to play. His brothers, sisters, and friends would laugh with enjoyment. Years earlier, during his first attempts at the fiddle, his brothers had insisted that he practice in the barn. Barney’s playing still wasn’t good, but it was lively, and he knew the latest tunes.
When a new motorman’s position opened with a streetcar line in Appleton, Wisconsin, 230 miles from the farm, Barney took it. He seemed to want to get away, to travel a little farther from the west central areas of Wisconsin that he knew so well. The Appleton job would give him that change of scenery.
By 1890, however, Barney wanted to move closer to his family again. He took a job with a streetcar line in Superior, Wisconsin, about 125 miles from the Caseys’ homestead. After jumping from job to job, Barney had more or less settled into work as a motorman. Streetcars — although quickly catching on from city to city — were still new enough that two or three years of experience still gave him a sort of “seniority” in this line of work.
The Caseys were elated to have Barney closer to home, even if he couldn’t really help with problems there. It was 1891, and American agriculture was suffering from a widespread depression. Drought and insects had devastated crops for several years in succession. When Barney Jr. saw that there were plenty of jobs in Superior, he wrote to his family to tell them of the opportunities.
Barney’s three older brothers, Jim, Maurice, and John, moved to Superior almost at once. The four Casey boys rented a house together, and their sister Ellen temporarily quit her teaching position to care for the house and them. Barney wrote to his parents again and urged them all to come to Superior. Finally, later that same year, the head of the family sold the farm near Burkhardt to a real estate company in exchange for ten city lots in Superior. Before long, Bernard Casey Sr. moved the remaining Caseys, the family belongings, and all of the livestock north to Superior. With a new rented farm and their older sons working at good jobs in the city, the family was soon on better financial ground, so much so that Bernard and Ellen could build a ten-room house to accommodate the family.
The three little girls — Margaret, Grace, and Genevieve — were enrolled in Sacred Heart Church’s parochial school, while the older Casey children began to attend high school. Even John, a year older than Barney, went back to school. Thinking of a profession as a lawyer, he took up the study of law during the evenings. Life was settled and satisfying for the Caseys. Except for Barney.
One autumn afternoon in 1891 he was at work and his streetcar was making its usual run when, as he rounded a corner, the young motorman spotted a cluster of people on the tracks ahead of him. He hit the brakes immediately, and the streetcar screeched to a halt. Barney and his passengers poured out to see what had happened.
Lying on the tracks in a pool of blood was a young woman. A drunken young sailor hovered over her, cursing and clutching a knife dripping with blood. As policemen pulled away the murderer at gunpoint, others lifted the woman’s lifeless body off the tracks. At almost twenty-one years of age, Barney Casey Jr. had lived most of his years on the farm among peaceable people. The dead body and the drunken words of hatred introduced him to something new, something sad and evil. The event was a shock to his psyche. Barney gathered his passengers and went back to work, but, at a deeper level, the young man couldn’t stop brooding about the senseless murder on his tracks.
Of the many sons of Bernard and Ellen Casey, this namesake son was one of the most introspective, and Barney agonized about the direction of his life as never before. Since the broken romance with Rebecca Tobin, he had had few goals for his future. While the family had needed financial help, Barney put concerns about his own future aside. He felt obliged to help his family. But now, the family was secure again, and old questions that had preoccupied him from time to time resurfaced.
Barney began to debate something deep in his heart. He’d done plenty of rhetorical debating in the past. This time, however, the exercise was not for fun. Ellen and Bernard Sr. weren’t sure what was going on inside the handsome young man, but after a long time, Barney himself was finally sure. He went to see Fr. Edmund Sturm, the pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Superior, to discuss the priesthood. Quietly but quickly, the young streetcar motorman was starting to move his life onto an entirely new track, and in a new direction.
Chapter Three
Following a New Direction (1891–1898)
When Barney went to talk with Sacred Heart Parish’s Fr. Edmund Sturm, he knew only that he wanted to move toward priesthood. Beyond that, he had almost no ideas about the kind of ministry he wanted to do or the sort of seminary he should choose.
Fr. Sturm listened to the young man seated in front of him, dressed in the trim, dark uniform of a streetcar motorman. He seemed a likable fellow. Though the Caseys had only recently moved into his parish, the pastor had heard quite a bit about them. He was very impressed with the young man’s parents, Ellen and Bernard Sr. And the town of Superior was impressed with the “Casey All-Brothers Nine,” a baseball team composed of the Casey brothers, for which young Barney fearlessly played catcher.
After listening to what the young fellow had to say, Fr. Sturm quietly suggested that he apply for admission to St. Francis de Sales Seminary in Milwaukee. This was the same “German seminary” where Barney’s brother Maurice had been enrolled. His brother’s attempt to study for the priesthood there had ended disastrously, Barney knew very well. Maurice had come home convinced that he was both a failure and a deep disappointment to his family. But Barney took Fr. Sturm’s advice and made plans to follow the path Maurice had taken. He believed that this was the life God wanted for him and God would move him toward this goal.
Barney stood up, shook hands with his pastor, and left. The anxious, heavy feeling that had been burdening him seemed to be gone. He walked out of the rectory and made his way to the streetcar station, where he was to begin work within the hour. Later in the day, he would tell his family about the new track he would be taking.
At the Casey household, Barney’s news was greeted with great joy. Ellen and Bernard Sr. were almost speechless, although they had suspected that Barney had been thinking of such a move. Their son explained that he would have to enroll at the high school level with fourteen-year-old boys. At that, fifteen-year-old Gus told Barney that he would be one semester ahead of Barney, his older brother, who would begin in the middle of the school year. But Barney wasn’t disturbed by that prospect. In fact, he was eager to begin.
So, in January 1892, a few months after the streetcar episode in Superior, Barney was in school in cold and snowy Milwaukee. This was a different world, conducted in a language he didn’t know. At dinner, during recreation, and in classes, young Casey found himself immersed in a German world. Barney probably didn’t realize it, but St. Francis Seminary was already at the center of a controversy over ethnic bias — a common concern during these decades of immigrant settlement. Long before he set foot in St. Francis, the controversy had been brewing.
The Diocese of Milwaukee was founded in 1843, and the diocesan seminary had begun to enroll young men in 1856. Even in its first year, according to its rector, Fr. Michael Heiss, German and Irish Catholics were defensive about the seminary’s direction. “Some thought that the seminary would become an institution solely for the Germans,” Fr. Heiss said. “When, however, we also accepted Irish youths, certain parties spread the suspicion that it was planned to displace the Germans gradually and to make the seminary Irish.”
German worries were largely misplaced. The diocesan seminary began with a German staff and emphasis, and remained that way for some years. The seminary staff was assigned by Bishop John Henni, the first bishop of Milwaukee, who had come with strong German associations from the diocese of Cincinnati. Nonetheless, it was true that
