From the Fair Grounds to the ‘other side of the moon’

Ray Rabalais, then a 16-year-old junior at Jesuit High School, didn’t second-guess the request from Jesuit Father Richard Thomas, his religion teacher, to show up at school with a few other classmates on a Saturday morning in the spring of 1964.

“In those days, if a priest told you to show up at school on a Saturday morning, you showed up at school on a Saturday morning,” Rabalais recalled, sharing the memory with Jesuit’s faculty during an in-service day on Aug. 8.

Rabalais drove his VW from the West Bank to school that day, and a couple of other students, one of them a photographer for the Blue Jay newspaper, pulled into the parking lot. There were about eight or 10 students in all, and they squeezed into three cars, headed for the Fair Grounds, which recently had concluded its annual racing season.

Father Thomas had grown up with horses in Tampa, Florida. His Ignatius moment – the incident to which he could tie his future vocation – ironically enough arrived when he was 16 in the summer of 1944, the same age that Ray Rabalais was that day in 1964.

Young Richard Thomas had fancied himself the ultimate horse whisperer – he could tame any horse within minutes – but with his older brothers away fighting the Second World War, an especially violent horse he had nicknamed “Hitler” was giving him a full frontal assault.

Taking a break under a hickory tree, Richard heard something. In later years, he couldn’t determine if it was audible, but he heard it nonetheless: “I want you to be a priest.”

The Jesuit kids in 1964 knew nothing of that story, of course. They were still trying to figure out why their religion teacher was taking them to the Fair Grounds, especially since there were no races scheduled and it was Manresa quiet.

“It’s not that I had any brilliant insight,” Rabalais said. “Honestly, we went up there and just enjoyed seeing the track. None of us had ever been to the stables, and we saw these beautiful horses. So, at first, we thought this was just a field trip. He didn’t discourage that feeling. He was perfectly happy to let us ask whatever questions we wanted. There was no script. I was amazed because those horses led a really coddled life. They talked about all the vitamins they gave them and their special diets. I had no idea.”

The stables along the backstretch conveyed a message of strength and watchfulness and care. The grooms and trainers were happy to share with the students stories about how much the horses ate each day – slow horses ate as much as the fast ones – how much rest and frolicking time they got and how their manes would shine after being cleaned and brushed out.

“And, then, Father Thomas said, ‘OK, we’re going to go to this address,’” Rabalais remembers.

The three-car, student caravan pulled out of the Fair Grounds and headed to downtown New Orleans.

“I think it was on Carondelet Street, right near the Pontchartrain Expressway,” Rabalais said. “So, we pulled up, and this was a really poor neighborhood. I was a little nervous. I think everybody was a little nervous. It was like going to the other side of the moon.”

Margie’s Playhouse at 1137 Carondelet, a structure dating 

to the late 1800s, was a first-floor bar with creaky living quarters upstairs. The students walked up the steps, the smell of stale beer and alcohol and God knows what else clouding their senses.

“And then we went into this room, and there were something like nine children,” Rabalais said. “They were sleeping on filthy mattresses on the floor, not even a bedspread or a bed stand. You just knew they were very, very poor – the poorest family I had ever seen.”

Family welcomed students
How Father Thomas had made connections with the family, who greeted the students warmly, Rabalais never found out.

“I mean, he didn’t just barge into the apartment,” Rabalais said. “I’m sure he had asked them if it was OK if he brought some students.”

Father Thomas’ instructions to the students were the same ones he had given them at the Fair Grounds.

“Just ask them whatever questions you want,” he said.

In reviewing that Saturday afternoon of nearly 60 years ago, what struck Rabalais was how Father Thomas followed a pastoral model of responding to social issues championed by Pope John XXIII: “Observe, judge and act.”

“There was no attempt on his part to draw any parallels or comparisons or drive students to a conclusion,” Rabalais said. “There was no anger on his part or outrage or anything like that. Again, it was just that everybody was to come to their own conclusions. That’s the thing, in retrospect, that sort of amazes me because as adults, we have a tendency to jump to the conclusion – you know, ‘You’ve seen it; now here’s the point.’ But, of course, teenagers hate to be lectured to.”

