Father Solanus Casey, Revised and Updated. Catherine Odell

was serving then as township treasurer and a school trustee. People liked him and his family. A crowd turned out to see the Caseys square off against one another in a battle of words and wits.

      Rebecca and Barney dated for some time after that. Barney completed his schooling and decided to return to Stillwater for work, though the couple agreed to exchange letters. For a short time, Barney had a job in Stillwater as a handyman and relief guard at the state prison. The environment was a bit unsavory and rough. Nonetheless, the young man was thrilled to meet the notorious Younger brothers, members of the Jesse James gang, who were prisoners there. Before Barney left prison work, Cole Younger gave him a clothes trunk, which he treasured. Then, Barney went to look for another job.

      Barney worked hard and was well liked on his jobs, yet he couldn’t seem to settle down to anything he really enjoyed. Finally, he found employment at a brick kiln in Stillwater. The other men working there, he soon discovered, were primarily of German backgrounds and had German tastes.

      One day, when Barney had no lunch, one of his coworkers at the brickyard offered him an extra sandwich with Limburger cheese. Barney ate it but apparently did not think too highly of its strong flavor. “Have you ever eaten that kind of cheese before?” one of the men asked Casey later. “No, I never ate it,” quipped the young Irishman, “but I’ve often stepped in it.” The German brickmakers roared with laughter. That young Irish fellow was all right, they agreed.

      But a strange and sad experience at the kiln, a few weeks later, moved Barney to think more and more about his future. While he was at work, a man fell into a deep pit filled with water. Seeing that he couldn’t swim, Barney jumped in after him and soon found himself struggling with the desperate man at the bottom. Barney quickly realized that he could not calm or overpower the fellow in order to haul him to the surface. He could see that he was in danger himself because the drowning man would not release him.

      For some unknown reason, Barney thought to grab for the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel hanging around his neck. His mother had given him the scapular a short time before. At just the moment he grabbed the scapular, he later told others, he felt himself being pulled up with the man in tow, seemingly by the scapular.

      Another man had jumped into the pit to relieve Barney. He could not get the drowning man to stop struggling either, and finally had to let him drown in order to save himself. Barney later believed that Our Lady would have saved him and the drowning victim through some miracle with the brown scapular. Disturbed and restless again, he looked for another job. While still working at the prison, Barney had heard that future jobs might be available with the new streetcar line Stillwater was planning. When he heard about openings at last, he applied immediately. His eye was taken by the swift, sparkling contrivances. He was hired, trained, and was soon working as a part-time motorman on Stillwater’s electric trolley. He wrote to his family about his new work with great satisfaction.

      Stillwater’s streetcar system predated similar projects in most American cities. From the 1890s on, streetcar systems could be found all over the country. They rapidly updated a city — replacing horse-drawn cars, connecting towns together through interurban lines — and were inexpensive. Young Casey was surely one of the first motormen in the country, and possibly the youngest on the job.

      At some point during this period, Barney received an emotional setback that may have actually contributed to his restlessness at some of his jobs. Enough affection had developed between Barney and Rebecca Tobin to prompt a proposal from the young man. Marriages between seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds weren’t so unusual in this era, and Barney was sure he could make a good living as a motorman in Stillwater.

      In a disturbing return letter, however, Rebecca informed Barney that her mother had refused to approve the engagement. In the fall, Rebecca was to continue her studies at a boarding school in St. Paul. Whether it was clearly stated or spelled out “between the lines,” Barney seemed to realize that the relationship was ended.

      Even worse, this letter was gleefully uncovered by three of his younger brothers some weeks after he received it, when they opened his suitcase during his visit home. Just what effect this breakup with Rebecca (and the teasing that no doubt went with the letter) had on the young man isn’t clear. Barney was deeply emotional, as the Caseys knew, but for the most part, he concealed his feelings. He continued to circulate generally among the young people of the area and appeared to enjoy the give-and-take of social mixing, even if he remained a bit remote. For a while, he seemed to be attracted to Nell O’Brien (although Nell later married his brother John). But after Rebecca, there was no serious girlfriend apparent in his life again.

      In mixed groups, the young man would grin, tell a few stories, and pull out his harmonica or the violin he had learned to play. His brothers, sisters, and friends would laugh with enjoyment. Years earlier, during his first attempts at the fiddle, his brothers had insisted that he practice in the barn. Barney’s playing still wasn’t good, but it was lively, and he knew the latest tunes.

      When a new motorman’s position opened with a streetcar line in Appleton, Wisconsin, 230 miles from the farm, Barney took it. He seemed to want to get away, to travel a little farther from the west central areas of Wisconsin that he knew so well. The Appleton job would give him that change of scenery.

      By 1890, however, Barney wanted to move closer to his family again. He took a job with a streetcar line in Superior, Wisconsin, about 125 miles from the Caseys’ homestead. After jumping from job to job, Barney had more or less settled into work as a motorman. Streetcars — although quickly catching on from city to city — were still new enough that two or three years of experience still gave him a sort of “seniority” in this line of work.

      The Caseys were elated to have Barney closer to home, even if he couldn’t really help with problems there. It was 1891, and American agriculture was suffering from a widespread depression. Drought and insects had devastated crops for several years in succession. When Barney Jr. saw that there were plenty of jobs in Superior, he wrote to his family to tell them of the opportunities.

      Barney’s three older brothers, Jim, Maurice, and John, moved to Superior almost at once. The four Casey boys rented a house together, and their sister Ellen temporarily quit her teaching position to care for the house and them. Barney wrote to his parents again and urged them all to come to Superior. Finally, later that same year, the head of the family sold the farm near Burkhardt to a real estate company in exchange for ten city lots in Superior. Before long, Bernard Casey Sr. moved the remaining Caseys, the family belongings, and all of the livestock north to Superior. With a new rented farm and their older sons working at good jobs in the city, the family was soon on better financial ground, so much so that Bernard and Ellen could build a ten-room house to accommodate the family.

      The three little girls — Margaret, Grace, and Genevieve — were enrolled in Sacred Heart Church’s parochial school, while the older Casey children began to attend high school. Even John, a year older than Barney, went back to school. Thinking of a profession as a lawyer, he took up the study of law during the evenings. Life was settled and satisfying for the Caseys. Except for Barney.

      One autumn afternoon in 1891 he was at work and his streetcar was making its usual run when, as he rounded a corner, the young motorman spotted a cluster of people on the tracks ahead of him. He hit the brakes immediately, and the streetcar screeched to a halt. Barney and his passengers poured out to see what had happened.

      Lying on the tracks in a pool of blood was a young woman. A drunken young sailor hovered over her, cursing and clutching a knife dripping with blood. As policemen pulled away the murderer at gunpoint, others lifted the woman’s lifeless body off the tracks. At almost twenty-one years of age, Barney Casey Jr. had lived most of his years on the farm among peaceable people. The dead body and the drunken words of hatred introduced him to something new, something sad and evil. The event was a shock to his psyche. Barney gathered his passengers and went back to work, but, at a deeper level, the young man couldn’t stop brooding about the senseless murder on his tracks.

      Of the many sons of Bernard and Ellen Casey, this namesake son was one of the most introspective, and Barney agonized about the direction of his life as never before. Since the broken romance with Rebecca Tobin, he had had few goals for