Oh, Incarnate Word

The Hall of Fame Induction speech, Oct. 14, 2023.

I can remember with great clarity the first time I stood alone on this stage. It was January 1979. I was a sophomore auditioning for the role of “Ado Annie” in the musical Oklahoma. And I was as confident as a 15-year-old could be. I’d grown up watching it, and when no one was home, I’d put the album on hi-fi stereo and sing along with quirky and slightly off-key Gloria Grahame.

So one Friday afternoon, I stood up here onstage — right over there — and belted out, “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No,” with every fiber of my being. And I really thought I had a shot. After all, I was in the director Mrs. Harris’s homeroom. We met right over there, backstage, and it was rumored that each year she hand-picked her favorites, which had to be the most talented theatrical kids in the class. 

But what I didn’t know, at the tender age of 15, is that Ado Annie doesn’t sing off key; she just sounds that way, and that it takes great vocal command to pull that off. So I should not have been surprised the following Monday, when the cast list was posted outside the theater door and my name was not on it.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Harris comes bounding backstage, gushing about all the talent in her homeroom. Then she looked at me and my friend Nancy Frey, the only other homeroom member who didn’t make it, and said very publicly, “Those of you who didn’t make it, I strongly suggest singing and dancing lessons before you try out for another musical.”

I was crushed. I went home and told my mom that not only did I not make it, but Mrs. Harris was kind of mean to me.  Mom just shrugged. She knew Mrs. Harris was right, but she wasn’t going to add fuel to the fire. She just said, “Try something else.”

That something else was softball, which I thought I was pretty good at. I’d grown up playing every summer in Florissant for the St. Sabina CYC, and I’d been a catcher my whole life. 

So I made the team. At the time it was a spring sport, but the coach, Jane Schreiber, told me not to expect much playing time, and that the only reason I made it was because she needed a third catcher as we played Cor Jesu the night of prom. She hated losing to Cor Jesu, she said, and she wasn’t about to forfeit the game for lack of a catcher.

It rained the night of prom, so I never got to show off my CYC catching skills.

I did get in one game that season, in right field, where in my first opportunity to prove myself I charged a sharply hit line drive between first and second. The sharply hit ball went right through my legs. By the time I chased it down, the batter was crossing third, heading for home and Coach Schreiber was on the bench with her face in her hands. That was the end of my athletic career at Incarnate Word.

Here’s why I tell these two stories. These two – in my mind – colossal failures shaped me in more ways than I could have imagined. You see, I didn’t really know who I was in 1979, but that year I found I out what I wasn’t: A musical-theater performer, and an athlete and, as would be quite clear the following fall in Algebra 2, in the class of the late, great Sr. Mary Kay McKenzie, God Rest her Dear Soul, a mathematician or scientist.

But what I was really good at was lunch, and Open Labs and finding my people and my friends, and myself, in that remarkable modular scheduling – so progressive for that era – that taught you what to do with your time. I was learning how to breathe.

What I was also learning, in those failures, was how to fall and stick and landing; how to flop and come up smiling. Because when you did there was always someone ready to help in this estrogen-filled, nurturing environment that this girl with no sisters desperately needed. And in trying all these things, I was making friends every step of the way. I was involved. I was showing up, which is 90% of life.

And finally, I saw The Light. No really. The Light was our student newspaper, and my senior year, after figuring out I was pretty good in my English and writing classes, I joined the staff at the request of my dear friend Colleen Lake, who was the editor. My first byline was a story about the girls basketball team. I still have that clipping.

That’s how the 1980s started for me. By the end of that decade, after earning degrees in English and a master’s in journalism, I was hired by the venerable Sporting News, the Bible of Baseball, that was in its 103rd year of publication. I was only the third woman hired as an editor in the editorial department. The first two only lasted a few years. They wanted to hire a woman and I was in the right place at the right time.