Eye-opening experience
The juxtaposition of the level of care provided to horses and to humans became an unspoken parable for Rabalais that, in many ways, directed the course of his life and future professional career. He went on to Princeton University and Harvard University Law School, but his passion for addressing social ills led to a position with the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, where he worked with three other lawyers helping low-income families with housing issues. He later went on to teach law and advocate for decent housing for 47 years at Loyola University New Orleans.

“All of those activities were directly attributable to the experience I had under Father Thomas,” Rabalais said.

Just weeks after their trip to the Fair Grounds in 1964, Father Thomas left Jesuit for a new assignment in El Paso, Texas – running Our Lady’s Youth Center just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican border city of Juarez. The church was in such a poor neighborhood that families who crossed the border from Mexico subsisted by combing the dumps for discarded food and scrap metal they could resell.

Somehow, the Jesuit students who were entering the senior year gathered the black-and-white slides they had taken at the Fair Grounds and at Margie’s Playhouse and created what essentially was a pre-internet Powerpoint presentation.

Report ruffled feathers
As a member of the debate team, Rabalais was anointed to be the featured presenter to the Jesuit Parents’ Club, Catholic parishes and Catholic business professionals. Most of the time, the student presenters were greeted with polite encouragement. Sometimes not.

“The place where I got the greatest hostility was at a luncheon group of businessmen at the Roosevelt Hotel,” Rabalais recalled. “A number of the businessmen were alumni of Jesuit, and they were furious. They were so angry, they said, ‘I went to Jesuit before the communists took over and they started indoctrinating the students.’ They were like, ‘Why don’t they clean up? Why don’t they buy a vacuum cleaner?’ Just completely missing the essence of poverty, that people didn’t have spare money to go out and buy a vacuum cleaner.”

In his more than 40 years in El Paso, Father Thomas, a good friend of Jesuit Father Harold Cohen, served the poor and became involved with the Catholic Charismatic movement and felt the Holy Spirit prompting him to do more for both the poor and the unborn. His ministry was transformed when he found two young boys sleeping in a dumpster outside his rectory in El Paso. He eventually founded a home for boys.

Loaves and fishes
Richard Dunstan, who has written a biography of Father Thomas entitled “A Poor Priest for the Poor,” said no one can fully understand what happened on Christmas Day in 1972 when Father Thomas went out to the city dump to invite people to lunch. He and his parishioners had been literally following Jesus’ mandate to invite to a feast those who could not repay the favor.

“He went out to the people who were dumpster diving in these rolling hills of garbage,” Dunstan said. “They thought they had enough food for 150 people. As they went out to the dump, there were about 300 people. They figured they would just serve the food until it ran out. But, the food did not run out. When it was over, they donated the leftover food to three orphanages.”

The parents of future Jesuit Father Nathan O’Halloran, director of the Catholic Studies Program at Loyola University, met as early volunteers with Father Thomas in the 1970s. Young Nathan recalls going with other children and with Father Thomas to protest outside of abortion clinics. The children learned to sit near the front entrance of the abortion facility and then go limp when the police showed up.

“That was something he learned from the civil rights movement,” Father O’Halloran said. “Sometimes, I was put in police cars. Often, they would just drag us to the sidewalk.”

Father O’Halloran said he was enamored of Father Thomas’ faith and tunnel vision.

“He’s the reason I’m a Jesuit,” Father O’Halloran said.

The older priest told him a story about how his racial biases disintegrated while he was teaching catechism to a young Black girl as a Jesuit scholastic at Spring Hill College in Mobile.

“He had grown up to understand they were not like us, but on that day, working with this young woman, a light bulb went off that everything he had been raised to think was just wrong,” Father O’Halloran said. “And that was it.”

Father Thomas, the student whisperer, died at 78 in 2006. Rabalais wanted Jesuit teachers to understand the power and the privilege they possess.

A teacher’s voice lives on, even in the whispers.

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