Life at the Catholic Worker

by Ammon Hennacy

From 1953 to 1961, Ammon Hennacy lived at the New York Catholic Worker and was associate editor of the newspaper. This account of his experience is excerpted from The Book of Ammon (Fortkamp/Rose Hill, 1994) and is reproduced with permission from the publisher.

We are a paper and a movement and a house of hospitality. We are a station where folks who have lost their way stop for a time until they can decide where they want to buy a ticket to -- a monastery, the Ford Foundation, a union job, the Carmelites, marriage, or lower down on skid row. Although there are perhaps only fifteen of us who will admit that we are anarchists, there are thousands who call themselves pacifists -- that is between wars, and likely there are a hundred thousand who praise us for our works of hospitality and our emphasis on voluntary poverty.

As a House of Hospitality, the CW is unique in that we who are "front office" live here and work for our keep. In organization we are truly anarchistic, for even in the smallest debating club or PTA much time is spent in making up rules and by-laws and writing a constitution. There are just about two unwritten rules here: (1) Don't bring liquor in a bottle into the house. We don't search the "ambassadors," but we pour out the liquor if we see them drinking. (2) We never call a cop, although twice when Dorothy [Day] did not know it, someone called the police.

The following scene describes our place at 39 Spring Street. Now we are at 175 Chrystie, feeding folks on the first floor. Dorothy designates someone to run the House, and as long as the person can do it without wearing himself or herself out, he or she is the boss of how many people can be "paid out" for a flop when we do not have the room. Now we have eight apartments and pay for everyone else in a hotel or rooming house, but in the old days up to sixty slept in the house. The cook has charge generally of what he wants to order from De Falco, our old grocer friend from Mott St., only we cancel lemon extract generally, for the tendency would be to use it for drinking instead of cooking. Roger O'Neill at Chrystie Street, who cooked when the cooks were drunk, used to have two kinds of meat and two kinds of omelet, rice and sweet and Irish potatoes, with no warning. As a vegetarian I would ask if there was any meat in the soup, and receiving a negative answer I ate it and would find a bone or, as I would say, "a feather" in the bottom of the bowl. In the old days we had a coffee line in the morning, a soup line at noon, and supper for those living in the house. Now we are forty-two steps up on the third floor, and it is not worthwhile for a man to come up for such a small bit, so we have a meal at 11:30 with sandwiches to carry out for later if they desire. The men come early and sit around, because first come first served, and we have to have a man at the bottom of the stairs to ward off the drunks who might fall backwards before they reach the top and to tell the latecomers that there is a saturation point in the feeding.

In my early days at 223 Chrystie Street, when just then most of the kitchen crew were drunk, I got up at 5:00 A.M. and helped pour coffee for the line and scrubbed the slime from the hall and kitchen floor. Some men would come back as much as three times in the line. Often one drunk would preach to the men in the line, telling them that they were all no-good bums.

What kind of people come to us? All sorts of tortured souls who have no other place to go. Peter [Maurin] said that we had to put up with one another the way God puts up with us, and Dorothy said we loved God as much as we loved the person we loved least. By this measure I am a failure, and so are most of us. The only thing is that we have different points of touchiness and tension and different breaking points as to how much of any certain kind of misery we can take. And I suppose we get a "tolerance" toward certain irritations and an added intolerance toward others. One kind that is especially difficult for me to take is the scrupulous, over-pious person always wanting to put a scapular on me and hovering near the holy water. They are sure to burst out in vituperation a little later. We have had some of the quiet, withdrawn scrupulous types who have generally been good workers in detailed filing, etc. But once they are presented with an emergency their frustration and hatred of life have resulted in their violently attacking whoever is in their way. Then we have the loud-mouth braggart who when drunk would upset everything by his very noise. One such person who has been here for twenty years used to exasperate me by his noise when I was trying to phone, and I said to him, "How long do I have to put up with you?"

"How long do I have to put up with you, you damn intellectual?" he replied. This is wonderful, for the Catholic Worker is a place for derelicts, and we intellectuals talk pacifism and anarchism and go to Mass. All some of these folks want is one more drink, and in between they have to listen to us.