Some People Who Really
Love Their Pet Dogs
Reported by Robert R. Schwarz
[ This interview was
originally posted
in November 2010.]
On weekday mornings as usual, Tom Adams and Rosemary Schumacher enter their church sanctuary around six-
forty-five and prayerfully embrace the
silence before the seven-thirty Mass
begins. Votive candles are flickering on both sides of the altar and the sun is now illuminating the
eight stained glass windows and the huge, multi-color Rosetta window high above
the altar's crucifix. You might hear a
dangle of Rosary beads upon one of the hardwood pews or a disabled man or woman pushing a walker the down the aisle.
At ten after seven, no matter the weather
or season, most of the dozen or so "regulars" are in their usual pews at the 4,000-family-member St. James church in
Arlington Heights, Illinois. Here, a
man is praying for his spouse with severe rheumatoid arthritis; behind him are three
nuns—one is, 95, and from a nearby convent; across the aisle is a retired
dentist and his wife. Today, there is also an unemployed
chauffeur with an injured back, a CPA who is an Opus Dei member, a church deacon, a retired newspaper editor (me), and a financial
consultant. Occasionally, you will
see in the rear pews a "homeless" man or woman or a teenager or a pregnant woman near her time. And, for several
weeks, the first to arrive was an
itinerant Catholic evangelist who had
just returned from knocking on home doors in Nova Scotia (you might have
seen her outside kneeling before a statue of the mother of Jesus).
 |
| At McDonald's, his favorite hangout |
The silence is now pierced (as it is on most mornings, by Tom Adams entering through the rear church door after a brief walk from the home; he has lived there alone since his wife of 60 years died four years ago. Tom is an outgoing, feisty 85-year-old. His stride is that of an inpatient teenager. He is a balding man with ever alert eyes.
As he passes pews, he scans faces with a broad, good-morning smile. Like an attentive hospital physician making morning rounds, Tom begins greeting the regulars (and now and then a stranger) with a hand on
their shoulder, often with adding a humorous word, "what time did you get to bed last night"?
In
an interview with him at a McDonald's, I kindly ask Tom to explain his behavior. " Why
not?" he replies with curmudgeon
tones. " These are your own people. Most of them have got problems or they
wouldn't be here. Grieving widows and widowers, men out of work, married women who want
to get pregnant. Thing is, nobody here talks to each other. Some have sour faces
but they're praying. So, why not say ' hello' to them? Make them feel good that they're in church and that there's people here like me who think about them once in a while. "
It's now nearly seven-thirty. The church
has been quickly populated with perhaps
90 weekday worshipers. Tom senses he's got time for one more pew visit until someone tells him to muffle his voice. "How's the wife? " I hear him ask a senior. The man replies that she is still
alive. Tom pats him twice on the back.
 |
| Sure enough, that red spot is lipstick! |
Sure enough, Tom hears a commanding
"hush! "
I ask him if he thinks his behavior distracts people who have begun to pray. "Hey, look," he says, "I'm helping them to pray
harder! "
The young altar server rings the bell over the sacristy
door. Tom goes to a pew (he seldom sits in the same
one), kneels and takes out his Rosary beads…
In McDonalds this morning after Mass, Tom excuses himself from his small coterie of coffee-drinking
parishioners to join this reporter to
answer questions about his past marketing and sales careers with the Chicago Tribune, New York
Daily News and Boston Herald before
publishing a weekly newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, and, finally, the Penny
Saver shopper in nearby Buffalo Grove
and Mt. Prospect. Currently, he works 22 hours each week operating the freight elevator at the
Arlington Park Racecourse.
It isn't easy to get him talking about
those eighteen B-24 bomber missions he flew as a 17-year-old waist gunner over Romania during World War II, including
the raid over Ploesti in which our Air
Force lost 660 crewmen and 53 aircraft. "
We got hit pretty hard by flack and I
had to jump into Yugoslavia, " he says. (He was rescued later and flown back to his unit by the Russian military. ) One of his regrets about the war was that he
never went to see Padre Pio, whose
church was only a mile from Tom's base
in Italy. Was there anything for Tom to
confess to the famous saint? " Tom grinned: "At my 17 years of age? Are you kidding?"
Asked what he does for fun besides walking four miles daily (twice around Lake Arlington)
, Tom says: " Not much. I talk, laugh. I've been with people all my life
who laugh."
And with that, Tom gets up and resumes talking to his friends. A minute later everybody is laughing there, Tom the loudest.
3 ½ Years
Later…
It's about 6:50 a.m. on Monday, and Tom is sitting in his
usual pew; but this time his friend Rosemary Schumacher is at his side. Tom leads off the Rosary prayers, something he initiated about a year ago. The two have been keeping company for maybe three years,
though she's been a St. James member for 45 years. " He kept asking me to go to coffee with
him in the morning…and finally he gave me a $25 gift card at Christmas, and we went out for coffee, " Rosemary says.
Tom is in his usual, feisty and teasingly
humorous mood and, after the Mass ,asked if I knew that
Deacon Pierce Sheehan and he were
"somehow" related. Not waiting or apparently caring for a reply, Tom
says, "I had a hard time convincing
him of this. I don't think he wanted to be related to me. "
"Holy Mackerel, " I say, stuck for any
other kind of reply.
" That's how I feel, " is Tom's
rejoinder. Thinking it was time to return
some of his own barbed humor, I turn to
Rosemary: "How do you put up with this guy?"
She says something about "hell on earth." Tom wears a
hearing aid, and his voice is a few decibels above normal. With an indulging smile, Rosemary says Tom is getting a
new hearing aid.
Tom tells Rosemary to speak up. "I can't hear most of it. "
Tom tells Rosemary to speak up. "I can't hear most of it. "
"Thank God," she says.
When our very Irish Pastor Matt
Foley walks by us, Tom addresses him: " Say,
Father, one second now: "How much
Polish do you have in you?"
Fr.
Matt naturally halts—a reflex acquired during several years as a U.S. Army chaplain—and looks curiously at Tom. The priest obviously is not acquainted with Tom's personality and smiles kindly at him and continues walking.
But believe it: Tom has a soft side
and shows it when a parish member walks by with his infant granddaughter in arms. Tom exhales a long and affectionate
sigh. "Look at this pretty one!
How are you, Honey?"
After Mass, I walk with Tom and
Rosemary out to the parking lot.
" The two of us have had a good
life, " Tom says. "A lot of it has to do with the
people here. They're decent people. You walk in and say 'hello' and people are
glad to say 'hello' back. "
Rosemary has been widowed for 12
years and is the mother of eight children. She says, "Our families have
gotten along beautifully."
Tom rolls down the driver's window
as he and Rosemary get into their car. I
make a complaint about aging. It's a
perfect setup for Tom's drive-away humor: "If you find a way to fix it, let me know. I sit down at breakfast with my New York Times, and the next
thing I've got cereal dripping down my shirt. " This time Rosemary laughs, too.
 |
| Mass is over--and the two of them are off! |
Rosemary for sure has left her mark
on Tom—in fact you can see it anew every Mass morning. I see it now on Tom's left cheek—a very prominent lipstick-red mark.
I have to ask, " When does she plant this on you,
Tom? Morning or evening? "
'That's none of your business," he says.
" It's there," Rosemary says as Tom drives away, " to ward off
all the women who were chasing him. "
The End
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© 2014, 2022 Robert R.Schwarz
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