Father Pru
(Chester Prusynski, C.S.C.)
Campus-Counselor-at-Large

Born in a Wisconsin town so tiny he had six kids in his grade school class. Worked in the town paper mill for a couple years and then came the War, “so I went into the Army Air Corps. I got sent all around. I was on Guam with a B-29 bomber group when the atom bomb was dropped on Japan. It was a Sunday morning. I was in the Army four years one month eleven days and five hours. After the war I went to Marquette and earned two degrees and then taught typing and bookkeeping and shorthand and math at Lodi High in Wisconsin, and then earned another degree at the University of Wisconsin and taught at Riverside Poly-tech in California, and then this vocation thing began to bug me. I’d never ever considered such an idea. It just came bubbling up in me. I remember standing in the snow in the mountains of Utah and realizing I was going to have to do something about it. I was ordained at age 42, and I came to The Bluff in 1964 to teach accounting, and I was hall director in Shipstad and Kenna, and that’s how I came to be sort of the unofficial athletics chaplain, I suppose. I’ve been here 42 years, which is amazing. Nowadays I am sort of a teacher at large, a witness to holiness wherever I can see the Lord, you know? I listen to the students. It seems to me that spiritual conversations start up anywhere and everywhere here, especially outdoors. I know I’ll be buried at the Holy Cross cemetery at Notre Dame, but I wouldn’t mind if my ashes were scattered in the Willamette River, so I would always be near the Bluff...”