an old Polish Priest- Father Stan- when I grew up, in the seminary I attended. He spoke english but haltingly, and spent a lot of time trying to get migrant workers fed and clothed and housed, at least temporarily. He was a big beefy Santaclaus of a man, white beard and broad shoulders and a gut predominantly constructed, I suspect, of vodka. He would get a couple dollars here and there from local patrons, rent a U haul and drive it to the big army surplus place in Indianapolis. There, armed with the spirit of a turkish carpet merchant, he haggled for bulk pricing on overcoats, pants, longjohns, etc, and would come home with literal piles of clothes. While he lived, I don’t think anyone ever went through a winter cold, in our area. He would sell the clothes to people that had a little money, or trade them for a few hours work. So our town was full of polacks and wetbacks and other displaced people wearing a strange mix of GI OD pants and shiny boots and Finnish Arctic parkas and russian wool trenchcoats. They worked anywhere they could get work, and they were warm.

God bless him, anyway. Still, he washed all those clothes before he distributed them, in the school’s big laundry, and lord, was it ever a mess. he wasn’t concerned so much about the look of the clothes as the cleanliness, so he just tossed all the shit in the washer together, with predictable results.

It was a school tradition- well, we were trying to make it a school tradition- to put a pair of really ugly boxer shorts on the bronze statue of the school’s founder, and we had done it often enough that we were getting good at it. Tired of having to crawl up onto the plinth to take them down, Fr Moskal finally rigged up a sensor to the statue, whenever you touched it an alarm would go off in the Priest’s quarters and a spotlight would go on.

We did not yet expect this.

When we got to the statue, a pair of purple polkadotted boxers at the ready, armed with needle and thread and tape (You had to sew the boxers on, you couldn’t exactly get the statue to lift one leg at a time) we managed to get all the way up onto the plinth before setting off the alarm and turning on the spotlights.

The faculty had been training for this for some time, thiough I don’t think they expected the extremely early hour (we were doing this before matins, and I suspect they were prepared for a more late night encounter) So all fourteen of them showed up on the front steps of the school, in full view of the floodlights. Father Stan had on his red drop-flap union suit, Fr Ernest his boxers, Brother Tom in his Y fronts, the rest in a combination of differing underwear/sleepwear.

We were used to seeing them all in blacks and dogcollars, so the sight of them in underwear was shocking enough, let alone underwear that had been stained the colors of the rainbow (assuming the rainbow was all Olive Drab and Grey) which was wrenching. The OD mottling and general grey of the assemblage, ranging from athletic brother Tom to the rotund Father Ed, was enough to give a pubescent kid nightmares and made me swear off gay sex right then and there, there was and has been since nothing I consider less attractive and erotic.

Fr Ernest had his shotgun- he half expected kids from another school doing this, and when he discovered it wasn’t, he was very annoyed. He marched us back up the school steps- quite literally at gunpoint- and phoned and got all our parents out of bed, which was a fate worse than death in those days. I know I got tuned up at school AND at home that day, and it was a tuneup I won’t forget easily, though still mild compared to the sight of all those Men of the Cloth in their BVD’s