Shoes a poignant emblem of Abp. Hannan’s vitality

Bowling shoes once worn by Tom Cruise cling to a wall high above the entrance corridor inside Mid-City Lanes, just left of the alley’s blue-lit statue of the Blessed Mother.

But what really makes local bowlers stop in their tracks is the pair of red-and-navy size 9s adjacent to Cruise’s – shoes laced up by New Orleans’ eleventh archbishop one afternoon in 1995.

“I thought, ‘I’ve got Tom Cruise’s shoes up there, but in New Orleans Archbishop Hannan is the real celebrity-hero,’” said Mid-City Lanes owner John Blancher, explaining how Cruise’s shoes were the first to be displayed on his unofficial “Wall of Fame” after the actor threw a 1993 bowling party during the filming of “Interview with a Vampire.”

Archbishop Hannan’s bowling shoes were added to the wall two years later, when the city’s favorite priest turned up at the alley – then at its original location at the corner of South Carrollton Avenue and Ulloa Street – for an afternoon pizza party with two dozen of his colleagues from WLAE.

Bowling novice

Although he had led an active life that had included swimming daringly far out into the Atlantic during family vacations to the Jersey shore and jumping out of airplanes as a World War II paratrooper-chaplain, the retired archbishop’s 1995 appearance at the New Orleans bowling venue marked the 82-year-old’s first time bowling, Blancher learned.

“I saw him throw a couple of balls, and they went into the gutter,” recalls the alley owner, who was asked by a WLAE staffer to give the archbishop a few bowling tips.

“People make the mistake of aiming for the pins, but what I told him he needed to do was to aim for that arrow right down the middle of the lane; it’s something you can see,” Blancher said.

“Archbishop Hannan said, ‘OK,’ and he got out there, and the first ball he threw he made a strike,” Blancher said.  “After that I never saw him throw another gutter ball.”

While they played for fun and never bothered to score the game, the archbishop’s bowling partner that day, David Snowdy, said the archbishop was tickled by his fledgling skills and hit the lanes a few more times before his 2011 death.

“After making that first strike I think he had two or three more,” recalled Snowdy, a parishioner of St. Luke the Evangelist in Slidell who currently works as WLAE’s facility technology officer. “He did say that he did well at things in general; anything he tried athletically, he took to it.”

Tenacity prompts a nickname

The WLAE bowlers had a group photo taken of the occasion – a framed memento that’s on display beneath the archbishop’s shoes – and later had a yellow silk bowling shirt embroidered with their boss’ WLAE nickname: “Slick.”

An inside joke at WLAE, the nickname dated from 1989, the year Snowdy, the station’s chief editor and photographer at the time, traveled to Rome with Archbishop Hannan to film a series of educational videos on the catacombs. To convince the notoriously pesky Roman officials that his camera crew should be granted unrestricted access to the catacombs and other sites requiring special permits, Archbishop Hannan would wave an old piece of letterhead engraved with the Vatican seal and assertively stride through the various checkpoints.

“Slick was his nickname because he could talk his way out of anything,” chuckled Sharon Snowdy, who attended the 1995 bowling party as WLAE’s production manager and married David Snowdy in 2005. “We all thought it was pretty funny,” she said.

In addition to good humor, many other healthy habits kept the archbishop young in body, mind and spirit over the course of his 98 years, say those who knew him.

The late Msgr. Clinton Doskey, who lived with Archbishop Hannan at the St. Pius X rectory for several years in the early 2000s, attributed his friend’s longevity to a soldier-like adherence to prayer, exercise and regular meals, the latter containing portions that fell in line with doctors’ orders, down to the ounce.

Water helped sinuses

Long before it became fashionable, Archbishop Hannan practiced a daily regimen of drinking multiple glasses of water. The archbishop told Sharon Snowdy that the added hydration soothed his sinuses, which had been frozen and permanently damaged during the Battle of the Bulge, in the winter of 1944-45.

The retired archbishop also played golf, always took the stairs and was an avid walker, added Snowdy.

“When he lived on Moss Street he would walk around Bayou St. John every day –  he would do his little constitutional,” Snowdy said, noting that even after a post-Katrina move to the northshore, Archbishop Hannan would walk the streets of old Covington with his caretaker.

“He would take a little nap in the afternoon to recharge for the rest of the evening,” Snowdy said. “He would tell us, ‘Every night I have somewhere to go, because people ask me to attend everything.’ Dave and I would go to different Masses around town, and I can’t tell you how many times we would see Archbishop Hannan in ministry as a retired archbishop, celebrating a Communion or a confirmation,” she said.

“He was a little energizer bunny.”

Beth Donze can be reached at bdonze@clarionherald.org.