Life is a sacred journey, so board the Winnebago motorhome with me…! As the Risen Lord walked seven miles with Cleopas and the other disciple, He walked with my father ninety-six years.
Victor’s journey began in 1928, a gift from God to his parents and siblings (the latter less sure of that). Born in a little house on the South Dakota prairie, he was baptized Victor Felix, strong Catholic names for saints less known today.
My father described his first memory as that of Fr. Golden riding up to the farm in a horse and buggy. I think this less a pious thought than a child fascinated by the simple carriage. His father Wendelin helped with the parish, installed the church’s bell, and paid for the chalice. My grandmother Barbara secretly prayed that one of her five boys would be a priest. As the youngest, Victor went with his parents when his maternal grandfather was dying and remembered the grandiose church in the small town of Hague, North Dakota, recently rebuilt after a fire.
One of the best photos of my father as a young boy is his beaming face on his First Holy Communion Day. He learned the Latin to serve at Mass and saw one movie as a child when Fr. Golden had arranged for all the children to see Boys Town. They bathed weekly for Mass, no matter the weather. South Dakota is frozen tundra in the winter, so his father would park the car by the distant road, then a horse would pull their sleigh to the car, so that they could drive to Mass.
Life was hard but happy on the farm. He lived through the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. He remembered his father installing their first electric light bulb, powered by a battery charged from a handmade windmill. As the War waged, the air over the farm was used for training new pilots, and my father’s fascination with airplanes began.
Dad was practical. He learned the virtues of hard work on the farm and focused his creativity on solving problems. This shaped his faith. He was not one to reflect readily about matters of the faith, rather he learned them and accepted them, and from that he knew what to do. This, my friends, was a great grace.
Victor studied electronic engineering at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where he sang in the cathedral choir and was active in the Newman Club that met in the undercroft. He enjoyed those years and then moved to Washington State for an engineering job when the Korean War found him. He enlisted in the Navy and was sent from California to Rhode Island for Officer Candidate School. The Navy sent him to Johnsville Naval Air Development Center outside Philadelphia. In God’s Providence, he met a young mathematician, Rosemary Hanahoe.
She had been praying about entering religious life, but she received a sign pointing otherwise. And she met my Dad! They married on May 16, 1953, at Transfiguration Church in Philadelphia. It was a wedding Mass - not to be taken for granted in those days - and they started the rest of their sacred journey together by receiving the Sacraments of Matrimony and the Holy Eucharist.
They both worked on the largest computer in the world at that time, the Typhoon with 6000 vacuum tubes. My father’s job included the large centrifuge when NASA came asking if it could be used to simulate G-forces on the astronauts. (Dad always understated his achievement. You can view him talk about it on the link in the program.) The professors at the University of Pennsylvania were brought in and they said no. My father said he could, and he did. He holds a patent for how he did it.
But that was nothing compared to fatherhood! Come to the hall to see the slideshow of some of the early pictures and his excited smile. Kathy, Anne Marie, Patty, David, and me. He always loved children and had a gentle, soothing touch with them. He enthusiastically participated in God’s plan for their sacred journeys, and from the five he witnessed all seven sacraments! (Think about it.) What could top his children? Eventually three grandchildren and two great grandchildren!
After the Navy, he continued the same job as a civil servant until he transferred to the FAA, and after a brief time in Washington, DC, came here to the National Aeronautical Federal Experimental Center (NAFEC). He moved his family to Margate in 1962 and he lived here for 62 years. The first 48 years were at 8600 Atlantic Avenue, chosen in part because it was near to the church and school. (Their next house was chosen because they only had to walk past a Jewish synagogue to get to church!)
Dad’s faith was in action. He did not so much contemplate his life as a sacred journey, he did it. When he moved to Margate, he would drive retired Fr. Marshall, the retired priest across the street, anywhere he needed. He made a near-life-sized Nativity scene, proudly displaying it on Atlantic Avenue. As a Knight of Columbus in Pennsylvania, he was a founding member of the Msgr. William Doyle Council 7316 here in Margate. He was a Man of Malvern, making his annual retreat. He sang in the choir. He joined the Serra Club to promote vocations. With my mother, he hosted Renew prayer groups and Little Rock Bible studies. They enjoyed Marriage Encounter together. He was asked to be on the Core Team for the parish merger. He was a longtime lector at Blessed Sacrament and requested to be buried with the medallion given to him when commissioned in the first group of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion. Devoted to the Eucharist, he brought Holy Communion to patients in the hospital.
Victor would not miss Sunday Communion, not since that photograph from his First as a smiling small child. It was a weekly reminder that life was a sacred journey, beginning from God and returning to Him. In his Winnebago motorhome trips, he would find a church wherever he was! And it was more than weekly - Victor and Rosemary would attend daily Mass during Advent and Lent. (It was accompanying them that the seed of my vocation was planted.) When he retired in 1983, it was daily, walking to these hallowed walls for the “breaking of the bread.”
When he retired, he also retired the old 1965 Winnebago Brave for a larger motorhome, in which we lived while he taught at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, and became active at Sacred Heart Church and School for that one year.
I am jumping over a lot, and all of my siblings can remember our father helping in this parish and Blessed Sacrament School. Once retired, he programmed the database for the first parish census and ministry scheduler, and he set up the school computers. And he spent a lot of time babysitting his grandchildren!
