He’s often cast as Chicago’s Father Flanagan with a hook shot, the sharp-elbowed, sharp-tongued basketball-playing priest who can never turn away a child in need.
So it was little surprise that in 1995, when the state of Illinois faced a big child welfare problem, it turned to one of the stalwarts of child welfare, Rev. John Smyth of Maryville Academy.
The state was bracing for the return of some 800 children–many with major mental illnesses–who had been shipped to secure facilities around the country.
There was no single moment when Smyth and Maryville’s board of directors chose to take some of the first of these profoundly disturbed children that trickled back to Illinois. Yet by seeking to meet a challenge, Smyth was simultaneously holding fast to his credo of never denying a child access to Maryville and setting the institution on a course in which services and staff would be severely taxed by some of the state’s most troubled youths.
After 32 years of his leadership, Smyth and Maryville have become so inextricably linked that the sprawling institution runs like an extension of his personality–tough but loving, deeply committed to children and married to their own methods.
In the last year, consultants investigating Maryville have chronicled dangerous conditions there, illuminating the staff’s inability to address the problems these more troubled children bring.
Inevitably, the problems reflect on Smyth. But true to his nature, he is not fleeing the storm.
In his days as a star basketball player at the University of Notre Dame, Smyth built his reputation as an immovable rock with elbows. While people who know him say that he has never been anything but gentle with the children in his care, some say that he can be a bruiser with some adults who work for him or cross him. Given to strong often profane language, Smyth has sometimes left subordinates feeling bullied in disputes over what is best for the kids.
Largest such facility
By all accounts, Smyth continues with the onerous day-to-day tasks of running an institution that during his leadership has grown to 21 sites and 1,443 employees, and which provided services to nearly 14,000 children last year, making it Illinois’ largest residential child care facility.
Smyth, 68, Maryville’s executive director, declined to comment for this article.
But those who know him say he remains eager to help youths and to continue his work at Maryville, his first and only assignment as a priest after he was ordained in 1962.
“Overall, he is taking it extremely well,” said Thomas M. Tully, 64, a Chicago attorney who first met Smyth 50 years ago while riding a bus to school.
“He said that everything is just fine, and we’re doing OK,” Tully said, relating a recent conversation with Smyth. “He has the confidence. He knows what the problems are and what the truth is. He has enough supporters around the community. They understand he’s trying to do his very best.”
Even those who have criticized the current state of affairs at Maryville have praise for Smyth.
“Kids clearly adore him and hug him,” said Ron Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a consultant at Maryville. “He’s what we all like to believe our grandfathers are: warm, all-embracing, loving and wise. That is the Father Smyth that I personally cherish and am deeply honored to know.”
But Davidson said there is another side of Smyth, a figure who “fights for what he believes.”
“That’s the Father Smyth I work with on a day to day basis,” Davidson said. “I hope we continue to have wonderful fights together for what we all know is best for these kids.”
Although Smyth has been credited with reaching out for help in May 2001, acknowledging that he was dealing with a much tougher population of children than in years past, Davidson and others have concerns that Smyth has resisted many of the sweeping reforms planned for the Des Plaines campus.
Smyth told the Tribune earlier this month that there was “no problem” at Maryville and that he was completely in control of the situation.
In recent weeks, a number of Smyth’s powerful friends have rallied around, painting him as the victim of a jealous smear campaign. Even Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, who had been highly critical of Maryville, has changed his tone of late to defend both the institution and Smyth.
“He is sincere, he is motivated and he has done a good job,” Murphy said.
No one doubts Smyth’s compassion for the thousands of children who have streamed through Maryville during his tenure there.
“He has always been very consistent, a good guy, interested in helping out the poorest of the poor,” said Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president emeritus of Notre Dame. “If he has one fault, it’s that he’s too generous. He reaches out beyond his own strength.”
Smyth continues to oversee a program of tough love for tough kids at Maryville.
He’s no longer the strapping young priest with dark hair, a square jaw and a zest for mixing it up on the basketball court. His hair is white. He’s slightly stooped now, a stark contrast to the man immortalized in a statue at the entry to Maryville’s leafy campus in Des Plaines. There, Smyth is cast in bronze tossing a child in the air.
In recent years he has undergone hip replacement surgery and cataract surgery. In February, he underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery. Less than one week after undergoing the heart operation, he was back on the altar during a funeral mass for a longtime friend.
Last year, he gave up his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. He often eats with the children at Maryville, and he has cut down on steaks and added fish to his diet.
“His life is totally devoted to one thing. He never vacations, He just lives for this place. He’s still charged up for this place,” said John Madden, a retired printing executive and chairman of the board at Maryville.
Smyth summed up his life and program earlier this year during graduation ceremonies at his alma mater, Notre Dame, where he received the Laetare Medal, one of the more prestigious honors for Roman Catholics in America.
Smyth quipped that as a basketball player he couldn’t run, jump or shoot, but “God gave me two beautiful elbows and I used them.”
“I made Dennis Rodman look like an altar boy,” he said.
He talked of changing “the impossible to the possible,” of his years at Maryville, an assignment that he loved, and of the changes battering society, including the plagues of crack cocaine and heroin addiction.
And then, he talked of the kids at Maryville.
“They come from no family, no faith, no education until they come to a place called Maryville,” he said.
