faculties as well as Senior Vice President, and as Boston College began to recover from the shock waves of the strike and the instability of financial losses, he concerned himself with the nature of the new faculty members who were now being hired, and who would constitute the future teachers of Boston College. From the very start, he made it a point to personally interview all prospective candidates for the faculty. According to his own estimate, he interviewed some 3,000 candidates for at least half an hour each in his office at Hopkins House. “I consider those 1,500 hours among the most important and enjoyable of my term,” he later wrote. There were two major reasons why he spent so much time reviewing candidates: First to support the department or school doing the hiring by letting the candidate see the interest and concern of the central administration. Second, to get a sense for himself of how a particular candidate might enhance teaching and promote scholarship at Boston College. There was a realization, as each candidate walked into his office, that he or she, as he put it, might become “one of us.” Having the opportunity to meet so many different candidates from so many different disciplines, he regarded as “a liberal education” that gave him “many rewarding moments.” In interviewing these prospective candidates, Fr. Donovan had certain definite opinions in mind. He was conscious of bringing in scholars who would help reaffirm in some way the Jesuit tradition and religious commitment of Boston College. In part this would be effected through a continuing commitment to quality undergraduate liberal education, with a strong emphasis on outstanding teaching; in part it would involve a similar commitment to serious scholarship and research appropriate to a major university. He looked for what he called an “appropriate balance” between the comprehensive interests of the university and the disciplinary interests of the department. In a well-ordered university, he insisted, “research is the partner, not the rival or enemy, of teaching.” As time went on, Fr. Donovan was called upon regularly by deans, department chairmen, and members of the faculty who sought his highly respected advice and [ 9 ] assistance as Dean of Faculties on everything from curriculum matters and promotion policies to program development and external funding. In every case, his thoughtful response was prompt, thorough, and to the point. If visitors did not receive an answer at the meeting, they would usually find a small note on their desk the next morning, written sometime during the night in Charlie’s unmistakable scrawl. But often, too, Charlie was sought out by a number of the lesser known but slightly more introspective members of the faculty who felt a desperate need for personal assurance and professional understanding. The reclusive scholar who found loneliness oppressive; the temperamental linguist who needed emotional release; the impassioned prima donna who felt unappreciated; the young teacher who was looking for financial assistance; the timid researcher who yearned for encouragement, and the many others who had found a gentle and sympathetic friend at Hopkins House made their way across College Road. There they found a warm and compassionate listener in Fr. Donovan, who spent hours on end patiently calming their fears, resolving their doubts, and sending them back to their offices with a lighter step - until they came back with new anxieties two or three weeks later. It was, perhaps, this long and intimate involvement with faculty members that made Fr. Donovan feel that some mechanism was needed to bring the faculty in closer association with the university - and with each other. In earlier years, during the 1950s and '60s, the Boston College faculty was predominantly Jesuit; the priests lived together in St. Mary’s Hall where, regardless of the schools in which they taught or the subjects in which they specialized, they saw one another regularly seven days a week. Between 1960 and 1980, however, the number of Jesuit faculty members dropped from 100 to 63, while during the same twenty-year period the number of lay faculty members rose from 246 to 495, with no sign of stopping. As the size of the lay faculty steadily increased, there were few opportunities for new members to meet older members, and even fewer opportunities for members of one department or school to meet with their counterparts across the campus. Increasingly the university was made up of a collection of individual scholars, most of whom commuted considerable distances, who were engaged in the solitary pursuits of their scientific experiments or research investigations, isolated from one another and generally unaware of what went on in other parts of the university. To counteract this growing tendency toward what he once described as “faculty fragmentation,” Father Donovan encouraged the idea put forward by the University Council on Teaching of a series of weekend workshops at the Andover Inn on the campus of Andover Academy. The first of these faculty retreats was held in October 1974, and under the organization and direction of Katharine Hastings, assistant to the academic vice-president, the weekends became a regular fixture of the school year. Some twenty or so faculty members, young and old, men and women, lay people and clergy, would be invited to attend each workshop, selected from various disciplines and professions and at diverse stages in their academic experience. The purpose of the weekend was for these faculty members to discuss, in a relaxed and informal atmosphere of good food, congenial companionship, and stimulating conversation, some particular academic topic or issue, but primarily to exchange views about the challenges and opportunities of the teaching profession. In the process, men and women who might never have encountered one another on campus had the opportunity to learn more about the history of Boston College, discover each other’s backgrounds, exchange views on teaching, compare classroom problems, explore issues of research and publication, and develop much closer personal relationships than otherwise would have been possible. When the Andover Weekends finally came to a close in 1996, a total of 150 weekends had taken place, involving some three