style=”text-align: left;”> 1945
by James Rada, Jr.
The second of his back-to-back Best Actor Oscars that the legendary Spencer Tracy won was for his role in the 1938 movie Boys Town. He played the role of Father Edward Flanagan, the Catholic priest who founded the pioneering boys’ home in Nebraska. The boys’ home is credited for giving many disadvantaged youths a better life and helping them through their turbulent childhood.
Flanagan was a graduate of Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, and he also experienced some struggles while there.
During his first day on campus, a schoolmate pushed him into St. Anthony’s Lake.
“I learned to swim because I had to,” Flanagan told the Frederick Post in a 1945 interview. He later credited that experience, along with the forced swimming lessons, for allowing him to save his father from drowning on a fishing trip at age seventy-five.
His second day on campus was just as noteworthy. “When a schoolmate challenged him to a fight in the gym, the youngster from Ireland proved himself a willing mixer. The battle lasted four hours,” the Frederick Post reported. His opponent spent the next week in bed. “I was in worse shape than he was and the only reason I didn’t go to bed, too, was because I was new in this country and too green to know that I should have,” Flanagan told the newspaper.
Luckily, most of his time at the Mount was not so exciting. He applied himself to his studies and developed a focused concentration on his work that would help him later in life.
Flanagan’s biographers have noted that Flanagan enjoyed his time in Emmitsburg and his frequent visits to his alma mater bear this out. He sang with the glee club and chapel choir and was elected to the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Frederick News also noted in a 1982 article that Flanagan was considered the best handball player on campus.
When he graduated in 1906 as the youngest in his class, he was recognized for his distinguished study in Latin and Greek and for a speech called “The Gaelic Revival,” during the college elocution contest.
His one regret apparently was that he didn’t get into any trouble. According to the Frederick News, it was a tradition at the time that a boy had to get in trouble with the administration at least once during his time at the Mount to be considered a true “Mountaineer.” “Perhaps I should have misbehaved a little,” Flanagan was quoted in one of his biographies.
He was granted a Master’s Degree from the Mount in 1911, while he was working in Austria. It was during this time overseas in Austria and Rome when he was also ordained a priest.
When he returned to the United States in 1913, he worked in Omaha as the assistant pastor at St. Patrick’s and as the proprietor of the Workingmen’s Hotel, which was temporary housing for vagrants. Seeing these men, Flanagan began wondering if they would have led different lives if they had been helped as boys.
This led to his idea of opening a home for boys in 1917. The Boys’ Industrial Home began with only five boys. It was more than just an orphanage, it was a home for boys that also used new parenting methods to raise and educate the boys so that they would be productive adults. As it grew in size, it was renamed Boys’ Town.
While the Spencer Tracy film was great PR for the organization, the film actually caused cutbacks in donations. “Viewers apparently made the judgement that if Boys’ Town could survive all the crises contained in the film, Flanagan and his troops might then withstand anything else that might happen,” according to the Frederick News.
In 1938, Mount St. Mary’s awarded Flanagan an honorary Doctor of Laws in recognition of his work at Boys’ Town.
Flanagan died in 1948 at the age of fifty-two.
“To have actually lived Flanagan is perhaps too much the perpetrator of the happy ending, too strong the personification of the American dream come true,” the Frederick News noted.
Father Edward Flanagan
