Word: toms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...People in Love." How the son of General Sherman, a nondenominational Protestant who believed in "truth," came to be a Jesuit spellbinder is told in this fascinating biography by Joseph T. Durkin, himself a Jesuit and professor of American history at Georgetown University. Tom Sherman, born in 1856, was brought up in St. Louis and Washington amid his father's legend, but his Catholic mother, Ellen Ewing Sherman, probably had the greater influence. Tom went to Yale, studied law at St. Louis' Washington University, then abruptly informed his father that he was about to enter the Jesuit novitiate...
...Tom moved toward his ordination as a priest, he began to sound more and more like the general's son. "National spirit will always be associated with the national arms," he proclaimed. "I should like to see all schools flying the national colors." He also said: "Order is heaven's first law and man's last and to restore it in a few spots of earth takes greater exercise of divine power than to create a million worlds...
...Father Tom, not yet 50, was wearing down fast, suffering nervous breakdowns, getting entangled in exhausting quarrels with his superiors about minutiae. In 1911 he collapsed, was put into one sanitarium after another, was treated as insane. "Repeated confessions but no peace," he wrote in 1913. "No hope whatever of eternal salvation. Still my vows press on me and I will continue to obey blindly...
Seventeen years later, incapacitated in hermitlike seclusion in Santa Barbara, four years before his death, he had just enough of the Sherman combativeness to fight and win a last battle for a $50-a-month Army pension that was his due for service in the War of 1898. Father Tom's entry on his pension application blank for nearest relative to be notified in case of death: his dead father, General William Tecumseh Sherman...
...most celebrated banger of mystical ashcans has written a fictional account of his childhood, and surprisingly, while the lad he describes is no Penrod, neither is he Little Boy Beat. Jack Duluoz, the author's alter-Kerouac, is exuberantly profane and comfortably delinquent-a kind of city-bound Tom Sawyer who at one point seems ready to go rafting down New England's flood-swollen Merrimack River on a henhouse roof...