thousand members of the Boston College faculty. For someone whose earlier careers on the Boston College campus had taken him through crowded classrooms, busy corridors, noisy cafeterias, and buildings teeming with all sorts of people, the peace and quiet of his study at Hopkins House was certainly welcome, but occasionally lonely. So Charlie got himself a dog - a warm, lively golden retriever called “Brandy” who became his constant companion. Brandy had the run of the house, day or night, occupied every room at his whim, sniffed at great length at everyone who came in to see his master, and plopped himself down in the midst of every conversation no matter how trivial or tendentious. In May 1978, Fr. Donovan was officially recognized by Boston College for his distinguished achievements on behalf of alma mater with the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. Not to be outdone, Brandy was also awarded an honorary degree, “Doctor of Canine Felicity,” at a private ceremony later that day on the lawn behind Hopkins House. At that time he was given his diploma, duly signed by a mysterious university official who styled himself “Jacobus D.M.” A formal portrait of Brandy was done by BC artist in residence Allison Macomber, and occupied a place of prominence in Hopkins House. Charlie was devastated when Brandy passed away in 1980, but he immediately obtained another golden retriever he named “Brandy II,” who picked up where his predecessor left off. He certainly adjusted quickly to the academic atmosphere. Charlie described to a friend how the president, Fr. Monan, greeted the new arrival in the kitchen of Botolph House, along with two vice-presidents, an administrative assistant, four secretaries, and a receptionist. “He accepted this attention,” wrote Charlie approvingly, “with aplomb.” In the spring of 1977, with his formal retirement approaching, the many faculty members who counted themselves friends of Fr. Donovan decided to honor him in a traditional European fashion with a Festschrift - a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial to an especially revered scholar. They used the title “Inscape ” for this volume, a word used by Father’s favorite author, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to describe the unique quality of individuality that every natural thing possesses, as well as to describe the elusive mystery of a particularly successful poem. Fr. Donovan’s friends and colleagues obviously thought the word could also be used to evoke the subtle individuality and complex mysteries of a very successful man. The editors of “Inscape ’’centered the collection around three “vitalizing ideals” they felt Fr. Donovan sought to sustain in his faculty: poetry and art; teaching and learning: the Society of Jesus and Boston College. From all departments, all disciplines, and all parts of the campus the contributions came flowing in. Administrators and deans, lawyers and businesspeople, professors of language and literature, theologians and philosophers, educators and nurses, novelists and cartoonists, sociologists and economists - they all came forward to present their small academic offerings to a man they had come to love and respect. The incredible diversity of the contributions themselves - poems, essays, meditation, reflections, scraps of art, bits [ 12 ] of verse, comic verse, religious thought, analytic treatises, scientific theories - provided a dramatic testament to the wide range of friendship and the remarkable scope of learning that Fr. Donovan had cultivated during his years at Boston College. In June 1978, Fr. Charles F. Donovan officially retired as Senior Vice President and Dean of Faculties, but was asked to stay on until a suitable replacement could be found. When Rev. Joseph A. Panuska, SJ was finally chosen to take over the post in July 1979, the president. Father J. Donald Monan, asked Fr. Donovan if he would serve as Boston College’s first University Historian, and invited him to remain in his beloved Hopkins House. “It is well-known that academic posts created on the occasion of a prominent retirement are in fact grateful invitations to he down and quietly go to seed,” wrote Ben Bimbaum in a charming memoir in the Boston College Magazine. “Charhe certainly knew that was the case, but he ignored it quite successfully.” Although he was now 67 years old, the thought of retirement was the furthest thing from his mind as he launched himself into the new job with the same enthusiasm with which he had approached his previous positions. In this respect, he often found inspiration in the long and productive life of BC’s founder. Rev. John McElroy, SJ. A poor immigrant boy from Ireland, McElroy started out as a lay brother in the Society of Jesus, was ordained a priest in 1817, and pursued a remarkable career as pastor and educator, preacher and theologian, before becoming the first U.S. Army chaplain during the Mexican- American War. In 1 847, at the age of 65, he came to Boston to become pastor of St. Mary’s Church in the North End. After many discussions with Bishop John Fitzpatrick about building “a college in the city” for the sons of Irish immigrants, the elderly Jesuit spent the next sixteen years raising the funds, acquiring the property, and securing the permissions that would finally allow Boston College to receive its charter in 1863 - at which point McElroy was 81 years old. “I had no idea he was that old',' Fr. Donovan once exclaimed as he compiled notes for his history. “Imagine! He accomplished so much - and at that age!” In typical fashion, he apparently failed to reahze that he himself was fast becoming a modem version of that historic and heroic figure. It was during his years as University Historian that Fr. Donovan was the recipient of all kinds of honors and awards, as the university began to more fully appreciate his many contributions to the academic life of the [ 13 ] university. In 1979, he was enrolled in the Boston College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in recognition of his “high attainments in liberal scholarship”; the following year the Gold Key Society honored him with the gift of an honorary key. In September 1983, Charlie celebrated his Golden Jubilee with his brother Jesuits at St. Mary’s Chapel, where he expressed his gratitude