LITMIR.BIZ

      Jerry Hannan and I minister to our brother, Denis Hannan, who passed away on February 5, 2010.

      With so many government officials living in the area, you never knew what celebrity might walk down our sidewalk, stopping — like one ramrodstraight Army officer, whom I later learned was General John J. Pershing — to pat our heads. (Pershing apparently never recovered from the traumatic loss of his wife and three young daughters in the tragic fire at San Francisco’s Presidio in 1915.) My brother, Tom, in fact, may well be the only person in Washington to run down a sitting president with a scooter. One morning, President Calvin Coolidge, accompanied by a Secret Service agent, was enjoying his usual, early-riser constitutional up 17th Street (from the White House) when Tom, hell-bent on getting his scooter to fly across the pavement, suddenly scored an abrupt bulls-eye on the leg of the leader of the free world. Unperturbed, Coolidge, sidestepping his young assailant, simply continued on.

      It would not be the last time that Tom — or the rest of us — would set eyes on the President of the United States. In 1927, due to White House renovations, Coolidge temporarily moved into the home of publishing heiress Cissie Patterson in Dupont Circle, two blocks from our house — wonderful serendipity, as it turned out, for the Hannan boys. When President Coolidge welcomed Charles Lindbergh to Washington, following his historic transatlantic flight, he invited “Lucky Lindy” to the Patterson house where an excited crowd — my brothers and I among them — stood on the lawn’s trampled bushes, cheering for the dashing aeronautics hero to make an appearance. Finally, Lindbergh and Coolidge emerged onto a second-floor balcony where Lindbergh, timidly waving to the noisy throng, allowed my brothers and me a bird’s-eye view of the world’s (then) most famous human being. Seconds later, he was gone, both men disappearing back into the house without saying a word. So much for public relations!

      St. Matthew’s Cathedral

      Ultimately, everything of any importance in our family centered on the Church, in our case St. Matthew’s Cathedral, four short blocks away on Rhode Island Avenue. I can still dimly recall the church’s aged, aristocratic founding pastor, Monsignor Thomas Sim Lee, a Maryland cousin of Robert E. Lee. Autocratically deciding in 1897 that the parish church, whose boundaries included the White House, should be worthy of a Catholic president of the United States, he set about making it a reality. As a result, the Monsignor commissioned New York architect Grant Lafarge to design St. Matthew’s imposing dome whose construction, exceeding the height restrictions established by zoning laws, required the city to change them. (The ornate interior, meanwhile, required thirty years to reach completion.)

      The priests of St. Matthew’s Cathedral were, like their leader, as varied as the neighborhood. Well into old age, Monsignor Lee still insisted on taking nighttime sick calls, while his successor, Monsignor Edward Buckey, an Episcopalian convert, set the gold standard when it came to “walking the parish” to visit every parishioner. Father Argaut, a member of the French Missioners of Paris as well as a wise, gifted counselor and confessor, found Washington’s humid climate, after years spent in India, more than agreeable. What was not agreeable was anything that did not adhere to the “old France.” One time, when the visiting French choristers, Les Petits Chanteurs a la Croix de Bois, sang the Marseillaise on the steps of the cathedral, Father Argaut huffed off in disgust. “I can’t stand that revolutionary song.” I was baptized by the English Father Mills whose father (an Oxford don) taught him to speak Latin and Greek. A thoroughly entrenched academician, Father Mills required every young First Communion candidate to pass a written exam — throwing my oldest brother John into a six-year-old sweat when it was discovered that he’d re-jiggered a basic Catholic tenet: “There are,” he confidently wrote, “two Gods.”

      “John, I’m shocked,” my mother reportedly exclaimed hearing of this blasphemy. “You know there’s only one God!”

      “I know, Mom,” he replied, “I just couldn’t spell ‘one’!”

      Priests were as much a part of our social, as religious, life. Nothing pleased my mother, an excellent cook, more than inviting over the parish priests as well as any from Catholic University (a constant influence in our lives) where Father William Turner, her fourth cousin, was a professor of philosophy. “Tur” (from baby Jerry’s inability to pronounce “Turner”) was smart and forward thinking, undoubtedly the force behind convincing, years later, the University’s powers-that-be to break tradition and allow my sister, Mary, to study for a doctorate in Latin and Greek. When Tur was named the Bishop of Buffalo, he delivered the exciting news to Mother via phone:

      “Lil,

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