Family, faith and education are the tenets Smyth has embraced at Maryville.
They are also the guideposts of his life.
Smyth was the second youngest of five children of Frances and Michael Smyth, Irish immigrants who settled on Chicago’s North Side. Smyth’s father was a doorman and later assistant manager at an athletic club.
A successful athlete
Smyth was a two-sport high school star at DePaul Academy, a quarterback in football and a forward in basketball.
He also had a calling for the priesthood, just like an older brother, Michael, who died of injuries sustained during a pick-up football game at the seminary in Mundelein.
Through his size, demeanor and leadership skills, Smyth was quite literally a big man on Notre Dame’s campus before his 1957 graduation.
“When he got in the post, it was like running into a tree,” said Lloyd Aubrey, a retired insurance executive who played basketball at Notre Dame with Smyth. “He wasn’t aggressive. He was just strong. His body was chiseled.”
Smyth may joke of his basketball skills, but he was the team captain, honorable mention All-American and a third-round draft pick of the National Basketball Association’s St. Louis Hawks. But he left the hard courts for a seminary and the priesthood.
“I just felt he had a vocation, that he was destined to be a great priest,” said Smyth’s college basketball road roommate, John Fannon, a retired president of Simpson Paper Co.
When Smyth arrived at Maryville in 1962, it was a fading orphanage where children were housed in dormitory-style brick buildings overseen by 50 nuns, four priests, four Catholic brothers and assorted staff.
“Smitty had the pulse of the kids,” Fannon said. “It was a tough love kind of relationship he had with those kids that shaped them up.”
In 1970, Cardinal John Cody appointed Smyth as Maryville’s superintendent and gave him one year to turn around the institution that was losing more than $400,000 annually. The message to Smyth was simple: sink or swim.
“The cardinal told Father John he had to stop the losses here. It was burning money,” Madden said.
Smyth boosted Maryville in several ways, using his contacts among his old Notre Dame classmates to carve out a fundraising base, connecting with Chicago’s business community, spreading the word of Maryville.
While playing handball at a local YMCA, he met developer and builder Tom Origer. Soon, Origer was contributing the first five group homes at Maryville.
An old Notre Dame football star, Zygmont “Ziggie” Czarobski created Maryville’s biggest fundraiser, called Chuckwagon Day. The goal was to lure donors to the campus for a picnic and entertainment. The first Chuckwagon Day drew 1,000 people and raised some $30,000. Now, Chuckwagon Day is billed as the largest single-day fundraiser in Illinois–this year’s event drew 12,000 people and raised more than $4 million.
Over the years, others came on board. Pete Townshend of The Who led a benefit concert for Maryville–the rock group will perform another Maryville benefit Monday night at Chicago’s House of Blues. Broadcaster Harry Caray, an orphan, was a big supporter and opened his restaurant to Maryville kids for annual Thanksgiving dinners, a tradition that continues.
Smyth also cultivated strong ties to influential politicians. Phil Rock, former president of the Illinois Senate, is a Maryville board member and has known Smyth since seminary. Gov. George Ryan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley have recently voiced support for Smyth.
But the fundraising and networking are secondary to Smyth’s calling–helping kids. In the old days, he was very much hands-on, mowing the grass for baseball games, interceding when children locked themselves in their rooms.
Smyth’s largest contribution at Maryville was instituting the Family-Teaching model of child care, where live-in “parents” supervise the children.
“The premise of the program is that behavior is influenced by the consequences of that behavior,” Smyth said in 1999. “We reward proper conduct and discourage improper conduct and help the child develop skills to live independently and successfully in society, without relying on the welfare system.”
It’s a program that has met with great success over the years, but which is seen by some as being unable to meet the needs of children with severe mental illnesses.
Many of those who are Smyth’s fiercest defenders are those who have been raised at Maryville. For all the current criticism, there is a history of success at Maryville, of youths moving off campus and on to college, their tuition met by Maryville.
The success is embodied by the likes of Sharona Price, 22, a few credits shy of receiving her undergraduate degree at Eastern Illinois University.
“When you go out there [Maryville], it beats the South Side of Chicago anytime,” said Price, who joked that she was probably the first child to run away to Maryville after being placed in a foster home.
“They stayed on our butts,” said Price, who was at Maryville from 1994 to 1997. “We went to school every day. We went to job fairs. They took us to work. We had a savings account. They took 75 percent of that paycheck every week and put it in the bank for us until we left. They treated us like gold.”
Seen as supportive mentor
Richard Baker, who was orphaned and lived at Maryville in the 1980s, credited Smyth with putting him on the path to a religious career. Baker, 28, is a master’s degree candidate in the divinity program at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard.
“He’s a Catholic priest; now I’m a Baptist ordained minister,” Baker said. “I’m black, he’s white. A Catholic paid for a Baptist to go to seminary. That’s something, isn’t it? World peace.”
“When I graduated college you know who was standing there? Father Smyth. When I got accepted for my master’s you know who was standing there? Father Smyth. He considers me his son, and I consider him my father.”
Baker said that Smyth’s critics claim that he gives too much, tries too hard and believes in the impossible.
“Keep on believing in the impossible,” Baker said. “If he doesn’t believe in the impossible, I would have been left out. So you have to think big.”
