A Conversation with Nina Polcyn Moore, 1986, by Rosalie Riegle

“There is no policy manual for any of this, you know.  You come and you see what needs to be done, and you do it. There is no computer printout, no charts, no recipes. You just do what needs to be done. That, to me, is the joy and the richness of somebody like Dorothy and all the people who have done all these things.

It is the age of the laity, and I feel this has always been primarily emphasized in the Worker.  A personal responsibility which gives people an opportunity to be, which they frequently get no place else.  And I think Dorothy has always said we really don’t need to ask about any of these things.  We just do it.”

Nina Polcyn Moore (1914-2007)

Section I – People Carried the Thirst for Justice

NINA: It’s like a brass ring in a carousel, somebody like John Cort gets the idea to be a labor person, and somebody else finds some other work to be done, and somebody else…. You just catchon to whatever providence has (for you). I love that quotation from Ira Progroff.  He’s a religious Jew who started the intensive journal writing. Anyway, Progroff says there is a golden cord in your life that you need at different times.  If you look back when you are old like I am, you can look back and say, “Oh, I met this persom who was significant for me, and I met that person, and I  had this experience, and I caught this idea.” You can just see that this happens in the Catholic Worker. 

For instance, Joe Zarella was from Brooklyn.  His father was a barber and Joe had no mother, so he really had no reason to come home sometimes, I suppose. He found the Catholic Worker and he got so excited from reading it that he went.down there, and at times he’d never- go home.  He had a job some place in Manhattan, and he’d sleep on the tables of the soup kitchen, freshen up, and go back to work. Finally, he told his parents he was going to live at the Worker.

He would open the mail with Gerry Griffen, and they had no money,  no money at all.  They were poor.  They owed the grocer, and they owed the baker.  Joe and Gerry would say, “Well, on Monday there will be a dollar from that Lautner girl.”  Alice Lautner.  She was a woman in Tell City, Indiana who was about Joe’s age and my age.  She made $4 a week and sent $1 to the Worker.  It got there every Monday.  She got the gleam.  She followed the star.  She got the message by reading teh paper.  So naturally she went to the Catholic Worker, and naturally she and Joe got married.  And they lived on the Catholic Worker farm and then went back to Tell City, Indiana.  Population 7,000.  Well, there’s nothing to do in Tell City except work in the furniture factory, and they do beautiful things.  

Joe went to work in that furniture factory at 50 cents an hour, a married man.  And what did he do?  He couldn’t’ t help it.  He had to organize a union in the furniture factory.  Even if his father-in-law, who wasn’t thrilled, was the manager of the plant.  What unmitigated gall!  Who did he think … and not only that, but Alice’s brother was the local priest.  And nobody believed in unions. So you see people carried the thirst for justice.  I mean this happened time and time again, so much that you just … you can’t recall all of it.  For instance, Cogley went to work as a religion editor at the New York Times as well as editor of Commonweal. Positions of influence, but the seed is there from the Worker.

RO:  I like the Golden Cord idea.

NINA:  I love that.

RO:  It seems to me that the Catholic Worker is still being family to people.  I mean having reunions.

NINA: Oh yes, yes, yes.

RO:  Can you talk a bit more about the reunions.

NINA: I feel, I think, I think Ed Marciniak said someplace that you are forever touched by Dorothy and Peter and the Catholic Worker.  You’re just never the same. He said when he…he’s been connected with Loyola (University) in social justice matters and things of the city.  He runs the Institute of Urban Studies.  You’re always asking himself, “How does this fit with what I really believe?  Am I deviating from the fundamentals?” But I think you see this kind of connection that everybody has.

RO: Do you think the young people, the people that haven’t been privileged to meet Dorothy, do you think they still are doing it? 

NINA: Well, I am very impressed by the fact that a lot of them read many things about the Catholic Worker and they seem to act as though they…as though it is very meaningful (to them).

RO: They still own her in a way.

NINA:  I believe yes, I do believe-that. But I think it is hard for these. I think everybody who comes into a (Worker) house feels that nobody ever had a house before. I mean that is normal. That is human, shall we say.

RO: You have to go through it, you can’t just say its been done that way ten years before, so I will do it·that way.

NINA: Yes, that’s true. But I think it is like everything else, the young have a hard time connecting with the old. They just feel we’re not living in the house right now, and we didn’t have the same experiences.. I think that’s very normal, though.

RO: I think one of the big changes has been the (increasing numbers of) homeless women.

