When St. Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits, the purpose of the order was to “strive especially for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and for the propagation of the faith by ministry of the word, by spiritual exercises and works of charity, and specifically by the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity” (Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, Pope Paul III, 1540). No one could have foreseen the vast network of schools that grew rapidly in Europe and throughout the world over the next almost five centuries. Where the Church carried out missionary work, there the Jesuits were,...

When Frank Miller arrived for the first day of classes on September 14, 1914, he was still a few weeks shy of his twelfth birthday. At the time of his registration earlier that summer, Frank had been assigned to the “F” section of the first class of the newly established Regis High School. The Jesuit administrators had decided to separate the first students of the new high school by height, which was an old Jesuit tradition. Since Frank was so young, it is not surprising that he was placed in the last section with all the other smaller ones. Almost...

By the time the priest got to his bedside to offer the sacraments of the dying, the man was already dead. Father David W. Hearn, the Jesuit pastor of St. Ignatius of Loyola Church on Park Avenue, had been called late on the evening of November 3, 1910, to the home of one of his parishioners, Hugh J. Grant. When he arrived at his residence at 20 East 72nd Street, the Jesuit found Grant’s wife, Julia, his two daughters, Edna and Julie, and his only son and namesake, Hugh, Jr., gathered around the body.¹ It was said that Mr. Grant...

For the first few days of classes in September 1914, Frank Miller and his classmates were allowed to enter their new school through the faculty entrance on East 84th Street. But that would not last for long. On September 22, the tunnel entrance on 85th Street, which was then referred to as the “arcade,” was completed, and from that point on no student was to use the front door. This rear entrance was not the only part of the building that was incomplete when classes began. Construction of the school had begun in March of that year, but the workmen...

When the class of 1933 began their first day of classes at Regis on September 5, 1929, little did they know that practically the entirety of their high school career would take place during the Great Depression, a time in which national unemployment rate would top 25 percent and New York City would see one-third of its factories shutter their doors. However, it would take some time for the nation to realize the impact of the stock market crash on October 29, 1929. In fact, in the entry for that day in the Prefect’s Diary, Father Archdeacon simply noted, “Regular...

After the death of both her husband in 1910 and her good friend, Father Hearn, in 1917, Mrs. Grant began to lead a mostly private life. Centering herself on her children and her faith, she continued quiet support of several charities, including Regis. In addition, Mrs. Grant also actively managed the considerable inheritance left by her late husband by reading several newspapers daily to remain current on the ever-changing financial scene. In fact, her son, Hugh, Jr., claimed that before the collapse of the stock market in October 1929, his mother had already sold off most of the family’s equity...

Because of the Grant family’s continued generosity to the Jesuits, especially toward the building of a new Jesuit seminary in Shrub Oak, on Christmas Day, 1960, Julia, Edna, and Hugh Grant were named “Founders of the Provinces of New York and Buffalo.”¹ The Society had bestowed a similar honor on their mother many years earlier, and now the Jesuits felt that her children should likewise be recognized and thanked for their many acts of generosity.

After the provincial, Father John J. McGinty, S.J., had received permission from the superior general in Rome to bestow this honor on the Grant children,...

Though secure in its perch above the center door on the south of end of the quad for more than forty years, in the late 1970s the iconic Regis owl disappeared, seemingly the victim of a teenage prank. Despite the valiant efforts of the assistant headmaster, Mr. John Tricamo, its whereabouts could not be determined. Realizing the significance of the old bird to many of the alumni, Father Raymond Swords, S.J., president of Regis from 1976 to 1980, asked Tricamo to redouble his efforts to find it. After much careful detective work, Tricamo was able to make contact with a...

In late 2007, Lucie Grant, the last member of Regis’s founding family, died in her hundredth year. With the final disposition of her will (which was still in process in the fall of 2013), the school was poised to receive another major gift (about $10 million) from the Grant family fortune. But this would be the last of the family’s generosity to Regis. The end of the Grants’ relationship with Regis coming just a few years before the school’s centennial provides the opportunity for reflection on both how much has changed since Julia M. Grant helped found the school as...