Friday, March 27, 2009
The Overcup Oak
Photo courtesy of Gary Layda, Metro Photographer
On Arbor Day 2009 (Thursday, March 26) dozens of Nashville community leaders gathered in Centennial Park to plant memorial trees in honor of significant Nashvillians who passed away in the last year.
That includes our Father Ryan principal, Monsignor James Hitchcock. Some of those participating in the tree planting ceremony are shown in the photo above. From left to right they are, Pat Nolan, FRHS Class of 1969, Diana Kuhlman, David Kuhlman, FRHS Class of 1957, Bishop David Choby, FRHS Class of 1965, Marvin Brown, Monsignor Hitchcock's long time caregiver,and Judge Mike Mondelli, FRHS Class of 1964.
During the ceremonies, Bishop Choby spoke and thanked the City of Nashville for recognizing Monsignor Hitchcock's contributions to the community as a great educator. He noted how fitting it is that the tree, an Overcup Oak, will be located just a short distance from the old Father Ryan Elliston Place campus where he taught and was principal for so many years in the 1950s and throughout the decade of the 1960s. Monsignor Hitchcock was also a graduate of Father Ryan in the Class of 1939.
The choice of an Overcup Oak seems quite appropriate to me for Monsignor Hitchcock. According to information I found in an on-line Google search, it is a long-lived, very sturdy shade tree that thrives in sometimes difficult urban landscaping conditions and in a wide variety of soil conditions.
This is in much the same way as Monsignor, who was so successful in dealing with the wide variety of students who came to Father Ryan as young boys and left as men during his tenure there.
The Overcup Oak, after several years, also annually produces acorns, usually between a half-inch and an inch in size. The oak tree is credited as well with being able "to create a wildlife habitat on land where most oak species can not survive."
This reminds me of the generations of Father Ryan graduates, who after being taught and nutured by Monsignor Hitchcock and his faculty and staff at Father Ryan, left the school each year to go into the world to help make it a better place to live. And hopefully, while some of them they lived and traveled all over the world after they graduated, they, like the oak tree acorns still stayed close to the values and life lessons they learned at the school.
Of course, I also find it fitting that Monsignor's tree is located in a park where Father Ryan students often slipped way to eat lunch on a beautiful fall or spring day, and perhaps sometimes did so without permission. Skipping school, we called it). We probably called it Work Crew if we got caught!
In case you'd like to visit Monsignor's tree, you can tell from the top photo, it is located not far from the Parthenon on the 31st Avenue side of the park. You can also see from the photo, the tree has a special plaque to indentify it.
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