ST. JOSEPH (1917)

Sun-baked, wind-swept Akron needed a saint. Ethnic squabbles plagued the founding pastor and the dark days of the depression drove another to beg for reassignment. Then Akron was blessed with an unlikely hero--stern-faced, big-eared William J. Coyne.

Before Father Coyne arrived, St. Joseph parish had had twenty-four short-term pastors. William J. Howlett first said Mass in Akron, the seat of Washington County, five years after the Burlington Railroad had arrived and laid out the town in 1882. A railroad official's wife named it for her hometown in Ohio. Terry McAloon, a railroad worker, stayed in the division point and opened a flour and feed store. As founding chairman (with trustees John J. Gebauer, Dan Diamond, Dick Meenan, Herman Gebauer, and E. W. Morand) of the Catholic Church in Akron, McAloon hosted Father Howlett and other early missionaries.

"Every `church' day Terry would be seen going down the street carrying a pail of coal and a bundle of kindling wood to start the fire in the stove," his daughter Margaret Hall related in The Pioneer Book of Washington County, Colorado. McAloon's wife, Mima, rigged up an altar with an old table and cracker boxes.

In 1898, the fledgling congregation bought a Main Street store and converted it to a church. When Bishop Matz paid his first confirmation visit on September 28, 1907, the Akron Pioneer Press reported:

The crowd was so great that the front doors of the church were left open and many stood outside holding up umbrellas to protect them from the sun. . . . This was the first time a bishop ever visited Akron and when his lordship came from the sacristy dressed in royal purple, wearing his miter and carrying his golden crosier, the greatest silence prevailed. . . . The unusual ceremony brought out many Protestants whose pardonable curiosity helped to swell the attendance. Before the services in the church began, Bishop Matz dedicated the building by sprinking it with holy water and pronouncing the words that dedicate the house to the Lord's use. A choir composed of Misses Edna and Elma Yeamans, Nellie Jones and Josephine Ballard tendered appropriate music. . . . The church on this visit of the bishop received the name of St. Joseph and hereafter it will be known by that name.

Rev. J.L. Juily, who became the missionary pastor in 1911, bought three lots on Bent Street. To build a new church there, the Catholic Church Extension Society of Chicago contributed cash, as did Akronites of various denominations. With labor and materials contributed by parishioners, St. Joseph's was completed and dedicated on May 17, 1914.

The following year, Bishop Matz received a long letter in German complaining about Father Juily. It was followed by a letter from Terry McAloon, which read in part:

I have seen priests come here when they did not have money to get home on; when there were only two or three persons at church. I often had to give them money to go home on. Now we have a nice little congregation but unfortunately [some German parishioners are] transferring the European war over here. I am Irish, cannot help it, would not if I could. Father Juily is French and seems proud of it. . . . We have never had a priest who went to more trouble and inconvenience to accommodate the people than Father Juily. He is clean, respectable and a credit to the church.

Father Juily, who had four brothers fighting the Germans back in France, stayed on and, apparently, achieved peace. In 1918, he was replaced by Louis J. Grohman, a World War I chaplain who became the first resident pastor. A year later, Father Grohman and Bishop Tihen blessed each room of a $25,000, two-story brick school. That September 1919, six Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary welcomed twenty-four boarders, and sixty-five day students.

While joyously celebrating this achievement, the parish had no idea of the ordeals ahead. Poor health forced Father Grohman to resign in 1920, leaving $35.89 for the next pastor's expenses. The next year, the Farmers' Bank of Akron failed, and the parish lost all its savings. St. Joseph's had thirteen different pastors in ten years, before Joseph Fleck arrived in 1930. Three years later, Father Fleck wrote to Bishop Vehr from the dry, depressed, dusty town:

If optimism ever miscarried it did so here and many victims of it here have left. . . . We have reached the zero mark in our bank account and I can see no prospects whatever to raise the $360.00 due in October. We are out of candles and Altar Wine and soon need coal and, oh, how the church needs painting and a new roof . . . the school building cannot be disposed of. . . . I am a nervous wreck, can get no sleep for nights in succession and . . . would therefore appreciate it if Your Excellency could reassign me to another charge.

Father Fleck wrote this letter in 1933--the worst year of the Great Depression--and the year when William J. Coyne arrived. Parishioner Avis Willeke recalled in the parish's 1976 history that Father Coyne came by train and walked over to the rectory where he shook the dust out of his bedding. That first Sunday, he told penniless parishioners just to put eggs in the collection basket and he would trade them for whatever else he needed. "I'm no spring-chicken," Father Coyne added, "and I won't put up with any bickering. I'm a hard-nosed businessman and we need to put this parish on a paying basis!" He rallied the men of the parish to redecorate the church interior, paint and landscape the exterior, dig out a basement, install restrooms, and spruce up the cemetery.

Father Coyne leased half of the school to the Washington County School District for $65 a month, procured a monthly $20 subsidy from the Catholic Extension Society in 1936, and sold $13,000 in parish bonds. In 1937, he shocked Bishop Vehr--who had grown accustomed to complaints and financial requests from Akron--by sending him $25, as "a little offering for your confirmation services." A decade later, Archbishop Vehr received a letter from St. Joseph's 210 parishioners, asking him to relieve the popular priest of some of his many mission assignments:

He is continually on the go from six o'clock in the morning until nine or ten o'clock at night, and many nights until twelve o'clock. The strain is telling on him to a greater extent than he will admit. . . . In the last ten years he has brought our parish out of a $13,000 debt, besides making many substantial improvements. . . . We have never had a priest who is as well thought of by Catholic and non-Catholic alike or who has done so much to unite this parish into a progressive unit. We are proud to say there has never been a complaint against him.

Although this request was futile, Father Coyne and his parishioners went to work, beginning a new church on the northwestern outskirts of Akron. Thanks to generous contributions of money, labor, and materials, Father Coyne expanded his plans, constructing a handsome, red brick edifice with a full basement. Architect John F. Connell designed this $107,000 neo-Gothic structure, which Archbishop Vehr dedicated on March 24, 1953. Two years later, the 350-seat church overflowed for Father Coyne's silver jubilee, as forty-two priests and 300 Akronites gathered to thank the one-time Casper, Wyoming, businessman who had switched careers at age forty-three to enter St. Thomas Seminary.

In 1963, St. Joseph's buried its long-time, beloved pastor in the parish cemetery, eulogizing him as "the light that guided them through the depression [and] through the war." The small but reinvigorated parish Father Coyne left behind was subsequently guided by Clement V. Gallagher (1962-1970), Andrew E. Gottschalk (1970-1975) and V. Leo Smith, who has written of his enduring parishioners:

These people have come many miles each week to faithfully worship their God in good times and in bad. . . . Regardless of the difficulties which the people of St. Joseph's have encountered over the years, they have tried to imitate the faith of their patron. Like St. Joseph, they have believed, worked, and prayed--even when they did not understand how God could be working in this way.