FRED MASON '70

The joy of human consciousness is almost never the destination.  It lies in the journey.  It is the nature of man to seek conflict, making not only for greater literature or stories but significant human drama.

Part of that internal struggle is developing a “voice,” learning and developing a sense of taste and aesthetics, what looks good, what kind of writers you like, music you prefer.  It tells a part of who and what you are.  The measure of a man is often found in how they respond to defeat, disappointment or regret.  Those early days of struggle shape and color the experience.

Every man has his story.  At the graduation of the 2008 Leo High School class, Fred Mason searched out the right tone and message as the commencement speaker.  His younger brother Kenneth, an inductee into this year’s Hall of Fame, encouraged him to deliver the speech.  Initially Fred wondered why did he ever agree to the speech.  Mr. Mason has spent a life in teaching, social mentoring and providing direction and discipline in those in need.

After some reluctance, Fred decided to give it a shot.  Walking up to the podium, preparing his final thoughts and anticipating what he was about to say, a moment of calm suddenly enveloped his entire body.  In a burst of inspiration he knew exactly what he wanted to tell the young Leo men assembled that afternoon.

Facta Non Verba.

“Deeds, not words,” recalls Mr. Mason, quietly reciting the Leo motto.  It was elegant, simple and struck directly and defiantly to the heart of the matter.  It set the right foundation.  The man is finally acknowledged by the decisions and actions he undertakes in his own name. 

Mr. Mason was part of an important history of Leo, the time when the school recognized the changing social dynamics of the neighborhood and the necessity of responding to the needs of these young men. They were not going away and Leo had to acknowledge their existence.  The fact that Fred Mason ended up at Leo is perhaps best viewed as an accident of history.  Both sides benefited from the arrangement, as his story reveals. 

Early days

A member of the Baby Boom generation Fred Mason was born Sept. 11, 1952.  He was a native South Sider who grew up at 73rd and Eberhart. His father, also named Fred, was a native Mississippian who worked as the headwaiter of the Illinois Central, the southern rail line that moved through Mississippi and Florida.  “That was the train that brought all the black folks up north during the migration [after World War II],” he says.

“My mother, Barbara Logan, is what we call Barack Obama now.  She was biracial.  Her ancestors on her mother’s side were German that came from New Jersey.  My [maternal] grandfather was black, and he was from Atlanta by way of South Carolina,” Fred says.  His mother was born in Chicago and graduated from Du Sable.  She worked as a payroll clerk for the University of Chicago Hospitals.  Fred was the first born in his family.  His brother Kenneth was born five years later in 1957.

Given both his parents had roots in the South, it was not surprising the family’s faith was Baptist.  “I was a product of that rural faith tradition.  That explains why I am the way I am now,” he says.  From kindergarten to fourth grade Mr. Mason attended Park Manor elementary school, followed by a two-year stretch at a public school. He was a serious, thoughtful and probing young kid who was drawn to ideas of sacrifice and service

He remembers attending a couple of different Baptist churches as a kid. He was unaware that it was different from other churches. Most kids his age were into sports, movies or music. He had already developed a serious and thoughtful side about him.  On Thursday afternoons, Mr. Mason left school in the early afternoon in order to take catechism class at St. Columbanis.  It was there he completed his final two years of grammar school.

It was there he found his way, metaphorically and spiritually, to the Catholic Church.  In 1964, at age 12, he was baptized.  Up until then he had a foot in each world, and he was still attending his Baptist church.  It created some tension at home.  “My father was very upset that I was going to what he deemed, a white church,” he says. 

“I led the way.  First me, and then my brother followed,” he says.  Eventually, his mother was baptized.  It was the central experience of his early identity.  “I had a vocation to the priesthood,” he says. So he took the first step.  He applied for admission to the seminary high school.  He was rejected.  He took the rejection in stride.  Fortunately he found his own form of intervention.