Victor was a wonderful father, but I am focusing on the example of faith he left us as his legacy, the way God the Father loved us through him. He was more than a grandfather to Chris and Mary, fulfilling a role that should have been their father’s. How he loved them! As a young Christopher once said, he lived in Conshohocken but his home was in Margate. Eventually Dad’s joy was complete when Gwendolyn was born, and then topped off with his beloved great grandchildren! (Finally, grandchildren that were great!)
Not all was joy. The sacred journey of life returns to God. My father’s father died when I was a baby, but I remember well my grandmother’s death and my first real encounter with it. Dad had the Winnebago prepared to take Chris and Mary to Disney World, but when the call came, the trip changed. It was the first time I really saw my father sob. I do not remember hearing from him until later the consoling story of her death. Grandma had just received Holy Communion and as Aunt Anna walked the priest to the door, she died. (It was a similar grace with his mother-in-law.) Life is a sacred journey. It begins and ends with God, and is nourished by Him.
When I, my parent’s youngest, went off to college, they rented the house and boarded their motorhome, sending me off to college with no phone number to reach them! They went to volunteer a full year at the St. Bonaventure Indian Mission in New Mexico. My father was their business manager and he steered them through some difficult times.
After that, my parents were free to travel, and so they did! What journeys they made and how they enjoyed them! But life’s joys are contrasted by darkness. Before Cleopas and the other disciple recognized the Risen Lord in the breaking of the bread, their seven-mile journey to Emmaus started in the shadow of the Cross. Though there be light at the end of our sacred journeys, my father’s first darkest day was April 25, 1996.
While visiting Patty in Germany, Victor and Rosemary received the call that Kathy had died in a car accident. Life is a sacred journey. It begins from God and goes back to Him, but no one was ready to return a sweet 40-year-old mother of two. My father was both broken, and a rock. He knew what to do, and set about it. It’s not something he could fix, but he had to do what he could. This is captured clearest in my mind by my father painstakingly building a hanging loft bed for Christopher, making his workshop into his grandson’s bedroom.
Life is a sacred journey - a pilgrimage. My parents made many pilgrimages. He was very proud to have had the presence of mind to kiss the ring of Pope St. John Paul II when they went on the Serra International Pilgrimage to Rome. Three times they visited Lourdes, the pilgrimage site where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette. Their first was in 2001 when they learned of that dark day of 9/11 traveling from Lourdes to Fatima. He was on my pilgrimage when a young girl was instantaneously healed of a badly broken arm. It was their final Lourdes pilgrimage that Rosemary almost died from a ruptured appendix, having the dream where the Blessed Mother told her the souls she saw were those for whom Mass was offered. (That is the same hope we have today.) Just four days before he died, he talked about going to Lourdes again and taking with him his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
The simplest pilgrimage was the walk to church… so many profound moments, both glorious and sad. Here was my first Mass. On that day, my father read from here. And right over there I gave him the purple stole I used for my first confession, which is now in his hand, always destined for the final leg of his sacred pilgrimage.
Twenty years after losing Kathy, David was lost at sea on April 29, 2016. No one should lose a child, let alone two. I cannot imagine enduring such loss without faith. That it was the feast of St. Catherine of Siena was small consolation, but it ties providentially into today.
Three and a half years later, and five years ago this past October, Dad buried Rosemary from here. It was a slow, painful end, but one that was expected. I witnessed my mother’s last words, spoken to Dad, me, and God. She sat up in bed with strength she did not have, saying, “I love you, Vic… I picked well… the best husband… You’ve been so good to me… I don’t want to leave you alone…. Jesus, I love you. Mary, I love you.” I cannot recall exactly what she said about Dad in that moment, but I had heard her say similar things many times before. Life is a sacred journey. She saw it in him, even as hers went back to God.
Victor enjoyed living! I think everyone here knew that. Why go on a journey if you aren’t going to enjoy it? He did, and so he bought a new Winnebago and hit the road! It was either that or an airplane. Mostly, however, he enjoyed talking with people as he walked around the block, worked out at the J.C.C., went to American Legion and K of C meetings - especially if there was food - attended concerts, and, of course, met his friends after Mass.
He enjoyed it when I visited, a mystery to the rest of my family. I am blessed to have had the weekend before his death here with him. We went to the family grave for All Souls Day. We winterized his motorhome. He was still doing his own maintenance with his hands! We talked on the back porch for a long while and had a wonderful dinner at The Crab Trap. He was talking about going to Lourdes again, but what struck me most - although I cannot remember exactly how he said it - was his hope for his beloved progeny to return to the Church. This is love: to will the authentic good for other, not for your own sake, not what they think they want, but what you know to be good. He knew life as a sacred journey, beginning from God and returning back to God.
And return he did. Victor died on the Feast Day of All Dominican Saints. You now all know that because of the funeral card, but November 7 is not a date on the regular Church calendar. It is specific to Dominicans. Eight centuries of saints and blesseds were cheering him on on that day!
What unites all Dominican saints, and indeed, all saints? The love of God and, in a special way, the love for Christ present in the Eucharist. At this end of my father’s sacred journey, the saints pray with us for him, eager for his reception into the glory of the unveiled vision of God, while we remain on the other side of that veil, peering into the mysteries at the “breaking of the bread.”