Daniel Rubin: Wake for a school

John Lynch thought I should show up at Cardinal Dougherty High School Sunday for its last homecoming, pay my respects.

"It's more like the last hurrah," he said. "We're going to say goodbye to the school. It's a wake, that's what we've got."

Once the largest Catholic high school in the world, with more than 6,000 students, Cardinal Dougherty was just one-tenth that size in October when the archdiocese announced that shrinking enrollment had doomed the Garnet and Gold.

"Why don't you come in with your press card and interview individuals?" suggested Lynch, 68, a retired Cheltenham cop. "Do the old Frank Rizzo: Shoot from the hip, and ask people where all the years have gone."

It's been a half-century since Lynch graduated, since his brief encounter with the woman who 43 years later would become his wife.

They met for the first time during their senior prom in the spring of 1960. Neither John nor Elaine Lynch remembers who asked the other to dance, though Elaine figures it was probably ladies' choice.

"He was a nice-looking, dark-haired boy," she says. "He was the only boy in high school who had a brown suit."

"She was tall and attractive," he says. "She was pleasant when we talked."

He asked her what parish she came from; she was an Inky from Incarnation of Our Lord at Fifth and Lindley. He was from Presentation B.V.M. in Cheltenham Village. He did some quick math to figure how many buses it would take to see a girl who lived down there.

And after that one dance, to a slow song in the girls' gym, he disappeared. Out the door.

"That boy didn't come back and ask me for another dance," she said to her girlfriends.

"He has a public back in Cheltenham," one of the girls told her. He was spoken for.

Through the years they'd see each other, when both were parents of Cardinal Dougherty students. They were band supporters, active in alumni affairs. Each had married someone from another school.

Back for a reunion in 2002, they met again.

"How ya doing?" he remembers asking.

"I'm a widow."

"I'm a widower."

Both laughed, and made a date to see each other the next weekend. Less than a year later they were married. The bridesmaids wore garnet and gold.

For the Lynches, and countless other couples, the closing of the school feels like a family death. Ten of his cousins went there during his four years. A daughter and four grandchildren went there as well. Elaine's brother and her four sons are alums.

So on Sunday, they walked around the place one more time, attended Mass, then headed outside for a picnic.

A DJ was playing Chuck Berry and Elvis tunes. John Lynch walked me over to a stone set in the middle of the courtyard on which the name James M. Lynch was inscribed.

They'd grown up five blocks away in the Village, gone through school together. Then both enlisted in the Marines and made it through basic training at Parris Island, S.C.

John stayed Stateside; stationed in Washington, D.C., when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he stood in his dress uniform along the processional route.

Jim went to Guantanamo Bay during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then reenlisted. He was on his second tour of Vietnam when he was killed July 29, 1967, during an advance on the demilitarized zone called Operation Kingfisher.

"We were buddies, not just cousins," John Lynch said.

The band was tuning up, and his daughter, Kathleen, Class of '87, was getting ready to play the flute and piccolo. Band president Joe Friend, Class of '67, had selected a program of patriotic tunes and marches, including a song called "Lights Out" that contains the school fight song as well as Taps.

Kathleen said her oldest, Brigid, had cried when she heard the school was closing. The 8-year-old always thought she'd go there one day, too.

John and Elaine Lynch looked around for faces they recognized. Mike Prendergast, Class of '69, approached and clapped me on a shoulder.

He's the head of the alumni group. He'd made a speech during Mass in which he quoted one of Cardinal Dougherty's teachers as saying the boys and girls who went there were the most unspoiled students he'd ever met.

Today's students come from three dozen countries, he told the audience, a real melting pot, which he thought could have been a model for the archdiocese.

"We've got a beautiful day," Prendergast said, admiring the blue sky. "Blessed Mother always takes care of us."