They gave me a typewriter and a desk in the corner of smoke-filled newsroom, and I loved it. I had already decided I was going to show up early and stay late. By the end of my first week, my enthusiasm was tempered by one of the longtime male editors, who came up to me late one night as I was getting ready to leave. His face was red, his finger was waving in my face, and he was proceeding to ask me – way too close in my personal space – if I knew how many men deserved this job more than me; how many men had spent their entire careers hoping to work at a place like this; how men naturally had such far superior knowledge of sports and if I knew I was a token hire, unqualified and unprepared, and that he’d be watching my every move.

I was shaken, for sure, but I didn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t about to let him know he rattled me. I knew what I was capable of, and I decided at that moment how I would conduct myself.

While the door had been left slightly opened for me, I was going to open it as wide as I could for any women that came after me by keeping my head up and letting my work speak for itself.

The work. The work. The work.

It’s always about the work you produce, and Incarnate Word had taught me that if you give it everything you’ve got, the work will see you through.

I’ve made a living putting sentences together and telling stories – and I still can’t believe I get paid for it. Life is a series of one thing leading to another, one door closing and another opening. I stayed 17 years at The Sporting News, and in between got married, had two amazing sons, became a part of some amazing communities. For the past 20 years, I’ve written a newspaper column for Times-Newspapers in Webster Groves – more than 800 columns now. For the past 16 years, Washington University has trusted me with a variety of jobs – including my current job as a writer and editor for WashU’s alumni magazine. They all have one thing in common. I get to tell stories.

So I hope you’ll allow me one more, because it’s about the school song.

When I graduated, I went from here to Quincy College, a small, liberal arts school in Quincy, Illinois, run by the Franciscans. At the time, Incarnate was a pipeline to Quincy. So in the early 1980s, there was a bunch of us Red Knights, maybe a dozen or so, so many that sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning, at a house party or in the dorms, we would sing the school song at the top of our lungs – so many times that even some of our friends who didn’t go here got to know the words.

I’m not making this up. 

So I started to think about the song and what made it stick, why it resonated with so many. As a person who’s made a living searching for that perfect sentence, here’s what I discovered about the song written by one Mrs. Thelma Pope Hines and the Jesuit Rev. Daniel Lord.

The song starts with not one, but two exclamatory sentences:

Oh, Incarnate Word -Exclamation Mark!

Our Dear Incarnate Word-Exclamation Mark!

Enthusiasm, baked right in from the get-go.

So I started thinking about those two sentences and why they’re so impactful. The first one is the Incarnate Word that is Jesus, the Word Made Flesh. That foundation of faith has been deeply instilled in this place since the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word came to St. Louis by way of San Antonio more than 100 years ago, and I’m grateful that that charism — to make God’s love a real and tangible presence in the world — has stayed with me my entire life.

That faith in the Incarnate Word has gotten me through some dark, dark moments, and there have been some, but it is also manifested itself in moments of triumph and in my greatest joys, three of which are here tonight My husband of 31 years, Tom, who is my rock; My boys, Matt, who is here from Chicago with his fiancé, Hannah and my son Jack and his lovely Libby. And my brothers, my extended family and friends, all examples for me of God’s love in the world.

The second exclamatory sentence:  Our dear Incarnate Word — it’s this place. These 9 acres in this beautiful part of North St. Louis County that make up this beautiful campus. There’s something about being physically present here. I don’t know if students here realize how much this place, these grounds, are going to stay with you when you leave. And how embracing it’s going to feel every single time you come back.

Our dear Incarnate Word is the more than 7,000 alumnae in 91 years that have graduated from here – including these remarkable women with whom I am humbled and honored to be a part of this 2023 Hall of Fame class. And Ken — not just Ken, as you’ll find out

Our dear Incarnate Word is an ideal that once you’re a part of it, stays with you forever. It picks you up when you’re down and teaches you how to stumble and come up smiling, how to fall and stick the landing.

It’s that intangible, that spirit, that is the reason that Incarnate Word will have our hearts until we die. [ Insert off-key singing sound here. ]

Nope, never did get those singing lessons.

But some 45 years ago, Incarnate Word Academy gave me exactly what I needed.

And tonight Incarnate is giving me more than I deserve.

Thank you from the bottom of my red and gold heart.