By Gretchen Keiser

James Lyke grew up in a new housing project on the South Side of Chicago in the mid-1940s, the youngest in a large family with neighbors who were poor too, but with a sense of community and concern for each other.

Wentworth Gardens, a project of single-family residences with well-kept flower gardens and lawns, had just opened and the Lykes were able to move in as relatives of a Navy man, older brother Amos. “It was a good area,” Archbishop Lyke recalls. “People were very proud” of their homes and yards. Mrs. Ora Sneed Lyke, his mother, frequently won awards for her flower garden in the neighborhood competition.

Before moving up to Wentworth Gardens, life was harder. He remembers sleeping on the floor in a cold flat, heated with a coal stove, the family not having beds to sleep in.

His father, Amos, had left his wife and family. Mrs. Lyke was the sole support, with government relief checks, as welfare was called then. She is remembered with great admiration by her children and others who knew her.

“The lady was an inspiration to me. She was an inspiration to everyone,” said her daughter-in-law Shirley, who is married to Andrew Lyke, the archbishop’s closest sibling in age.

“My mother-in-law was a very kind, giving person. She gave everything, she gave away everything. She was there in the community.”

Shirley was 12 years old when the Lykes moved in to Wentworth Gardens, a half block from her house. Her future husband knocked on the door the first day to ask her mother if there were any odd jobs he could do for her to earn some money.

She grew up alongside Andrew and his little brother, Jim, and the three became close friends. She and Andrew have seven children.

Nine years older, Andrew was parking cars for White Sox games at Comiskey Park, two blocks from the project, while Jimmy was selling score cards as a summer job.

“We were very, very poor,” Andrew Lyke recalls. “My mother worked hard. She ironed for the church to help pay tuition (at Catholic school). Ours was the usually poor family, close to the Church. It helped keep us together.”

The younger brother and his three or four buddies were “goodie, goodie boys,” according to Andrew Lyke. The only time Jimmy was “bratty” was when food got short on the dinner table and Andrew tried to take some from his little brother’s plate. Andrew would roughhouse with him, but they never fought.

The two boys helped work in the yard on their corner lot, winning first and second prizes for “best kept lawn.” Project administrators provided seed; the boys dug up the yard, leveled it, planted and tended the grass.

His brother was an excellent student, Andrew Lyke recalls, inspired by a priest at St. George’s Church where he attended the parish school. Father Henry J. Pehler “took Jimmy under his wing. He was like a daddy to us.”

Although Mrs. Lyke was Baptist, she wanted her youngest son to have a Catholic school education and discipline, doing the church laundry to help pay the tuition. Shirley Lyke says her mother-in-law was a beautiful laundress.

The connection with the church led her to become Catholic, along with all her children except her oldest son. Jim was in the fourth grade and Father Pehler gave them instructions in the faith. Mrs. Lyke lived in Wentworth Gardens until her death and was such a regular at St. George’s that at her funeral the homilist began by pointing out Mrs. Lyke’s favored seat for Mass. She did not live to see her son ordained, but he was well along in the Franciscan seminary.

The attraction for the order came from the appeal of St. Francis himself, Archbishop Lyke says. He also recalled a Franciscan priest who visited the parish to help hear Saturday confessions. Jim Lyke went to St. Joseph’s seminary as a second-year high school student.

“Once I went to the novitiate, I never had any serious doubts that I would go on,” he said. “I really liked the life.”

His novitiate was made at the Franciscan house in Teutopolis, Ill., and he says his activism and outspokenness twice almost ended his seminary career. The first time was after he had spend a summer in Louisiana at the height of civil rights agitation, experiencing, along with several white Franciscan seminarians, threatening phone calls and harassment, and seeing a white civil rights marcher severely beaten.

He saw for the first time separate water fountains marked for whites and colored. “I can still feel my body just convulsing when I saw that,” he said recently. “It just made me more determined to continue the civil rights work.” Back at seminary, however, “my classmates and I were rather vociferous about the state of the country and the world. It was getting in the way of our studies and our formation. I remember my superior saying something like ‘If you continue in this direction, maybe the order is not for you.’ That put me in my place. I was quiet.”

Years later, at his first Mass, Father Lyke says his superior took him aside and said, “Do you remember that day? Well, you were right.” The superior himself had reinforced the students often in the Franciscan ideals of service to the poor, a mission they longed to carry out.

His second difficulty came in the final year of seminary when he and a few others secretly organized a midnight Mass for peace at the time of anti-Vietnam War protests. Under community rules, the Mass was illicit, he said, because it was said in English and without the knowledge of the community. One person who attended later was disturbed about it and disclosed it to a superior. The leaders, including Father Lyke, were called in one by one and each questioned in excruciating detail before the whole faculty. All could have been dismissed from the order on the spot, he recalls, a fate that befell seminarians who did something similar in a distant diocesan seminary. “We went away on pins and needles wondering what would happen,” he recalls. “But they found a way not to do it. The punishment was going through the ordeal. It was the closest thing to the Inquisition.”

Ordained June 24, 1966 in Teutopolis as a member of the Order of Friars Minor, he was surrounded by family members, including older sisters Thelma Harvey, Doris Fields and Rayetta Holman, his brother Andrew, and nieces and nephews. His father came unannounced to the banquet held after his first Mass. Despite their separation, Mrs. Lyke had instilled in him a respect for his father. “I never heard her speak a word against him…She would always refer to him as ‘your father.’”

At times when he was growing up, his father would appear unannounced at their house for a visit. “If I was outside playing, she would call me. ‘Jimmie, your father is here.’ I would sit and he would talk…It was not someone I was supposed to disrespect.”

The death of his mother two years prior to his ordination was “very hard because she had supported me all the way through. I think she was particularly happy that I was out of the violence, the poverty of the projects. She was a very saintly woman.”

(Paula Day contributed to this article.)