I had my first glimpse of Dorothy Day in the late summer of 1960, though I didn’t have the nerve to speak to her. I was still in the Navy at the time, a third class petty officer stationed in Washington and working at the U.S. Weather Service. I had read her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and had been deeply impressed.
The occasion was a Friday night “meeting for the clarification of thought,” a phrase Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin had coined back in the movement’s first year, 1933, for the Worker’s once-a-week evening gatherings for dialogue. A lecture or reading was the main event, followed by a lively discussion whose forty or so participants ranged from the very sane to the mildly insane, the pious to the irreverent.
Dorothy was sitting in the front row jotting in a reporter’s notebook. Taking notes was, I soon discovered, one of her most ingrained activities, a discipline that must have taken root during her early days as a young journalist. By happy chance Allen Ginsberg was the guest speaker that night.
[Content continues with personal observations and interactions with Dorothy Day, including discussions about military service, faith, and social justice. The article concludes with Day sharing the story of St. Martin of Tours and offering the author a place at the Catholic Worker.]