Brother Ernest, C.S.C. (1897-1963) & Nancy Garner (1924-2009)

Several years ago, I was at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis and they were giving away copies of Indiana Authors and Their Books. Three prized and well-made volumes and they were just giving them away. So I took them home and paged through them, reading entries here and there and cataloguing authors of special interest to me, on aviation or genre fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, and so on. These books have a special place on my bookshelf and I prize them still.

One of the things you'll notice in reading about Indiana authors is just how many have written on religious subjects. Native Hoosiers are generally conservative and many are churchgoing. These two attributes have helped to build among us a resistance to nonsense. That resistance breaks down occasionally, but most of the time it serves us pretty well.

For Christians, this is Holy Week, which culminates in the celebration of Easter, the holiest day of the year. Just last week, a couple of days before Palm Sunday in fact, I came upon a book by an Indiana author, probably illustrated by an Indiana artist, and on a Christian subject. My friend Troy plopped this book into my cart at the local secondhand store. It came at just the right time. The book is called The Son of Thunder: A Story of St. John the Apostle, and it was written by Brother Ernest, C.S.C. The illustrator was Nancy Garner. It's a slim book, a biography for children and just thirty-eight pages long. It was published by Dujarie Press of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1947.

Brother Ernest was born John Dominic Ryan on August 4, 1897, in Elyria, Ohio. In 1918, he entered the Congregation of Holy Cross of Notre Dame and took his vows in 1923. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1925, a degree in library science from Catholic University of America, and a master's degree from the University of Portland. Brother Ernest taught in Evansville, Indiana; New Orleans; Indianapolis; Portland, Oregon; and at Notre Dame. The Dujarie Press of Notre Dame was his creation. He founded it in 1943, but even before then he was an author. His first book listed in Indiana Authors and Their Books is Our Brothers, from 1931, but in his thirty-year career, Brother Ernest wrote scores of books, most of them biographies of saints for young readers. At some point he gave up teaching in order to devote himself to writing and to the operation of the Dujarie Press.

The illustrator of The Son of Thunder was Nancy Garner. She was born on April 3, 1924, in New Albany, Indiana, to Dr. William H. Garner, Sr., a surgeon, and Mary Louise Cavanaugh Garner. Unfortunately I have found nothing on her. I suspect she was a student: her work has the look of a young person learning her art. I suspect also that she was an artist close at hand, perhaps at St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, which was at the time affiliated with the University of Notre Dame. If she was indeed a young artist, She attended St. Mary's College, which was at that time affiliated with Notre Dame University. In 1947, when The Son of Thunder was published, Nancy Garner was a young artist. We can imagine her excitement from that long-ago time in receiving an assignment to illustrate the life of another young person, John the Apostle and Evangelist. In about 1947, she married, eventually to have five children. Nancy Marie Garner died on July 12, 2009, in Toledo, Ohio, at age eighty-five. Brother Ernest, C.S.C. (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce) died on March 4, 1963, in Notre Dame and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in the same place.

HAPPY EASTER!

Updated on May 27, 2024. Thanks to Mary Clare Decker for information on Nancy Garner.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley