DAVID SCHAFFER and Johnny O`Donnell are two young men busily immersed in budding careers. Schaffer is a lawyer, and O`Donnell is an actor. They are also giants in the eyes of the staff of Chicago`s venerable Mercy Boys` and Girls` Home. Considering where Schaffer and O`Donnell started from and what they have gone through to get to where they are now, it is hard to dispute the Mercy staff.
In December 1978 David Schaffer, then 16, got a piece of advice from a high school counselor. Schaffer was an honor student, tall, sturdy and with a winning smile, but for a year he had been on the run from a violent, impossible situation in his home. After his father`s suicide, his alcoholic mother had married a brutally abusive man who regularly administered vicious beatings to Schaffer, his three younger brothers and his younger sister. Schaffer ran away from home and was struggling to stay in high school while living from night to night in the homes of friends.
The counselor found out how he was living and offered him an alternative. ”He told me to go see Father Jim Close at Mercy Boys` Home,” Schaffer says, ”and handed me a letter of introduction.”
Schaffer had never heard of the place, but he went that night to the three-story brick home in the heart of an industrial neighborhood at 1140 W. Jackson Blvd. The burly, blue-eyed priest who opened the door when Schaffer rang the doorbell turned out to be Father Close himself. The priest invited him in, and life hasn`t been the same since for Schaffer, his three brothers and his sister.
Close explained the home`s program and the rules that Schaffer would have to follow. He would have to stay in school and keep an outside, part-time job. When he wasn`t at school or at his job on weeknights, he had to be at the home to attend meetings with the staff and other residents. He would have to do his share of housekeeping chores. If he kept up his end of the bargain, the home would give him a room, clothing, food and counseling and pay his school tuition.
”It wasn`t hard to say yes to a deal like that,” Schaffer says now.
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”It was like a great burden had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.”
Schaffer whizzed through the last two years of high school while living at the home. After he graduated from the University of Chicago, he went to Harvard Law School, financing himself through jobs, scholarships, grants and a couple of loans from the Mercy Home.
”Nothing can replace a real home,” says Schaffer, now an attorney at a major Loop law firm, ”but you can`t imagine how it is for kids from a family like ours to be offered that kind of chance. I guess you could argue that I might have got on in life even if there were no such place as Mercy. I was smart enough and determined to make it through school; drugs and crime were not problems with me.
”But I was determined that somehow, some way, I wasn`t going to leave my brothers and sisters behind in the mess they were in either. Since I went to Mercy, the home has in one degree or another reached out to everbody in my family. That relieved me of a terrible pressure. If I`d had to look after and help support my brothers and sister while I was in college, I don`t know if I could have gone to the schools I went to and gone as far as I have.”
Early in 1980, when Schaffer was already preparing to leave Mercy for the University of Chicago, 16-year-old Johnny O`Donnell was called into his counselor`s office at St. Ignatius College Preparatory High School. ”You`re doing very well here,” the counselor told the slight, baby-faced O`Donnell. The youth had made the honor roll for the second semester in a row at the academically demanding school. Almost as an afterthought, the counselor asked how everything else was going.
O`Donnell, who prided himself on his street smarts and toughness, surprised himself and shocked the counselor by bursting into tears. His father had abandoned the family when O`Donnell was 6, leaving him, his older brother and a younger brother and sister, both retarded, with a violent, mentally unbalanced, destitute mother.
For seven years, until the state took custody of him and his siblings, O`Donnell had lived in perpetual terror of his mother. While they lived on welfare in a series of vermin-infested tenements near Chicago and Damen Avenues, the mother administered daily beatings to the children.
”I mean every day of the year,” O`Donnell says, ”except Christmas Day, when she only screamed at us. She wasn`t all that big, but she was stocky and strong enough to pick us up and throw us into a wall. Sometimes she`d wait until early in the morning when we were asleep, and she would attack us. I`ve got a scar on my leg where she stuck me with a screwdriver. My older brother has scars on his nose and face where she bit him.”
When the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) took custody of the O`Donnell children, Johnny was 13. During the next three years, he lived in 12 different adolescent-group and foster homes. The majority of kids he lived with were from tougher circumstances than his, as likely to be spending a day in court as in school. To avoid being robbed, he avoided owning clothes and anything else of any value and carried all his belongings from one foster home to the next in a grocery shopping bag.
”All I knew was that I was going to make something better out of life than what I had,” he says. ”I never smoked, drank or used drugs, and I figured the only way out was an education. I always did pretty well in school, and when it came time for high school, I went to the best one I could find, St. Ignatius. It cost me $300 a semester, but I got jobs and saved every cent I got so I could stay in there. I was doing all the right things and did all that good work, but for what? There was nobody around who cared what I did.” The day O`Donnell broke down in front of his counselor at St. Ignatius, he had been kicked out of yet another foster home and had spent a weekend in a Salvation Army shelter. He had no idea where he was going next. Upon learning of O`Donnell`s plight, the counselor steered him to Mercy Boys` Home.
