By Father Edward J. Flanagan

I have just returned from Hollywood where I enjoyed a unique experience – that of meeting myself. It is a strange feeling to meet, face to face and for the first time, the man who is to play the part of one’s self, and to match philosophies of life with this other person.

Yes, I sat across the table from him in the lunchroom on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot at Culver City the other day and did just that.

For a great many years, I have been building up in my own mind – as everyone does – a mental image of myself. When I comb my hair each day, looking into the mirror, I am adding to that self-impression. So, when I was introduced to the man who will be “me” in a forth-coming moving picture, you can imagine my feelings.

It was as if I had looked into my mirror and saw, not myself – not the Father Flanagan I had known these many years – but a total stranger, dressed as an aviator with grease paint streaking down his face, spotting his leather flying jacket. For my alter ego, my screen personality is Spencer Tracy, who was then engaged in taking the last “shots” for “Test Pilot.” After “Test Pilot,” he was going to the hospital for a minor operation and then, for the next three months, he would be me – Father Flanagan – in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of “Boys Town,” a movie based on our incorporated township, composed of two-hundred homeless boys who govern themselves. Yet, until within a month of the time he first camera would start clicking, we had never met.

“Father,” Spencer was saying, and he grinned sheepishly at the personal superstition he was about to reveal, “I’m almost afraid of this part in ‘Boys Town.’ They tell me I made a pretty good priest in ‘ San Francisco.’ Well out here we have a saying that ‘the second time’s the charm.’ I wonder if I will do as well again as a priest in ‘Boys Town.’”

“All actors do everything possible to live their part; to be the very image of the person they are portraying. But few actors, Father, have the opportunity of being confronted by that person. That makes the going even rougher, for as I play this part I will be thinking not only of you, but of what you will think of me.”

As he talked, I could feel his eyes upon me, studying my every little mannerism, the way I sat in the chair, the way I talked, the way I pushed the hair back from my forehead. I knew that he was studying me – the man he was going to become – as searchingly as I studied him. I almost knew what was running through his mind.

‘Here,’ he was thinking, ‘is the man I am going to portray. What sort of fellow is he? What does he think about? How does he talk and act?’

Now he was talking again:

“I’m so anxious to do a good job as Father Flanagan that it worries me, keeps me awake nights. Maybe I’ll be over-anxious, because in ‘Boys Town’ I’m going to get a chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Gone was all trace of the grin. Now the deadly-serious Spencer Tracy was talking.

“I want to do something for the other fellow, the less fortunate man. I don’t mean by just writing checks for charity. Anyone can do that if they have the money.

“I want to use the natural talent that God gave me in a role that will bring home to the public the story of neglected, homeless boys. The drama is there – plenty of it. One doesn’t need any plot genius to manufacture it. I’ve seen them, hungry little fellows with pinched faces in breadlines; I’ve seen them clustered on the tops of freight cars pouring into California where it is warm.

“That’s why I really want to do a good job in ‘Boys Town.’ In such a picture, I can

show them how worthwhile men can be built from such raw material.

“If I am instrumental, through this picture, in giving a new opportunity, a new hope, a new life to one single child who, otherwise would not have such a chance, then I’ve done something. And the ‘Boys Town’ movie will give me such an opportunity. I only hope that I can do justice to the part.”

To hear such a philosophy of living come from the lips of my other self was – to use my earlier analogy – looking into my mirror and finding – not my own, but a stranger’s face staring out at me. Yet, when the stranger talked, it was my voice and he was expressing my philosophy of life.

Of all the players in Hollywood who might have been chosen for the part, the man who was selected was a man who hoped to accomplish in the picture, “Boys Town,” the same thing that I was working to accomplish in the real Boys Town – the giving of new opportunity to the hundreds of homeless children scattered throughout America.

“You might be suffering some doubt, Spencer,” I reassured him, “about your ability to portray Father Flanagan. But you can rest assured that Father Flanagan has no such doubts. Any man who believes as you do, who feels the urge to do things to ease the path of the less fortunate man can not only do a good portrayal of Father Flanagan. He can do a good portrayal of men far greater than Father Flanagan. The performance you will turn in this picture, I know, will do a world of good not only for the boys of Boys Town, but for homeless boys wherever they maybe found.”

This philosophy of doing for others, incidentally, is not peculiar to Spencer alone. All Hollywood seems imbued with the ambition to do worthwhile things, to participate in a growing social consciousness which is abroad in the land. In such pictures as “ Winterset” and “Dead End,” the motion picture industry has demonstrated its power along these lines. “Boys Town ” will, I believe, be its first attempt at a truly social service theme developed upon actual fact and living figures. And Hollywood is enthused about it.

Wherever I went on the M-G-M lot, stars, prop men, executives, directors, writers and research men, were talking of “Boys Town,” not for my edification, but sincerely and with such large measure of gratification that such a dramatic story as the real Boys Town affords is to be woven into a picture which will have such audience appeal.