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Section II –  Strong Witness

NINA:  Oh yes, yes.  I was  lucky enough to go to New York in 1935, and we did things like picket the German counsel against Hitler. Well, I was reading in.the New York Times this morning that some rabbi sees that the Jewish tradition has a need to remember And this man is trying to remember all people, for example, who helped Anne Frank. You see it wasn’t just those four non-Jews, those four gentiles that fed her in this old factory, in this tiny place.  But it was all the people that didn’t.tell, you know, the people that knew who shut their eyes. That knew something was going on but didn’t report it. The delivery men and the postmen, I mean other people who knew that something was happening. These four were heroic but, yes, there were other people involved.  And I feel that was one of the witnesses in the Catholic Worker, for example.  In fact, I think I would like to write to that rabbi and tell him about Dorothy Day and Peter and our picket signs where spiritually we are Semites. {Nina, Did the picket signs read ”Spiritually we are Semites”?} But it was a witness and this was before World War II.

RO:  And it was when Father Coughlin was…

NINA: In the ascendancy.

RO:  And giving the Catholic church such a bigoted name.

NINA:  That’s right, that’s right. You know, it takes a lot of courage to picket (no matter) when or how or what. I do feel that that witness was one pure ray of sunshine in a naughty world, as Shakespeare says. Or good deed in a naughty world.  Very heroic.  And on the day of the Hiroshima bomb, Dorothy wrote, “We can’t do this.”  A very strong witness.  And also the war in Spain.  A great purity of vision, a strong sense of the Lord and the true peace on earth that was so rare.  

You know, I  was thinking that I am 72, and I was born in 1914, just about the time World War I was started.  And there has been no peace ever, really. It’s one war after another. It just seems … It’s just unbelievable, isn’t it? The continual … wherever it is it just keeps on and on, eating us all up. Eating up all the money that should go to the poor.

RO:  And now wars in other countries so we don’t feel it. We gain the economics and not (the pain of losing soldiers).  Talk a little bit about going to the Catholic Worker in 1935, Nina.

NINA: Oh, I will have to find you … I wrote something about that.  I will have to find it and send it to you.  I lived next door to St. Matthew’s rectory in Milwaukee, which is at 25th and Scott.  And we had a pastor that fed everybody, and, you know, the depression was rough.  I think it is rougher now, but it was rough then, even though being poor was more acceptable.  But I think it was very, very hard on ordinary people.  I remember Bishop Rembert Weakland talking about his mother.  He never thought adults liked candy, for example, because his mother would say, “Oh, that is for children.”  But she went without so that those kids could·have her share.

Our pastor next door was a man like that–Father Ryan. Fed everybody.  Now that was a very lovely thing, and somehow this notion must have spilled over to our house.  My mother would feed people, too.  We lived about eight blocks from the railroad yards.  And did you see “The Journey of Natty Gand?”  Well, that would be a wonderful movie to get the flavor of that time. You saw people riding in box cars and going from one place to another in search of jobs. There was this tremendous lack of dignity.  People who just couldn’t get a job anyplace. The people who were hungry would come to where they knew there was food.  So my mother would feed whoever knocked on our door.  And we had a modest house with a toilet in the basement, and if my mother saw some fellow whose pants weren’t being held together, she’d tell him to go downstairs, and she had a couple of safety pins and she would tell him he could wash up while she made him a sandwich or something. And she had a few towels and washcloths down there.

So I think you get some sense of the homelessness, but it wasn’t nearly as severe as now. It just seems so hopeless now. But it was very hard on people who received welfare.

During the Depression, it was then called the Department of Outdoor Relief, in contrast to the Department of Indoor Relief which meant being sent to an institution.  And you could tell riding on the street cars who was on public assistance because of the shoes and the clothes. You could see the poor stitching in the shoes. It was a terrible stigma. Now people get cash and decide that they need shoes or a hat or whatever. It is much more personal, but it was so depersonalized then.

So Father Bryant, assistant [to] Reverend Franklin Kennedy at St. Matthew’s found out about the Catholic Worker early.  He became editor of the diocesan paper and we had a Sunday school which was a CCD kind of thing, with a very heroic woman who had four hundred kids in this Sunday school. There were no parish boundaries.  Everyone was welcome to come, and this woman, Nellie Welch, was an expert in pedagogy and catechism.  She accepted four hundred copies of the Catholic Worker for all these children to take home to their parents, to show them that the church cared ·about the poor and the worker. So I read that paper and it was luminous to me.