“My eighth grade teacher recommended that I go and take the admission test at Leo High School,” he says.  Leo was undergoing its own transformation.  In 1926 the Christian Brothers of Ireland established their first Chicago school, Leo High at South Sangamon on East 79th Street.  Historically the school was predominantly Irish, white and Catholic. After World War II, the first significant wave of Southern blacks entered Chicago’s South Side, bolstered by significant new employment opportunities in manufacturing.  The first African-American students entered Leo in 1960.

Furthermore the neighborhood around the school was changing fairly rapidly, moving from predominantly white Catholic and ethnic to working and middle-class black families.  As a freshman in 1966, Mr. Mason was part of the first significant group of black students to enter Leo in significant numbers.  “There were black kids already at Leo, but my class was the first one that had 27 [students] out of freshman class of about 325.  That was a considerable expansion on the part of Leo,” he says.

The writer Michael Herr famously observed that Vietnam is what we had instead of a happy childhood.  Life in Chicago and the rest of the country in fall of 1966 was strange, profound and shattering.  The war in Vietnam was escalating, and public opinion about the suitability of American participation in the war was quickly turning to official and highly theatrical forms of protest, especially among the young.  The mass of black migration from the South occasioned some harsh racial disturbances.  The civil rights movement burst onto the front pages when Martin Luther King made his notorious march in Marquette Park demanding fair housing for blacks.

King and several of his supporters were roughed up.  Mr. Mason says it is likely some of the people involved were from Leo.  At the beginning black students felt somewhat marginalized and caught on the outside looking in.  “We did not feel we had ownership of the school,” Mr. Mason says. He adapted quickly to the school curriculum. The indoctrination was the same for all students, regardless of color. Fred says a particular détente was achieved between the white and black students. Tempers sometimes flared, but Mr. Mason says were few outright racist incidents, except on occasion such as followers of Lincoln Rockwell’s Nazi party at 71st and Western placed offensive fliers in the lockers at Leo.  The most damaging thing that ever happened was being assaulted at a bowling alley on Ashland.

Fred performed well in his classes, but he found himself in an unfortunate position.  He was constantly being sent to the dean for being late to school.  “I had a paper route, that was my job,” he says.  He rolled up the now defunct Daily News and dispensed them from a special cart.  It was fun and exhilarating, and it put some money in his pocket.  “I probably made $50 a week, and I was at every door at Christmas,” he says, laughing. 

Leo was known throughout the city for its athletic prowess.  Fred Mason demonstrated many fine qualities as a young man, but he was not an athlete.  He was a big guy, and his body was filling out.  His pursuits were intellectual, books, reading, and writing.  He joined the drama club and performed in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.  He joined the school newspaper, The Oriole, as the viewpoints editor.  His developing political consciousness emerged when he and several classmates left campus and traveled to the Loop to participate in an antiwar demonstration. “They were exciting times,” he says.

The portrait was streaked in gray rather than black and white.  Fred had white friends. The hierarchy, conservative institutional order of the Christian Brothers produced some negative stereotypes or dangerously out of date thinking.  “The kinds of racism was more subtle, but it was there.  The Brothers did not do it intentionally, I don’t think, but you were aware of it if you were black.  They never pushed black students to attend four-year colleges.  They also pushed them to go to two-year or junior college schools.  That’s what they did with me,” he says.

Fred experienced a repeat of being passed over for seminary school.  He applied to Lewis College [now University] in Lockport, in the south suburbs.  The school denied his application.  Mr. Mason’s time at Leo taught him the importance of sticking to his ideas and not backing down in the face of adversity.  He refused to take no for an answer.  “I went to the dean of admissions, and told him he had to accept me, that I would not disappoint or fail him and I would live up to my end of the bargain.

“I got in.”

New challenges

By 1970, the social tumult of the country had only grown worse.  Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968, his junior year at Leo.  The war in Vietnam had been brought home to the streets of Chicago, particularly during the contentious activities of the August 1968 Democratic National Convention.  Fred was drawn to the power and theater of political action.

Something deeper and more powerful gnawed him. The pastoral tradition he learned on his father’s side, their ancestors from Magnolia, Mississippi, reiterated the point that God was central to human life.  At Leo, he fought the conservative institutional order; he hated the use of corporeal punishment (though fortunately he managed to avoid it.) Brother Thomas Ryan was instrumental in learning the concepts of sacrifice.

