The guys on his 16-inch softball team called my dad “Padre.” I heard it one day when I was watching his R.R. Donnelly team compete at Grant Park. Dad played left field or pitched. His company team was solid: more than once, they won the league title.
In this kind of softball, the pitcher lobs the ball underhand. In those days, he was allowed to fake a couple of tosses before serving up the real offering. Pump fakes were meant to keep the batter a little off-balance. During one of his games, his shortstop, admiring Dad’s technique, called from behind, “Way to pitch, Padre!”
Later, I asked Dad why that guy called him that name. He told me the men on the team saw him as such a devoted Catholic that they gave him the nickname.
Dad’s Catholic faith framed the major elements of his life – work, family, politics and neighborhood – into a coherent whole. He wore his Catholicism naturally, not to boast or proselytize. That traditional frame saw the father as the spiritual and financial head of a little “domestic church” at home. Mom, a full-time homemaker, ardently embraced the whole model.
Dad kept us in touch with his work, even though he spent long days at the plant near the lakefront. We knew what he did as a photo re-toucher: he’d show us images he’d worked on in the Sears catalogue, which Donnelly’s produced.
When our first child was born, I had a different relationship with Catholicism than Dad. I had formed a more inwardly focused spiritual life, not attached to any one Christian institution. In my journal, which I referred to as my “inner church,” I prayed, analyzed dreams and reflected on what God might be calling me to do.
With my wife, Maureen, beginning her own career as a lawyer (I was a political science professor and practitioner in community development), my father-work relationship was evolving in ways dissimilar to Dad’s. Over the next seven years, when our other three children were born, rather than the traditional balance that Dad practiced, I went for fusion.
I made fatherhood my work with my own kids and through my teaching and policy research. Responding to the growing uncertainty in society about what homes with kids were supposed to look like, I took on a lot of household tasks, including cooking. I redefined my view of policy to emphasize “family-based community development.” It became the framework for my role as dad, teacher and scholar. The logic in this fusion led me to work from home more than I had planned.
We searched for a vibrant faith community. The church we joined in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – St. Thomas United Church of Christ – had embraced women in the ministry. It was led by married co-pastors, with a vibrant music program. Maureen cantored. She also sang in a quartet, “Gabriel,” with the pastors and music director.
I was receiving spiritual direction from another UCC pastor who was trained in Jungian Psychology. Among other issues, this Jungian work helped me get in touch with my inner feminine, and it helped me begin to get back in touch with some of the masculine self I had repressed since leaving the traditional home.
When we moved to Oak Park in 1996, the fusion of my fatherhood with work was well along but generating new iterations. Our home on Elmwood became a “productive family habitat.” In a partnership with Julian Middle School, we co-schooled our twin sons who had been struggling with organization. We also became an urban farm, growing fruit and vegetable throughout our property (See https://www.oakpark.com/2013/04/30/the-kordeshes-live-off-the-fat-of-the-land-in-their-backyard/).
We sold that home in 2017. We downsized, first for a few years in the South Loop, and since 2020, in a condo in Oak Park. While in the city, I took care of a granddaughter, taking her for walks along the lake. Now I spend every Monday with the daughter of one of those sons who had benefited from Julian’s creativity and dedication years ago. Currently, he teaches Special Ed in a school in the city.
I still value “Padre’s” quiet ferocity about the family. I made the family central to my work in community development. My own fatherhood evolved as I began forming a family with a woman whose career aspirations and commitment to motherhood were themselves quite powerful.
Today, as a grandfather of five and once again a practicing Catholic, understanding how work and family interpenetrate remains an ongoing quest, fed by the faith that made Padre the dad that he was.