There’s a saying that Theresa had this “T” written in heaven.  Well, I saw this “CW” written in heaven.  I found this paper spoke to me.  It was absolutely rich.  I devoured every word.  We didn’t have a missal.  Nobody had a missal.  But here there were little snitches from the missal. There were Collects that Dorothy used as fillers and she had Ade Bethune and the lives of the saints.  I thought, I just can’t stand it!  I must go to New York, and I must see this place.

I read that Dorothy was coming to Chicago.in 1934, and I persuaded Dean O’Sullivan to invite her to come to Marquette, which he did. My husband and I heard her talk.  And then Dorothy stayed overnight with my parents.  And we became friends.  Then I persuaded my parents that when I had finished college at age twenty, I could go to the Catholic Worker.  My parents were young and permissive, so I was lucky enough to go.  In July of 1935.  One of the best parts was that there was a young woman there for that summer named Evangeline Mercier.  Her father was a French teacher at Harvard.  She was extremely darling and cultured. She  knew all about the missal, and she introduced me to a great wealth of other good things.  So she and I became friends.  She is now a Carmelite Sister in Danvers, Massachusetts, and I keep in touch with her and went to see her last year. She considers herself very Catholic Worker oriented. We stayed with the bag ladies on the top floor of the house on Charles Street, and we had one night in the Salvation Army when a lot of people came so we … You really need a companion.  You need a partner.

Dorothy had us pounding on doors to start a maternity guild so that when poor people in St. Joseph’s parish were having a child, they would have a little money.  We tried to collect a quarter a week to prepare for theil'” lying-in.  It was like an insurance policy.  Well, we were scared green to walk up and down these damp tenement stairways.  So finally Dorothy put us to answering the correspondence, and we washed the windows and washed the dishes, and we picketed the National Biscuit Company, and we picketed the German Counsel.

RO:  Why the National Biscuit Company?

NINA: Well, there was a union problem. And we went to the German ship, the Bremen, when it came in.  A whole bunch of Catholic Worker people went to give out the paper along the waterfront.  We were there when there was a riot.  So we had a lot of rich experiences.  Of course all this culminated in a group that began to meet at Marquette in the basement of the journalism library and out of that came the Catholic Worker house.

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Section III – Opening and Closing a Catholic Worker House

RO: So you started Holy Family, after you got back from …

NINA:  Yes,  Dave Host came for a month, also.  He is a retired professor at Marquette and he had went off to study at the Pontifical Institute at Toronto; he studied philosophy.  So the rest of us then started a small house and that lasted four years.  But this is what happens in the Catholic Worker. The New York house has had a continual history of over fifty years, but in some places a small group starts and then all these people get a new vocation.  It’s kind of like a wave on an ocean where somebody else comes and then a couple of months or years later starts another one. That’s what happened at Chicago, and that’s what happened in Milwaukee.  Several, as they say, generations of people just keep going. They get the star, get the gleam, and then they go and do something else. They get married or buried, and then some other batch comes in and starts fresh and builds on the foundation.

Well, there was a small group that met at Marquette.  There was Harry Schwartz and Leonard Doyle, (some of these people are dead) and after we opened up,  a lot of people converged.  Florence Weinfurter came on opening day and she was a tremendous asset.  Margaret Blaser was there before we opened, and Larry Heaney came a little later.  He was with my parish and he met his wife there.  Harry Schwartz met his wife there.  Leonard moved onward and met his wife at the New York Catholic Worker.  So there were a lot of wonderful things and there were a lot of agonies and disasters and lots of personal growth.

RO:  As I remember from the archives, it seems that one of the problems you had, at least toward the end, was that you only had the three women.

NINA: Oh yes, yes, that’s right, It was a very difficult time because we found that the men … Well for example, Frank Bates was a prime mover. He decided to be a C.O, and he went off to C.0. camp, and then he eventually joined the Navy, and then he became a Dominican priest.  He is still a priest in Alaska.  Larry Heaney and Ruth Ann went to the Catholic Worker farm and then they went to this farm in Rhinelander, Missouri, and had six children.  Harry Schwartz decided to give full time to his wife Ann Powers and full time to his work at the Milwaukee Journal where he became a Vice President.  So I think our problem was that the women were keeping the house together with scotch tape, glue, and a couple prayers.

And the men that they took from the line to run it were selling beds … Oh we had problems of alcoholism, and a lot of factors we felt we just couldn’t control.  It was a very, very hard time to close the house. but we did, and we sent Dorothy a telegram and we got a telegram back which you have probably read in the Archives saying, “Say there are no poor in Milwaukee.”  She was most hurt about it. She was very wounded and very disappointed, but we healed that wound.

