A Conversation With... Br. Patrick McNally is in his 58th year of service as a Christian Brother. The 1955 St. Joe’s graduate is currently Director of Alumni Activities for St. Joe’s and the St. Joe Alumni Association, and is Executive Director of the Wig and Mask Society (WAMS). Br. Pat also organizes monthly Piano/Strings Concerts, is the school’s Vocation Director, and is the advisor to the Christian Brothers’ Auxiliary. How did you happen to attend St. Joe’s, even though you had attended St. Ambrose Grade School, in Grosse Pointe Park, and St. Ambrose had a high school?
8
We were in Georgia. It took some time to move back to Michigan. My father realized in August that he needed to enroll my oldest brother, Jim, in high school. My dad went to De La Salle, When I was in second grade, my mother on Conner and Glenfield. The princidied. pal said that the school was full, and suggested St. Joe’s. At St. Joe’s, the My dad was in the Navy, stationed in Principal at the time, Br. Joe Doyle, Georgia, and my mother was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer at the med- said, “There’s always room for one ical center in Atlanta. Our whole family, more.” So, my three brothers and I all including my grandparents, had moved graduated from St. Joe’s. to Georgia so we could all be together Your brothers had several children and grandchildren. You seem to be while my mom was being treated. close to them. Do you often get toAccording to my dad, one of my gether with your various relatives? mother’s last statements before she died I have 20 nieces and nephews, and 46 in 1944 was that she wanted her four grandnieces and grandnephews. When boys to be educated by the Christian we got together recently to celebrate Brothers. She told my dad that in her a grandnephew’s graduation from the absence, the Brothers would take good University of Michigan, there were care of her boys. probably 60 of us. So there we were. My mother had died.
My dad remarried in 1946. I always admired my stepmother who always thought of us as her own kids. We never referred to her as our stepmother, she was always “Mom.” You have said that for you, the summers are too long, that you miss the presence of students in the building. How do you spend that time to relax? The family has a summer place at Higgins Lake, and I spend four to six weeks there in the summer. It takes a week to get the yard in order, wash windows, and power wash the house. I like to sit and read a book. I walk every day. It’s a total change of pace. I enjoy it, but there is nothing like the energy that comes from the school year at De La Salle. Your mother was religious, as was your family. What led you to join the Christian Brothers?
Brother Pat and his St. Joe's classmates at the Senior Alumni Summer Luncheon in June. Pictured left to right; Ron Latiff, Robert Yazbeck, Hugh Larkin, Mike Ermiger, Jack Lysaght, Norm Muller, Benny Addelia (‘56), Brother Pat McNally, Gino Paliaroli, Julius Cicchini, Frank Goeddeke
