The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (31 page)

TWENTY-NINE YEARS AFTER THE ARRIVAL OF THE REVEREND DERoHAN IN 1790, a second Irish priest reached the Catholic settlements in the land that would become Marion County-the Reverend William Byrne from County Wicklow, who saw the need for an educational institution among the settlements and founded a school for fifty boys on a farm at St. Mary's, which included in its charter class a young John Martin Spalding, the future archbishop of Baltimore, a youth who demonstrated such natural intelligence that he taught his classmates mathematics when he was fifteen.

After running the school for twelve years and educating some twelve hundred students, Byrne put the St. Mary's school into the hands of a band of French Jesuits. But after an argument with Bishop Flaget in Bardstown, the Jesuits left St. Mary's for the newly founded Fordham University in the Bronx-yet another example of in-fighting within the church hierarchy in Kentucky to the detriment of the flock. In the end, Bishop Flaget's two greatest accomplishments were running out of Kentucky the founders of Fordham and Notre Dame Universities. And they didn't leave with mixed feelings: Father Badin left Louisville chanting the Dies Irae, the Latin song of death, while the Jesuits were known to have said on their way out of St. Mary's: "Nothing good would come from Kentucky."

After the departure of the Society of Jesus, care of the college at St. Mary's fell into the hands of the Resurrectionists, an order headquartered in Kitchener, Ontario. Through the nineteenth century, the Resurrectionists educated a number of notable luminaries, clergy, governors and congressmen at St. Mary's, including J. Proctor Knott, who used his St. Mary's education to deliver one of Congress's most famous sarcastic speeches ever, a ripsnorter about the proposed funding for a railroad to Duluth, Minnesota.The New York Times headlined his obituary:

PROCTOR KNOTT, WIT OF POLITICS, IS DEAD

Former Congressman and Governor of Kentucky Passes Away at 82, Leaving a Widow.

SPEECH ON DULUTH A CLASSIC

His Satire on Promoters of a Railroad In the Northwest Attracted Attention Across the Country.

... Although he was later to become governor of Kentucky, it was as a Democratic representative in Congress, to which he was first elected in 1866, that he made his famous Duluth speech, for which he will-probably be longer remembered than for any ofhis more serious efforts. It was practically his introduction to Congress, but it lingers in the traditions of that body as one of the most keenly humorous satires ever delivered. One can't go to Duluth today without hearing the story of it...

"Where is the patriot who is willing that his country shall incur the peril of remaining another day without the amplest railroad connection with such an inexhaustible mine of agricultural wealth?" Knott said from the floor of the House of Representatives.

"I was utterly at a loss to determine where the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be until I accidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of Duluth. Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm-like the gentle murmurs of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft sweet accents of an angel's whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth! Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years as the hart panteth for the waterbrook. But where was

Another noteworthy St. Mary's alumnus, John Lancaster Spalding, nephew to Archbishop John Martin Spalding, became an archbishop himself, presiding over the diocese of Peoria, Illinois. The New York Times headlined his obituary:

BISHOP SPALDING DIES IN 77TH YEAR

Roman Catholic Prelate of Peoria, Ill., Was Once Chancellor of New York Diocese.

AN AUTHORITY ON LABOR

One of the Arbitrators Chosen by President Roosevelt in the Coal Strike of 1902.

St. Mary's continued to educate young men through the twentieth century, bringing aspiring priests by train into the wilderness of Marion County from Chicago, Milwaukee and beyond. A young Jerry Eifler came from Louisville.

"When I decided I wanted to be a priest, I entered St. Mary's College in 1953 in the fall to study in Latin," Eifler later said.

"My days at St. Mary's College were very positive because I had the opportunity to make lifelong friends with a number of people.' he unique thing about St. Mary's was that it was very poor.' here were no frills, and if anything was to be done, whether it be athletics, or art, or theater or music, it had to be done by the students."

The world outside the 150-acre campus did not exist for its students. Newspapers were censored by the priests before students could see them, and no one was allowed to venture off campus, certainly not into Lebanon.

"We could not leave the seminary property from when we got there in September until we went home for Christmas," Eifler recalled.

What about the wild side of Marion County?

"We knew nothing about it."

The students' only exposure to the greater community was through the staff who worked at the college.

"Billy Elder was the head of food service," Eifler remembered. "He was from St. Mary's town, and he and his quote-unquote `staff' would cook our meals for us. Of course, Billy was a known drunk. It wouldn't be unusual at all for Billy to serve-and he did, a number of times-he'd go into the cupboard and get out the large gallon cans of what he thought was fruit cocktail and put it in a bowl and serve it to us as dessert. Where, in reality, it was mixed vegetables.

"And his menus were quite varied and unusual, to say the least.... We suspect that it might be wild game or varmint, but it wasn't. Once he got through with a chicken, you weren't quite sure where he got it."

After Vatican II, when Latin was no longer a clerical requirement, and after the pope declared that each diocese should have its own seminary, enrollment at St. Mary's continued to atrophy, another victim of diocesan mismanagement. What finally killed it off for good?

"A number of things," said Eifler. "After we graduated, if you were going to go on and do any graduate work, you had to have your degree validated by additional classes by an acceptable school, except for Catholic University in Washington, D.C., but no other reputable institution would do that because [St. Mary's] had some type of accreditation, but it wasn't full accreditation.

"Then, when the Archdiocese of Louisville opened its seminary in 1961, or thereabouts, all the seminarians from the archdiocese were transferred from St. Mary's to St. Thomas in Louisville."

The archdiocese sunk $800,000 into its new seminary at St. Thomas when it already had a perfectly good one at St. Mary's, and St. Thomas closed fewer than ten years after it opened. St. Mary's finally shut its own gates in 1975, 154 years after its foundation by the Reverend Byrne and the "no good will come from Kentucky" Jesuits.

In a strange turn, the property of the seminary was purchased by an eccentric millionaire, Ken Keyes (whose surname rhymes with eyes or thighs), a man born into money, married first at twenty and stricken with polio at twenty-five, which left him nearly quadriplegic-an affliction that did not stop Keyes from enjoying multiple sexual partners from his electric wheelchair.

In Berkeley, California, in the late 1960s, Keyes founded the "Living Love Center" in an old fraternity house. There he taught a New Age "method" of removing the jealousy inherent in multipartner sexual relationships, a field in which Keyes was an expert, having been married and divorced twice already.