RO:  It didn’t end up affecting your friendship?

NINA: No, it didn’t, but it does leave what was an agony, what was an ache.  Father Hugo said that it was a result of the letters from us in Milwaukee that he went on the journey of clarifying the peace position in the Catholic Church.  Dororthy said that this made him go to the sources and made him study so much.  So I think we are all part of this chain.

RO:  I was reading in the Archives that, at one time, Father Hugo wanted to make the training for the Catholic Worker much more like a religious community, with a year of formation and …

NINA:  I don’t know about that, but I think he really wanted everybody to partake of this retreat.  Very hard going, and it caused a lot of confusion, I think, about how much people could take for themselves, or partake in, ingest… be part of.

RO:  Was there ever any feeling that some people were more real Catholic Worker because they had done the Father Hugo retreats?.

NINA:  Well, I think Dorothy encouraged everybody to do it. And she herself was a woman of great dedication to a life of prayer. I think Dorothy had a regimen in her life that was not altogether espoused by everybody. She saw that the more you had to do, the more you had to take your hour off and go to somebody’s church and really pray.  I think she never embarked on any appeal letter or any project without some intensive prayer.  She was a woman who had a pattern to her life, and of course not everybody does, or not everybody sees that value.  And I think that the Catholic Worker is just this kind of an accordion and is kind of an amorphous kind of thing, so that people do what they feel like. And I’m sure there is some feeling that other people … some people, I’m sure, feel that it would be good if other people had more order in their lives. But that isn’t ever going to happen, I guess.

RO:  It seems to me, though, that the Catholic Worker attracts those for whom the order stifles.  So many of the sisters and the priests that are working in it are working in it, I think, because they can’t live and pray with too much order. I think the order that is still in so many of the institutions of the Church is stifling for some people.

NINA:  I suppose it is.

RO: When the Holy Family house closed, you weren’t married, you were just a young woman teaching and working in Milwaukee. What did you feel like then?

NINA:  lt was ·a very painful time because the Catholic Worker occupied all my spare moments and cash. When something like that happens, I think you pray for what your next step is. It was a very hard time to figure out just what to do.

RO:  Did you think you have a vocation (to the religious life)?

NINA:  No, I have never had any … no, I just couldn’t have any rules.  There are always sisters who come to a place like the Catholic Worker and make subtle invitations.

RO:  Didn’t the Baroness (de Hueck) from Friendship House really want to get a hold of you?

NINA:  Oh, she wanted to get a hold of everybody!  She was a natural born person with a net.  She was a large looker for new people and very outward. I discussed going to the New York Catholic Worker with Dorothy lots of times, but I couldn’t get into the unstructured life, somehow. It just didn’t seem to suit me.  I was very attracted to that work and I just loved Dorothy so much, and I saw so much to be done but I couldn’t seem….

RO:  But when you moved to Chicago, it was so good for the Worker movement.  I know from what I have read in the Chicago history that the houses there think of you as some sort of touchstone. 

NINA:  Well, I haven’t been as closely identified with all of them as I’d like.  But I think they are all different and they are all extremely valuable assets to this whole time that we have been living in. And maybe because of my age, I am one connection for them.

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Section IV – Friendship with Dorothy & Travelling Russia Together

RO:  I mean this is just my interpretation, but Dorothy was your friend, too.  I think Dorothy came to Chicago a lot because she could also be with you.

NINA:  Well, I think she had a place to stay that was peaceful and there were always some houses in Chicago.  She went to everybody.  She was very sensitive to visiting around, but she also sometime felt a need to just come and collapse and just do all her letters at one time and call up a lot of people and keep in touch that way.

RO:  You would be like a safe house for her in a way.

NINA:  Well I  don’t know … that is highly exaggerated.  Chicago is always a place to change buses or trains, you know.  

RO:  But it seems everybody was always coming to her asking her things… 

(end of [tape] side one)

NINA:  Yes, I know … I think people just recognized how wonderful she was.  New York was such a busy place and so full of ferment and ideas and just unbelievable correspondence.  I mean people came there from all over the world. You could just sit on the front stoop and you … just one day when I was there, Sigred Undset came and Father Judge who founded a religious order and Sister Peter Claver … It was a wonderful place just to sit because it was the center of ideas and inspiration, a center of the richness of Catholic social thought.  And a new kind of Catholicism.  A new kind of personal responsibility and a new kind of  outlook.  But then I think she just lived … she truly embraced a life of poverty.  

I remember meeting her when she came from some gathering in Rome.  Stanley (Vishnewski) and I went to meet her at the boat.  She lived in a small tenement with another lady in the house.  It was a room piled high with newspapers that this woman was collecting. Cold water flat, no bath, maybe a toilet down the hall, no privacy, no amenities. But that was her choice. That was her wish. So I think life was not easy for her anyplace.

But I’m always startled by the fact that she came as a convert and came with this vast bedrock of the importance and dignity of the human person and this great sense of revolution for the world, that it is not as it must be. She was able to translate these surging feelings and this thirst for justice into a Catholic tradition.

She was a constant reader a voracious reader and she was able to nourish herself and other people to come forth and to make many connection, many bridges between justice and injustice, to make herself grow in this process

RO: Can you talk little bit about when you and Dorothy went to Russia?

NINA: It was a delightful experience. She and I were the only Catholics in this group. We went in 1970 with Dr. Jerome Davis as the leader of the group. He was a Methodist minister from Yale and had been to Russia twenty-five times.  Had an autographed picture of Lenin spoke Russian fluently. He was in his so:s when he organized this group. Dorothy got a scholarship which means her trip was paid for by Corliss Lamont.

She and I were always talking about going to Russia and she called me up and she said she had this opportunity and would I go.  And I could hardly wait to go.  We had three weeks there.  Practically everybody was a Methodist minister or his wife.  And I think there was another Catholic lady from Canada who was a factory inspector.  She and Dorothy and I were the only Catholics except a fellow named Brian Duff who arranged the tour.  And we went to Moscow, Leningrad, Warsaw, and we went to Romania.  We had a weekend in their workers resort called [ … ] and went to Czechoslovakia.  We went to Hungary.  And in each place we had prearranged gatherings, discussions with local people on the peace movement.  It was a very rich experience because there was sightseeing plus these conversations. Dr. Davis knew the Russians and had the contacts.  This was very, very important.

And we went to a collective farm and we went to a silk factory.  And our .factory inspector from Canada said that was a good one to go to because it would be clean and it would be a show-off place. There were these huge rows of machines and at each end of the machines there were a banner indicating what these women had done during the day.  For instance, a row got a banner because they did so much of this tapestry.  There were pictures of Lenin around, and we got to talk to the factory manager. We heard about the day care for the women with their small children where they could go at lunch and look at the child and see if the child was okay. The families lived nearby. The inspector lady in our group rushed into the bathrooms and saw

that they looked fine.  She knew what to look for in a factory.

The whole trip was an eye opener. Both work and study. And of course it was delightful to be with somebody like Dorothy, just an unforgettable experience.  To have that whole mind

explored.  We saw a great deal of the Hermitage and Leningrad and just had a marvelous time with the kind of people that we met.  Everybody on the tour, almost, was a minister.  They were all people who were trying to build bridges and understand the fact that the ordinary person wants peace.  Dorothy was great in that sense of bridge-building and seeing what we could agree on. That was the joy of the whole thing.

RO:  And I would imagine that the Methodists learned a whole lot about Catholics.

NINA:  I think it was mutually informative

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Section V – Women’s Roles in the Catholic Worker

RO: Now do you spend much time…Do you visit the Worker House in New York much now?

NINA:  I haven’t been there for a while.  I haven’t been to the New York area.

RO:  It’s probably different with Dorothy ….

NINA:  Oh I’m sure it is. Of course it is.  There are some people that you know very well, and some people that you don’t know at all. I didn’t get to that reunion, but I keep in touch with them. I write and communicate every once in a while. Let’s have a little luncheon and you can look at your questions about feminism …

RO: I’m sensing that is something that nobody has explored, theoretically, anyway. Dorothy was very much a believer in traditional roles, wasn’t she?

NINA:  I think she loved being a woman. She loved being a mother and being a grandmother. But she never really had a home. was always living in a room with someone else, or in a small apartment in New York.  When Tamara went off to school, she was living with guests in the home.  That must have been a very, very hard thing tor a woman who was as sensitive to beauty as she was, who was as fastidious as she was.  So many people dismiss her in this area as being very insensitive, which wasn’t true.

I think she had a great sense of justice to woman which you can see by her going to jail for woman suffrage.  Even if she never voted, she still thought it was a right and to do something was very important.  I think she had a sense of caring for all the women who came to the Worker.  I think it’s not so easy to be a full-time woman in a (Catholic Worker) house because there is always bound to be some conflict as to tasks, as to who does what.  But she loved ..she had a sense about cooking and keeping … having a sense of beauty, of what the real world would call a propitious atmosphere.

