I can still remember waiting in the lobby of what was the Chicago Athletic Club on Michigan Avenue to be interviewed by Thomas F. Roeser for a 2006 piece in the Wanderer. As a student, I had begun a campaign to help encourage a better commitment to Catholic identity at the Nation’s largest Catholic University, DePaul. New to grassroots activism and the Chicago conservative community, I had no real idea who Mr. Roeser was nor could I predict how fundamentally he would change the trajectory of my life.
Roeser greeted me with a certain sense of hopeful exuberance – after all, I was only 19 at the time and, for an 80-year-old veteran of the conservative grassroots, new recruits aren’t people to ignore. Upon publication of our one-on-one chat, which lasted nearly two hours, I was shocked at the amount of positive feedback the article received. Several hundred checks supporting a week-long Catholic speaker series began to flood my student organization’s mailbox. I had earned a powerful endorsement, indeed.
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