The Regis Alma Mater
Originally Publication Date:
Regis Alumni News | Volume 45, #2 | Winter 1980
Where did the Regis Alma Mater come from? Father Daniel Burke, S.J. spilled the beans during an interview for the Oral History Project this past summer. The Regis Alma Mater was originally the school song for Weston College, a Jesuit House of Studies in Massachusetts.
Back in 1927, Mr. Daniel Burke, S.J., a Regis alumnus from the Class of 1919 who was teaching as a scholastic in Loyola School, came across the street to teach Regis students a school song. A Regis scholastic by the name of Mr. John Diehl, S.J., (now deceased), asked Mr. Burke, an accomplished hand at the piano, to compose the song. It seems the football team had a big game coming up and no fight song to sing.
The now Father Burke recalls that he said "no" to the request to compose the song himself, but he offered to teach the boys a song he had learned at Weston College. The composer was a fellow scholastic, John C. Ford, S.J., now a Jesuit priest who is about to celebrate his sixtieth year in the Society of Jesus. Father Ford played the ukelele back then and wrote what is now know as the Regis Alma Mater.
When you sing, "We are your sons, fair Regis," remember it once went "fair Weston." Today the students learn only the refrain, but it is heartening to hear a group of freshmen spontaneously strike up in song on the annual bus trip to Bear Mountain. Regis might never have had Father Ford's song if Father Burke hadn't evaded the principal, Father Archdeacon S.J., who intercepted him on the way to the auditorum back in 1927.
Both Father Burke and Father Ford are still going strong. Father Burke resides at the Faculty House on 83rd Street and still goes on parish assignments on Sunday and hospital calls on Roosevelt Island. Father Ford, who later became a renowned moral theologian, spent most of his priestly years teaching at —you guessed it—Weston College. Today he works with men trying to recover from alcoholism.