I think she was always very very sensitive about the women that came, and she was very sensitive to the women in jail wherever she went.  I think she loved afterwards to go to Alderson and be sensitive to those women who were incarcerated and to talk about their legal rights and how their families were managing without them.  She went to the Woman’s House of Detention.  What was the name of that woman that she went to jail with? It was during some the sit-downs against the air raids … Oh, Judith Malina.  I think they·went.during the peace demonstrations. I think she protected her from stronger women when she went to jail.  It must be a very rough scene.  I certainly admire people like Liz McAlister who left her three children and also people like Jean Gump from around here.  Darla from the Chicago Catholic Worker is in Texas.

RO:  I’m glad there are a couple there because then they can at least have each other.  To get back to women who are Workers in the houses now, what I seem to hear is that women in some houses are still expected to be the “inner people” and the men are the “outer people”.  The men are the ones who talk to the press.

NINA:  I don’t know too much about that. But I think I get the feeling of some kind of undercover comments from women who are looking to play more important roles and maybe are not encouraged.  Of course we had to laugh at the gathering of the fifty years o the Chicago House where the women who came in the beginning washed the dishes.  But I think there are some strong women here in Chicago, such as Barbara Blaine.  Barbara plays a very public role and does a great deal … there is a very harmonious relationship.  She makes a great many of the public decisions, and she is able to initiate many good things.  And I think someone like Gayle Catinella in the St. Francis Houses is also a strong person.  But the St. Francis House has more men just in sheer numbers, so it must take a kind of balancing act. That was one of the questions that came up in a gathering and I really … I don’t know enough about the inner workings of some of those places (to give you an answer).

RO: St. Elizabeth has more women?

NINA:  Well, there are just two of them.  What I mean is Barbara and Gary carry the main thrust.  I think Dorothy had always been such an articulate person and she did so much speaking and fundraising and she had this talent.  But I think, for instance,  that Alice Zarrella says in some of the books that she, Alice, was never encouraged to write for the paper, and she had that particular kind of talent. time, by time.  So it probably varies time by time.

RO:  It seems to me that in the earlier years in the movement, a lot of the people were single people, lay people. Now I am noticing that there are more and more priests who are coming as priests and staying as priests. Have you noticed that at all?

NINA:  No, I don’t know.  I haven’t kept in touch with that kind of information. I know that Bill Brennan, a Jesuit at Milwaukee, was a vital factor when he was there, and I think he made a very strong contribution on many levels.  And I am sure that he himself reinforced his sense of poverty and dignity and priesthood.  That was a wonderful experience.  It is very hard to define some of these roles, isn’t it?  Because at some houses there are people taking heap parts that are not Catholic, and it makes you wonder where these delineations are.

RO:  Well, I think one of the advantages you mentioned earlier was the flexibility

NINA:  Yes, exactly.

RO: The fact that the Catholic Worker can mean different things to different people. Now in the statements that I have been making about the book, I said that what I want to do is show the diversity, show the pluralism, because I think the perception is that any group on the political left has never been that way.  People think of the left as being sort of doctrinaire, and I personally don’t think it is.  I  don’t think the Catholic Worker is, either.  And I think that people always think of the Catholic Church as being …

NINA:  Oh my!

RO:  Yes, and I want to show that the Catholic Worker is one of the things that is contributing to the diversity. I think that it’s quite distinctively American. 

NINA:  No, I don’t think that any other country has that particular outlook.

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Section VI – 50th Reunion of Chicago CW & The Future

RO:  I think maybe the intellectual kind of tradition, the things from Peter might be European.  The sort of connection with intellect, but not this allowance, this tremendous allowance for difference.  Apparently there were several characters at Chicago’s 50th reunion. Who was there that you can remember?

NINA:  Well it was not a particularly large group.  But it was a very cohesive small group. It is hard to know who defines whom as a Catholic Worker.  You know Ammon,Hennacey was a vital factor for a long time and part of our Milwaukee Catholic Worker group when he was a very young man.  Then he went to live in New York for a long time and was sensitive to Karl Meyer and ended up with the main emphasis of his work being on tax resistance in Salt Lake.  And he ran this house which fed people and which housed people and offered them very refreshing ideas as Ammon was an original thinker on some points.

