The way you could tell that he was really furious was to count the number of exclamation points in his memos. I got a note from him once with eleven exclamation points, a personal record, but there are stories of fifty exclamation points on a page, and let’s not even get into the whole underlining thing, one line for emphasis and two lines for shouting and three lines for thinking maybe the University of Patagonia would be a good place to work. He has the most beautiful handwriting you ever saw, the kind of penmanship that makes old aunts weep with pleasure, so it was always startling to find a snarl at the end of such ornate and graceful handiwork — like a ballet dancer ending her arabesque by punching a patron in the nose.

Yet he was wonderfully courteous and gregarious in person, and a thousand times in twelve years a brief conversation about some matter of pressing professional concern became a hilarious exploration of insipid devotional art, ecclesiastic politics, the murky swamp of college administration, his childhood in a steel-mill town, his twin brother who died at birth, much else. I remember once wandering up to his office to check on something or other and instead of finding something or other I was treated to a cheerful lecture about obscure Welsh saints. Another time it was the peculiar prayer habits of the piratical Sir Francis Drake, about whom he knows altogether more than he should. Still another time it was a litany of murky practices indulged in by professional athletic agents seeking to represent the flower of American youth, a subject about which he appears to know every unsavory detail since Eve tossed the apple to Adam and sports and sin began together.

You would think that a man charged with the presidency of a major private university, a man who spent his days sprinting madly through thorny thickets of bristling details, wouldn’t have a whole lot of time for muttering grumbling editors wandering unannounced into his office, but there you would be decidedly wrong, I am happy to say, which certainly drove his secretary to the brink of madness, but made for a wonderfully personal, if hectic, presidency. Plus you got to meet the most interesting people in his office — archbishops, carpenters, deans and other comedians.

In his thirteen years there was much hoopla and hooraw, arguments and accomplishments, controversy and continuity, and it is a terrific compliment to the man to say that he was responsible for almost as much as we claimed he was — most of all his insistence, sometimes with lots of exclamation points, that the University of Portland could and should and would be one of the best Catholic universities in the nation.

Why not? he would ask, and there would be the most delicious resounding silence in reply. For there was and is no real reason for the university not to sing and soar, to be not just excellent but extraordinary, and its president for the last thirteen years had everything to do with that astonishing idea.

For all the gleam and glory of his tenure, however, there were moments of surpassing tragedy and horror, and in those times I saw him cast deep into a personal darkness he shared with few. He told me once he could no longer bear to tell parents of their child’s death, having done it so often, and I think maybe he was more aware, as a priest, of the daily lurk of evil and suffering than the rest of us, such a constant witness to pain being his sworn profession.

But so often in those moments he then rose to an extraordinary eloquence, and sang the power and poetry of his God with verve and fury and tears.

Those were the greatest moments of his presidency, I believe - the moments when he led with love, was both pastor and president, breathed light into the screaming darkness. For all the facts and figures of his years here, all the new halls and walls, all the lauds and litanies, the funding and fawning, those are the moments I will remember best — the stunning moments when his voice rang out like a shivering bell at Mass and he said passionately of the sudden dead, their passing away was thought an affliction, and their going forth from us utter destruction, but they are in peace, they shall shine, they shall dart about as sparks through stubble ...

Amen to that, David Tyson. Amen to that.

Brian Doyle was editor of this magazine for twelve of the thirteen years of Father David Tyson’s presidency.

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