that the Lord had allowed him to “dwell in His House” for the past half- century. In 1985, he was awarded the Joseph Coolidge Shaw, SJ Medal for his “noteworthy personal contribution to learning and culture.” Perhaps his most treasured award, because it expressed the pride and affection of his classmates and fellow alumni, came in 1987 with the William V. McKenney Award from the Boston College Alumni Association. But Charlie did not have time to bask in the limelight of all this adulation; there was work to be done. One of his first tasks as University Historian was to bring the history of Boston College up to date. In 1947, Father David Dunigan had written a history that took the story of the college from its origins in 1863 to the end of World War II. This was a valuable piece of scholarship, especially in view of the discouraging lack of primary source materials, but it obviously did not cover the remarkable transformation of what was essentially a small “streetcar college” into a major national university. That was a half century that incorporated the greater part of Fr. Donovan’s own life and career at Boston College, and there was no one better to tell the story in all its details. “He recalls conversations he had with people in the 1930s, with less hesitation that it takes for most people to remember what they had for breakfast,” commented one interviewer who was struck by his phenomenal memory. Working with Father Paul FitzGerald, a professional historian and archivist who unfortunately died before the work was completed, Fr. Donovan brought to the project special insights as well as incredible knowledge. Drawing upon his doctoral work at Yale some 35 years earlier, he set out to write the story of Boston College as more than a mere parochial family history of “limited scope and insight.” His goal, as he put it, was to show the “evolution of an institution in a broader perspective” - especially in further illustrating the history of Jesuit education in the United States. The final publication in 1990 of the History of Boston College: From the Beginnings to 1990, proved to be a lifelong tribute that chronicled not only the factual details of Boston College’s past, but also captured the unique spirit that sustained and nurtured the university in good times and in bad throughout its long and remarkable history. Having appreciated the tremendous difficulties that both he and Fr. Dunigan had confronted in writing a history for which adequate sources and documents were generally unavailable (nobody seemed to have saved anything in those early years), Fr. Donovan made every effort to see that future historians, scholars, and researchers would not face similar obstacles. In a series of large file cabinets lined up from floor to ceiling along the wall of his office at Hopkins House he scrupulously compiled manuscripts, documents, records, and reports, correspondence, pamphlets, booklets, and publications; photographs, minutes, statistics, and directories - anything and everything that contained references to the history of Boston College - so that the future history of the university would not go unrecorded. In the process of writing the history and compiling the documents, Fr. Donovan also began to rescue from the archives a variety of half-forgotten stories and little- known anecdotes. They might not have fit into the official narrative, but they shed a great deal of light on the lives of fascinating people who had contributed to the institution’s development, as well as on often-unrecorded events which had actually played an important role in the course of many eventful years. These “homeless stories,” as one writer pleasantly described them, became the basis for a series of delightful essays Fr. Donovan, now 70 years old, called Occasional Papers, which began appearing in March 1982, without prior notice or fanfare, in faculty mailboxes. Eventually he would author and publish twenty-two of these beautifully written and seriously researched booklets over the next sixteen years, the last one (“Boston College and the Lawrence Family”) appearing in February 1998. But time was passing by, and Charlie, who during all those years never seemed to change at all, slowly began to show the unmistakable signs of advancing age. His sprightly step slowed perceptively as he made his daily walk from Hopkins House to St. Mary’s Hall; he cut back sharply on his outside social engagements; he was seen less often around the campus. But he remained busy and alert, keeping up with his voluminous correspondence, and watching from his office window the many ways in which Boston College was continuing to change at a pace much faster than ever seemed possible. But he never panicked; he had seen it all before; he took it all in stride. “For me, these latter years have been among the most rewarding of my whole career,” he said one day, leaning back in his easy chair, Brandy II by his side, “partly because I see the stability and the solidity of the institution.” Oh yes, there have been “external” changes, he conceded. Many of the younger Jesuits prefer to be called by their first names these days, and civilian dress has pretty much replaced traditional clerical garb. “Rarely do you see a Jesuit on campus today in a cassock, whereas all Jesuits in the ‘50s wore cassocks to class.” But things like “dress and address,” he mused with an expressive wave of his hand, are “accidentals” - they are “external” changes. The “essentials” remain the same. “AJ majorem Dei Gloriam is still the motto for all Jesuits,” he said with a resolute smile. And that was the heart of the matter as far as Charlie was concerned. He was content to reflect back upon the fact that he had devoted his half-century as a Jesuit making sure that that motto continued to remain at the heart of whatever went on at Boston College. His own heart was not that strong, however, and Father Charles Donovan quietly passed away on July 17, 1998, at the age of 86. It is difficult to come up with a more appropriate or accurate personal tribute to Father Charles F. Donovan, SJ, than the one written at the time of his graduation from Boston College by his classmates in the 1933 yearbook, the Sub Turri: “Great. Brilliant, not blatant; Popular, never vulgar; Esteemed, unspoiled - Charlie Donovan.”