”I couldn`t believe it,” he says. ”I mean, they gave you a room of your own with a lock on the door so people couldn`t get in and steal your stuff. The only locks I saw every place else I lived were on the
refrigerators.”
O`Donnell at first feared that Mercy was just too good to be true. Surely, he recalls thinking, there was some hidden ”catch” to the place that would somehow backfire on him, even as he moved into the home later that year. Nothing backfired, and he was soon involved in a program of individual and group counseling. For the first time in his life, somebody was listening to his problems. Among the boys at the home, some had come with even heavier emotional baggage than his, while some came with less. But all of them-black, white and Hispanic, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish-were expected in no uncertain terms to listen to and respect one another.
”If you come from the kind of background I came from, that place is just unbelievable,” O`Donnell says. ”We were all kind of throwaway kids, but knowing that doesn`t mean you`re not any good. One man`s trash is another man`s treasure. If Mercy Boys` Home can teach a kid that he can be loved, that`s the bottom line. That`s the whole thing.”
O`Donnell is 26 now and a struggling professional actor. After high school, he went to Columbia College and majored in theater arts, helped along by college grants from the home. He has had small speaking roles in two movies, ”Running Scared” and ”The Howard Beach Story,” the first a theater release, the second made for television. Since it`s not a particularly good time for movie productions in Chicago, he pays his rent by delivering pizzas at night and getting occasional jobs in industrial training films. But he is still determined to make it as an actor.
THE STAFF AT MERCY CAN DO A lot with kids like O`Donnell and Schaffer, both highly motivated despite their troubled backgrounds. Such kids are prime candidates for the home`s highly selective and successful program to undo the damage suffered by troubled teenagers, whether they come from wealthy suburban families, public housing projects or off the streets. Schaffer and O`Donnell are ”giants” of the program, youths who went on to notable achievements by anybody`s standards. They are among the exceptional successes in the risky business of dealing with troubled teens.
A lot of the kids who enter Mercy don`t do well at all, about a third of them either running away from the program or responding so negatively to it that they are forced out. They go back home or into psychiatric hospitals or back to the streets, with their risks of crime, prison or violent death.
Another 50 percent of the home`s kids respond positively, mastering whatever demons that drove them into the home. They leave the program prepared to enter adulthood effectively by holding down jobs, paying taxes and establishing and nurturing families. That, perhaps, is the most impressive record of the home-enabling troubled teens to break the cycle of pathological behavior that otherwise gets passed on from generation to generation.
The remaining 15 percent of the home`s ”alumni” are its giants, kids who leave Mercy and are able to compete with the best and brightest of their generation. The home can boast of several who over the last decade have graduated from Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Notre Dame, and it has a number of kids currently enrolled at Harvard, Notre Dame, the University of Illinois and seven other universities and colleges.
Mercy`s track record is well recognized and respected by other child-care agencies, school counselors and policemen. Curiously, though 62 percent of its budget depends on public donations and it has been serving the city`s youth for 103 years, it is almost unknown to Chicagoans.
Even Father James Close had never heard of the place when, one day in July 1973 John Cardinal Cody, then the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, summoned Close from St. John Brebeuf Church in Niles, where he was quite happy doing routine parish work. ”Father Kelly is dying of cancer,” the archbishop told him, ”and you`re just the man to take over Mercy Boys` Home.”
The priest was more than a little taken aback, not the least because he didn`t even know Father Kelly or the home. Protesting that he knew nothing about child care or operating an orphanage, he tried to get out of the assignment. Cody, however, insisted that Father Close had the requisite abilities for the job and urged him to ”think on it and pray about it”
overnight and to return the next day with his response.
That night, Father Close asked friends for advice, and they were unanimous in their appraisal: He liked parish work, he was good at it and he would be nuts to take over a home for troubled boys. The next day he told Cody that after a night of prayer and consideration, he was turning down the Mercy Home job.
”I thought about it and prayed over it too,” the cardinal told the priest, ”and you are going to the boys` home. Tomorrow.”
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Thus Father Close found himself taking over a venerable but ailing institution. Father Edward J. ”Jake” Kelly, who had kept strong control of the place, had been weakened by illness; the 89 boys living there were running wild; and the small staff was plagued with high turnover.
Those boys were not a bunch of essentially decent-but-down-on-their-luck orphans waiting for a Bing Crosby father figure to set them straight with a friendly pat on the head. They were tough, hard-nosed street kids, most of them with one foot in trouble and the other swinging that way.
Close says that during his first visit to the home, he asked the man he was replacing, ”What the hell`s the program here?” Close says Kelly told him that he was big and looked mean but suggested that he get a black belt in karate.
Soon after Close came to the home, Kelly died, and the new director of the Mercy Home had to make a quick assessment of the place he had so reluctantly inherited. He didn`t entirely like what he found.