The St. Francis House in Chicago also has some very creative people like David Stein, who sleeps under· bridges.  David has truly understood the plight of the street people by being one himself.  And the people in both houses here work in shelters, and I just wonder how their energy holds with being on call day and night for the poor and the homeless.  And Ruth Heaney came (to the reunion) from Jefferson City, Missouri, where she works in a maximum security prison.  She counsels prisoners, she helped organize an Ecumenical house where families can come who are visiting their folks in jail.  Thisi house has proved to be a tremendous help on a very human level because (families of prisoners) are frequently poor people with no money to spend for hotels or food, and they are more than welcome in this very pleasant …

RO: And they also don’t have the support climate…

NINA:  Exactly.  There is nobody that says it’s not your fault or how can we help your child or what do we do with your boy or your girl.  

RO: So many times their families are…

NINA:  Drained.  They are just drained, just drained.

RO:  The Alderson Catholic Worker, I think, does this, too.

NINA:  That house is in the middle of nowhere, as that jail is in the middle of nowhere.  Anybody who does that kind of… that’s a very heroic work.  Ruth Heaney became a Benedictine sister after Larry died. She kept her own name, though. And she is a very remarkable woman. She practices the works of mercy (by visiting) prisoners.  She has made public protests and has been thr-own out of a pr-ison for her comments, and she is, like Dorothy, being labeled a dangerous woman by the IRS.  But also, President Reagan singled her out a few years ago as somebody who was a voluntary person who was carrying her share of the load. She responded and said she felt very irate, that she was not doing this in honor of the government.  She was doing this as a Christian per-son.  She was very unhappy that her name was denigrated in this particular fashion.

Joe Zarrella came (to the reunion) from Tell City, Indiana. He is now working half-time and spending every day washing dishes at a soup kitchen in his town. There is great unemployment.

RO: Where is Tell City? 

NINA:  It’s near Louisville at the bottom of Indiana.  He and his wife.have maintained their Catholic Worker tradition and been very vocal in.their-own city situation.  

Oh yes, Karl Meyer came with his wife, Kathy.  I feel he is a very superior human being.  He certainly has distinguished himself in his tax resistance and in his frequently solitary witness. He is like Dorothy and Peter, a pilgrim of the absolute.  He is a man of great integrity and great compassion, and he feels so strongly that tax dollars are just being wasted that he is ready to risk imprisonment, as he has before.  He was also opposed to capital -punishment.  Several years ago he had a little cart that has since been repossessed by the IRS in which he personally …. he had a symbol of the electric chair on this cart, and he walked, carrying this cart, from Chicago to Springfield, the state capital. That was his witness. He has been, I feel, one of the most heroic people in the work.

He started a house near the Gold Coast (of Chicago) St.Stephen’s House. The poverty in that house was truly very gospel like… Karl is a heroic person.  He wouldn’t want anybody to say it.  He earns his living as a carpenter and he has been a constant … especially known for his tax protests and very delightful things.  He gets all kinds of endless letters saying he owes interest and other penalties.  It, is just staggering in terms of numbers.

RO:  What can you remember about Ammon Hennacy when he was in Milwaukee?

NINA:  He was a young married man at our house … came to our house, sometime between 1937 and 1941, and at that time his two daughters were maybe in grade school, 9 and 11, around that age.  They came and sang at Christmas time. His wife was a member of the “I Am” group. (Note: Nina–What was that?) and at that time, I guess his marriage was vanishing Ammon told us about his days in prison when he was one of the few conscientious objectors.  I think he was able to give to all of us a breath of life.  He gave us a whole sense of the worth of each person and the dignity and the great sense of witness and the absolute values.  He was a vegetarian and I think he was just beginning then his protest to government agencies about taxes. Then, of course, we saw him through the years.

RO:  But his first contact, with the Catholic Worker, then, was in the old days.

NINA: Yes, and he brought to us a then-famous reporter Eugene Lyons who wrote a book called Assignment in Utopia.  And a guy who was the Moscow person for The New York Times and again enlarged our horizons.  Ammon was somebody who was a great encourager of people.  He was not then a Catholic, and he was in and out of the Catholic Church after that.  An amazing man in terms of his own commitment.  He knew what jail was, and he was totally fearless.  He had the strength of ten because of his convictions.

RO:  I see correspondences in their creativity.

NINA:  Oh yes!  One was influenced by the other.

RO: I think Ammon Hennacy is almost the folk hero of the Catholic Worker movement, particularly of the men.  

