By Pat Riley

Of the telling of Christmas stories there is no end, so great is the inspiration of the first one. To that lengthening list I here add one that was told me by the man who lived it.

We were boys together, or rather stood on the verge of manhood together, and the memory of him is one of the freshest and fondest of my youth. His gaiety was irrepressible, and in retrospect I see that he had judgment and perception beyond his years.

When NC News Service sent me to Washington from Rome in the early 1960’s I made a point of journeying to Southern New Jersey to see him. He was pastor of a poor parish, mostly of market gardeners, Italians like himself. I found him prematurely gray and not in strong health, overworked yet complaining only of insufficient time to read. The night I arrived, with his work over and his Office said, he reached back into the years before we met and spoke of the hard times of his boyhood.

Dick’s father had been a photo finisher, but the Great Depression put him out of work. To support his family –a wife and two boys –he took odd jobs. He would lead a horse and wagon through the streets of Brooklyn hawking potatoes, and in winter he would shovel snow. Hardly lucrative occupations, these, and even simple necessities such as warm clothes for Dick and his younger brother became heart-aching problems. One winter, to get shoes and overcoats for the boys, the father pawned his diamond stickpin and the mother her diamond earrings.

Meanwhile Dick had found an after-school job delivering meat. This brought him three dollars a week plus tips, not at all bad for a 13-year-old boy in such times. He wanted to give the money to his father, but was told to keep it and use it wisely. So in his mind a great project formed.

Secretly, he searched out the pawn tickets, scrutinized them, and put them back. As Christmas approached, he returned for the pawn tickets, pocketed both them and his savings, and made straight for the pawnshop.

“It’s just as if it was yesterday,’ he reminisced.

“I can see the pawnshop on the corner. I can see the big glass cases full of cameras and jewelry, and the musical instruments hanging on the wall. There I was, walking up to the broker with the tickets and the money in my pocket, feeling ten feet tall. I’ll never forget that Christmas. My mother opened the little package, but when the earrings and the stickpin came into view she stopped still, and kept looking down at them without a word. Then I saw she was crying. I looked up at my father and he was crying too. Pretty soon we were all crying.”

“Dick” I exclaimed, “what a wonderful story!”

“But it isn’t finished,” he said, smiling. He grew serious and paused a moment, whether to savor the memory or to master his emotion I do not know.

“When I was ordained,” he finally said, “those diamonds were on my chalice.”