Before I started I had see the principal. He said, "You will have to take Greek." I had taken two years of Latin at Melrose High School. He said, "So you might as well go back and start high school over again." And I didn't want to do that. So I said, "Well, Herb Coy, who lives next to me, could teach me Greek all summer, because he is just out of BC High." Well, he gave me a Greek grammar book and exercises, and said, "If you do all these exercises during the summer, write them out, and bring them to me the day that school starts, we will see what happens." So Herb and I did the whole book from beginning to end out in my back yard. I used to sit and do it with him. And so when school started, I brought the book of completed exercises with me. Father took the exercise book-I don't think he even looked at it actually. He said, "OK, go to class." And I spent my last two years there.

At the beginning of the school year at Baghdad College I taught junior year English and religion until Christmas time. At Christmas time four more Jesuits came. We were the first people to go there after the war; nobody had gone there during the war. So from about 1938 until 1945 there hadn't been anybody new coming there. Initially three of us scholastics went, and then four priests came four months later at Christmas.

The Masses there were completely in Italian. Well, my Italian was pretty good by that time. I had done some study while I was in the North End. But I really learned Italian there in Rome. The first day I got there, I met a great older priest, God rest him-he was about eighty then. He is my great model of life now. He said to me, "You want to learn Italian, don't you." I said yes. He said, "Well, I'll tell you what. I have a group of children, and after school each day they come and play soccer behind the church. You come down with me and I will have them talk to you." So initially for two summers that's what I did: I went over every morning to behind the church. We went down to the field, stayed there until lunch, then went down after lunch, and sat while the kids played. Every once in a while he would say, "Vieni qui. Parla con Papa." (Come over here and talk with Father.) So the kids would talk to me, and I would ask them, "Where are you going to school? What are you studying?" We had a great time talking, making conversation, or trying to. And eventually, I learned an awful lot just listening to them, because we did that for four or five hours every day for two whole summers.

We all left at the same time from Jerusalem. We got out about three hours from Jerusalem, and all of a sudden the two drivers stopped the truck. I was sitting in the back with all this equipment, and they were taking over fruit to be sold in Baghdad. They went under the truck and slept three or four hours. They did that twice that day and twice the next day, and on the third day we finally got to Baghdad. The other scholastics and the priest got there the first day at midnight; I got there two-and-a-half days later!

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