After fighting to get accepted at Lewis, Mr. Mason decided this was his time to give something back.  He studied history, education and music. He justified the dean’s faith in his plea to get accepted into the school.  He adopted the principles of the Christian Brothers.  He became one.

“I wanted to continue the legacy of Edmund Ignatius Rice,” he says.  The Blessed Edmund Ignatius Rice (1762-1844) founded the Christian Brothers, the first congregation of men formed in Ireland, for the purposes of teaching, clothing and nurturing young men. Their motto, from Job 1:21:  “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord forever.”

Returning home “After I graduated, I was given my assignments and they asked my preferences, and I said: Leo, Leo and Leo,” Mr. Mason says.  He was only four years removed from the school as a student.  The school was moving quicker to adapt to the pluralism of the surrounding community.  Mr. Mason says by the time he arrived in the fall of 1974, the school’s black population had jumped to about 30 percent.  His younger brother, Kenneth, was a sophomore at the school.

His first meeting with the principal was tense.  “He said to me: ‘I hear you’re militant.  You will not be militant here.’

“Some of the students remembered me from when I was there,” he was.  He taught in Room 202.  “The kids were hard, and they tried to run me out of there.  But I loved it.  The obstacles and the challenges and dealing with young men, trying to find myself as a teacher and maintain my principles made it a very exciting and thrilling time,” he says.

The call to sacrifice, dedication and honor caught fire with him. Mr. Mason found his place and excelled at what he naturally regarded as his calling.  He taught history and religion for the next 17 years.  He knew his time at Leo was only an apprenticeship of sorts.  He moved across the country, spending time in Gardenia, California and he taught at two different Catholic high schools in St. Louis.  He spent his final year as a full-time at St. Rita in 1991.  He also earned a Master’s degree from Loyola in 1986. 

Most important, he met his wife Barbara at Evanston Township High School.  They were married in 1988.  Their son (naturally named Fred) was born in 1995.  His wife is also an educator, working in the south suburbs.

Transition

His departure from teaching was motivated in part by his deeper commitment to Christian work.  In 1990 Joseph Cardinal Bernardin ordained Mr. Mason as a deacon. The word deacon derives from the Greek word diakonos (διάκονος), translated as “through the dust,” and typically regarded as a servant or waiter of God.  Deacons frequently are called upon to aid the poor, the sick and the marginalized.  With his dovetailing background of teaching, academia and interest in social justice, Mr. Mason took charge of the youth ministry programs in the Archdiocese’s South Side.  He oversaw nine high schools and 76 parrishes. 

In 2000 he worked in the Catholic Youth Office.  He worked for four years as the director of outreach programs for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the mainline Protestant denomination that is based in Chicago.  He is also a priest in the Old Catholic Church, the independent Catholic denomination that split from Roman Catholic Church over its docrtinal disagreements over papal infallibility.  (Bishop Paul Francis Cope founded the Old Catholic Church of America in 1925.)  In that capacity he officiates weddings.

Now, he is the pastoral director of Medhane Alem Community, an ecumenical contemplative mission located at 95th and Kedzie.

His work in the church and the ministry galvanized him.  He is nearly four decades removed from his time as a student at Leo. Those four years shaped his orientation and helped make the man.  “My four years at Leo, that faith and spirit is still very much in me,” he says.  “Their spirit and beliefs and values are something very much worth holding onto. That’s what I wanted to tell those kids at the graduation.

“I have spent my life and believed absolutely in education, character, social justice and working with young people.  As I said, my mission, my belief was the same, I wanted to carry on the legacy of Edmund Ignatius Rice.  What I learned at Leo is something very much worth keeping, the faith, a belief in God, church, the family, values and priorities that we received there. “I was one of the first group of black students at Leo.  I never would have believed that it would become an all-black school the way it is today.  I didn’t think the Brothers would allow that, because I believe that all schools, like life, need and are best served by a mix of things.

“In my life and work, most of all I’ve carried the torch for Leo.”

Facta Non Verba.

Indeed.