It seems to me that when Dorothy was here, she used to mediate conflicts within the houses.  She was a leader.  She could be called upon to make settlements, not that it was ever her movement, or that she insisted on monolithic kinds of responses.  But I think she would … she would come and solve difficulties and you can tell that when you read the letters.  There is obviously nobody doing that now.  Do you think that  there will ever be a leader like that?  Or should there be?

NINA:  I  don’t know. I think that is so hypothetical.  Who is to know?  Maybe you only get one Dorothy Day per century. Maybe nobody will ever want those boots.  Maybe the answer will be that the people in the houses have to live with each other grow with each other, suffer each other, help each other out of whatever confusions there are.  Maybe that kind of person is almost impossible.  And you know Peggy Sherer has left.  I don’t know too much about that, but maybe she is burned out or has other things to do.  

RO:  Well, one of the things that you started, the tape with is that people come and they are with the Worker and then they go out and make its presence more known.

NINA: That is very healthy, it strikes me. 

RO:  Isn’t that the whole idea of the leaven?

NINA:  It would be awful if everybody stayed because the work changes and people change and people have different needs at different times and especially those who marry and who have families. That has been a long, long matter of discussion – how do you raise a family as a Catholic Worker?  There are always conflicts.  So and so needs money for dentistry, and do the poor need this?  It is very heroic to raise a family in that context for any length of time.

RO: Dorothy didn’t really think it was a family thing.

NINA:  I know, except I think she accepted the families.  It was very hard.  I think there are many, many people who were very conflicted during all (of these decisions.)

There is no policy manual for any of this, you know.  You come and you see what needs to be done, and you do it. There is no computer printout, no charts, no recipes. You just do what needs to be done. That, to me, is the joy and the richness of somebody like Dorothy and all the people who have done all these things.

It is the age of the laity, and I feel this has always been primarily emphasized in the Worker.  A personal responsibility which gives people an opportunity to be, which they frequently get no place else.  And I think Dorothy has always said we really don’t need to ask about any of these things.  We just do it.  

That is one of the hallmarks of the Catholic Worker, that sense of this is my responsibility today and I don’t need to ask any old body and clergy or any other body what needs to be done.  That’s been a refreshing aspect for fifty years.  It’s been a healthy independence that I think has paved the way for so many creative things in the Church.  So much now, the war on povertyand so on, has been made very respectable by the Catholic Worker being the forerunner.  So many areas – work in the economy and work to help co-ops and work to help labor unions and work to nourish these little sprouts of goodness and of good works that come.  This to me has been … I don’t think we would have gotten this far in our social conscience without people in the Catholic Worker.  Especially Dorothy.

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Section VII – Biography

A good friend of Dorothy Day, Nina Polcyn Moore (1914-2007) was one of the founders of Holy Family House, the first CW in Milwaukee, and was also a lifelong friend to the Catholic Worker movement.  Dorothy would often stay with Nina when she visited Chicago, and the two of them traveled three weeks in Russia together in 1970, on a trip organized by Dr. Jerome Davis of Yale. But their friendship started when Nina arranged for Dorothy to speak at Marquette University.

After teaching in the Milwaukee Public Schools, Nina moved to Chicago in the Fifties and managed and then owned St. Benet Book Shop at 300 St. Wabash until she married in 1973. St. Benet Book Shop, with an engaging Nina at the helm, was a beacon for Catholic intellectuals, both religious and lay, at a time of exciting changes in the church, sparked by Vatican II. Catholics from around the country would stop at the shop to find lively discussions, books on the latest ideas, and contemporary religious art unavailable elsewhere.

“This came to be her way of being faithful to the vision of Dorothy Day,” said Roy Larson, former religion editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. Rev. John Gorman, a retired auxiliary bishop in the Chicago archdiocese said, “She was the heart and soul of the place.”

When Nina married Thomas E. Moore in 1973, they sent a meat feast to the Worker in New York so everyone there could share in the celebration. She attended the Chicago Worker 50th anniversary celebration, and after she learned of the 2006 National Catholic Worker Gathering in Iowa, she anonymously contributed $7,000 to make it possible. She was also an enthusiastic supporter of artists who spread the message, particularly her friends, actress Sarah Melici and film-maker Claudia Larson.

(Biographical information from https://www.pieandcoffee.org/2007/02/17/moore/)

Rosalie’s interviews with Nina Polcyn Moore were made available courtesy of the Marquette University Archives. Many thanks to William Fliss for sharing these transcripts from the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection and to Ashley McCormick of Mary’s House Catholic Worker for formatting and posting this resource.