It was almost a year ago that John Considine, Jr., Metro producer, happened upon a small item in a Los Angeles newspaper which intrigued him. It was the story of our “city” election at Boys Town, Nebraska, where some two hundred citizens of a legally incorporated township when to the polls and elected a boy-mayor and six boy-commissioners. Here was color. Here was romance. Here was a real motion picture story.

So, a short time later, J.C. Dull and Eleanor Griffiths, who jointly did the preliminary research for the picture, sat in my office at Boys Town.

“I guess you will be glad to know, Father,” Mr. Dull said, after introducing himself as John Considine’s representative, “that this picture is going to be made.”

“That,” I answered, “depends entirely upon the type of picture you are planning to make. If you are planning to weave a sentimental plot around the name ‘ Boys Town’; if you intend to do an ‘Oliver Twist’ orphanage picture, I’d rather that it never be made.

“You know,” I went on, “there have been some movies about orphanages that I haven’t liked. For the most part, I don’t believe such pictures have been justified. Of course, in a few instances, where orphanages are tax-supported and politicians are charged with the appointment of superintendents, there have been abuses. Even in such cases, the abuses have been more due to a failure to understand children and the problem at hand than to an actual desire to abuse.

“Boys Town, however, is supported entirely by voluntary contribution of people who feel that my way of handling boys is a good way. And my way is to recognize that each boy is a definite individual, a separate social entity with ideas and natural gifts peculiar to himself. Boys Town is NOT an institution. It is a township where fine little men live and work, study and ply, govern themselves and mould – largely by and for themselves – the strength of character essential to a good life.

“If you can capture such a Boys town on the screen, I sincerely believe you will have a great moving picture, as dramatic and packed with romance as any you might produce. If you can make this sort of a picture, I shall be happy.”

And this is exactly the sort of picture Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has written around Boys Town. Through long months of research, here and in Hollywood, the writing staff of the studio has dug up facts about Boys Town. From faded clippings in our files, they have gleaned almost forgotten incidents; they have gathered facts from case histories and correspondence. They have talked with the boys, lived with them day after day, until they knew each one’s desires and ambitions. They have captured the “feel” of the township, its spirit, ends and aims.

They have found, as Dore Schare, the script writer, has amply demonstrated in his finished script, not only romance of Boys Town, but the romance in the lives of the boys who comprise its citizenry and of those who have gone out from Boys Town, to the working and professional world.

They know of young Larry Kennedy, a former Boys Town mayor, whose ability as a pitcher captured the eye of St. Louis Brown’s scouts and who, this spring, is under contract to the Springfield, Ill. Club for a year’s seasoning. They know of another chap who went from Boys Town to Creighton University and into the law office of a nationally-known law firm.

But for pure, stark romance, -- unadulterated, unadorned – I give you the case of Andy Cain. Andy Cain is six years old. Neglected, virtually uncared for, Andy came to Boys Town via the welfare department and county court in his back-mountain Kentucky home.

When Mr. Schare and J. Walter Ruben, the director assigned to Boys Town, were here early this spring to acqure atmosphere, I noticed that they kept watching Andy, in school and at play. It was not until later that I learned the reason for their interest.

There is a character in the script, “PeeWee,” who is such a lad as Andy. And both Mr. Ruben and Mr. Schare were watching, not Andy, but “PeeWee.” They were enthusiastic about his possibilities and plan to give him every opportunity of playing this important part in the picture.

If Andy gets his screen test all right, if he really does make good, what romance! From a back-mountain township, where he rarely ever saw a motion picture, to Hollywood… via Boys Town.

These are stories in my own limited experience. There are so many others. What a magnificent picture, what an American epic could be woven around Jane Addams and her Hull House! Around D. Bernardo and his orphaned lads who have done so much to people Australia, to make it a land where men might work and live. Around Dom Bosco, in Italy…

These are constructive stories, stories which add warmth to the human heart, inspire great deeds. How much better for the human race are stories of this caliber, stories which make builders of men, as over against stories of crime and evil-doing, stories of war and destruction. There is, I’ll venture to say, more appeal – if a quieter appeal – attached to the building of Hull House than there is in the mad scramble of Napoleon to found an empire. And I speak from my own small experience when I saw that Hull House is more lasting monument to true heroism than is the tomb of Napoleon.

I found, in Hollywood, not the frivolous, gilded sort of experience I had been led to expect from reports oral and printed, but a hard-working, sincere group of men and women working in a comparatively new but powerfully effective medium. Even the youngsters in Hollywood take their work seriously, as Mickey Rooney, who will play the juvenile lead in Boys Town, demonstrated when I visited the American Family set, to find him hard at work.

Mickey, who, incidentally, reminded me strongly of one of our young city commissioners at Boys Town, gave me my most lasting impression of Hollywood, a town where – to borrow a journalistic phrase – a “man might bite a dog” without creating a scene. Immediately after we were introduced, Mickey – before I could get my own autograph book from my pocket – had his ready:

“Father, can I have your autograph?”