Stories from my mother: The rosary before television

It was one of the stories from mom’s Catholic girlhood that she loved to tell and she told it often. The tale was about one of the great comforts of her life: not prayer or Mass, neither Holy Communion nor the addiction to cigarettes that nearly killed her.

Television.

In the year after World War II, when Gloria Theresa Jones was in the 8th grade at St. Casimir parish school in Canton, some 40,000 American families in a population of 140 million owned a TV. My mother’s Dillon Street home, a tiny dwelling near the canneries on the southeast Baltimore waterfront, was not one of them.

But a few blocks away in the old Polish colony at 1109 South Curley, the family of classmate and fellow Girl Scout Cecelia Klaus did have one.

It was a 12-inch Emerson, the small tube set in a wooden cabinet. Near the end of her long life, across which she watched every game show from “What’s My Line” to mourning Alex Trebek as her own fate beckoned, Mom recalled the first time she glimpsed the marvel.

“Ceil invited us over to watch a show, I don’t even remember what it was,” she said from a rocking chair in her home near BWI, a large flat screen across from her in the living room. “As we went into the house, her father said, ‘Before TV we’re all going to say the rosary.’ We were just kids, we figured it would be worth it. So we all knelt down in their dining room and said the rosary.”

Mom’s family was Catholic, as most everyone in the neighborhood was, but they weren’t that Catholic.

And though St. Casimir Church is still open while most Catholic parishes in Baltimore have closed, Canton is far from the bastion of faith it was during the 20th century. In days gone by, many of the rowhouse front windows held small statues of Christ and his mother. I walked by the old Klaus home on Curley street the other day to find a replica of Captain America’s shield in the window. Divine protection indeed.

Regular recitation of the rosary was standard for the Klaus family of nine: Mom and dad, six kids and, when the children were quite young, their maternal grandmother, a Polish immigrant from a town near Krakow. Babcia to the Klaus kids, Marianna Chronowski Czekaj said the rosary on her own, always in Polish.

My mother remembered that while she prayed with other youngsters eager to see the wonder (even the test pattern was a big deal), Mrs. Klaus—Josephine, a seamstress who worked in a downtown pajama factory—fed an infant in the kitchen. The baby was Leo “Pete” Klaus, now 79 years old and, like his surviving siblings, still praying the beads for hope and help in a troubled world.

“I clearly remember saying the rosary at four years old with my family each evening,” said Pete, a folk guitarist and acknowledged expert on the comic book hero The Phantom. “Our father had a very strong devotion to the Blessed Lady and it touched each of us.”

Frank J. Klaus, a Bethlehem Steel pipefitter during the war, was moved by his mother-in-law’s devotion to the rosary and swayed by the Rev. Patrick Peyton (1909-1992)—the “Rosary Priest” who preached “the family that prays together stays together.”

In October of 1951, the globe-trotting Peyton held a rally at the recently rebuilt Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street. Frank Klaus attended with a crowd estimated at 45,000, considered a sellout before the arrival of the Baltimore Colts in 1953 and the Orioles a year later.

Once a month on a Saturday evening he’d take a streetcar to Saint Ignatius Church on Calvert Street for an all night vigil honoring the Blessed Mother while asking her intercession in affairs public and private. In this way, the Klaus family maintained a close relationship with Mary, her son and the Creator of the universe in their daily lives.

“At first saying the rosary wasn’t very organized at home, maybe we’d say it on a Sunday night,” said Pete. “But then it became a thing and you’d have to have a very good reason not to do it.”

Skipping prayer to watch the Let’s Rhumba dance show on NBC was not an acceptable excuse.

Confirming the stories

After my mother died just before Christmas in 2023, the stories she told—going to see Abbott & Costello at the Hippodrome with her father, courtship tales of walking to Little Italy with my dad to get meatball subs for 50 cents—spoke louder in her absence.

So I decided to follow up on the rosary/TV tale from the days when tomato trucks from the the wilds of Harford and Carroll counties lined the streets around the packing houses and mischievous boys known as “hoodles” would sidle up with salt shakers and help themselves. The ones they didn’t eat they threw at people.

I landed in the cafeteria of Oakcrest Senior Living in Parkville for lunch with two of the Klaus siblings: the widows Cecilia Weigmann, who turned 90 this month and 92-year-old Marie Skowronek, the first born.

The sisters don’t pray the rosary on their knees anymore, like they sometimes did around their parents’ bed when their mother would lay down with baby Pete, exhausted from her day. But they pray it every day.

“My kids will call me on the phone and say ‘So-and-so is sick, start praying,'” said Marie, acknowledging that acceptance of the outcome—”Thy will be done…”—takes precedence over the petition.

During Advent, family members meet at one another’s home each Sunday to say the rosary and share a meal. “We reminisce about the days when we were growing up,” said Pete.

Ceil confirmed my mom’s recollection of having to pray before the TV was turned on. “When my father was ready for the rosary to be said, that’s when it was said,” she recollected. “If we were out playing in the evening and it was time to say the rosary we had to go find each other and go home.”

As for the optimistic phrase “the family that prays together stays together,” there is plenty of evidence to the contrary in a realm as complicated as personal relations.

An honest answer

I know of another mid-century Catholic family, a much larger one of Irish heritage, who prayed the rosary together after dinner throughout Lent, the mother and her nine children all in a row, all on their knees. Their father was usually at work.

The oldest child remembers that the sun was still shining and their friends were riding bikes and playing ball while his family recited prayers on all 59 beads of the ancient devotion. Now nearing 80, the memory is seared into his psyche.

When his mother was near the end of her life, he sat at her bedside and asked what it was all about, all of that praying while the world passed by their window.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know.”

It is one of the truest examples of honesty I’ve ever heard.

Rafael Alvarez is writing a book on his experience with the Rosary. If you have any good stories about praying the beads please email him via orlo.leini@gmail.com