Mixed Blessing

COEUR d'ALENE - There are boxes everywhere; piled like a lifetime in Father George Rassley's room at the Loyalton assisted living home in Coeur d'Alene.

They're filled with stacks of books and papers, and pictures from newspapers or from the camera Father Rassley wears around his neck.

But Rassley, 81, can't quite get to them.

The last Redemptorist at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church is in a wheelchair, and his health is failing him.

"Without Biron I wouldn't be able to get to them," he says, of his chauffeur and helper, Biron Larsen, who squeezes though the stacks covering the tables and blocking the television to pull out each article, yearbook, or clipping. "He can climb like a monkey."

If you took every piece of paper in the box in Rassley's room it would be a sliver of the history of Coeur d'Alene and its Catholic Church. Nine other storage units across town are packed with his boxes, too. Father's last,

great achievement will be to sort and sift through each scrap and line and finish writing the book on St. Thomas' 100-year-old history.

But Rassley, the historian who lived in Coeur d'Alene as a boy and returned in 1990 as Parochial Vicar of St. Thomas, will do the work 30 miles south of St. Louis, at a retirement center in Liguori, Mo.

"I know I couldn't last forever," Father says. "But I have a lot to do before I go."

It's getting too expensive for the Redemptorists to keep him here. They're having budget troubles, so they're bringing him back in June, where he'll live with 30 other retired priests - his old classmates - and pen Coeur d'Alene's history.

He'll stay in touch with his congregation, his friends, his parish, through the telephone, but he'll only return to be buried, he says.

"I'll miss the people, the families. It's a little sad, but it's something you have to bear with," he says. "Most of my classmates are dead. Only a couple of them are still alive. So I can't last forever."

•••

His mind is sharp as ever, his congregation says. Everything he'll be writing down in Missouri he already knows. Names, dates, faces, all the information in the boxes is already his.

"The lives, the births, the deaths," Biron calls it. Not just with the church, but all of Coeur d'Alene.

Father still gives mass Saturday mornings at 8 a.m. at St. Thomas, hears confessions in the afternoons, and visits the soup kitchens on Tuesdays. He moved away in 1942 for the seminary, but stayed in touch with the town through newspaper clippings his mother sent him.

"You want to record all his stories before he leaves," says Jeff Conroy, St. Vincent de Paul executive director, one of the many boards and nonprofits which Rassley chaplains. "You want to sit down with a tape recorder and let him talk."

Bring up a name and father will connect it, like following a tree branch to the root.

"You work for the newspaper?" he asks, then lists the names of the other writers who have done stories on him and the writers whose parents he knows and then the paper's owner, Duane Hagadone.

"Knew him as a boy," he says, which leads to his aunt, who got Rassley a job delivering papers before he left for the seminary.

"She was famous for smoking with a holder," he says of her." She married a Johnson in 1970." And then it's on to the Johnsons.

•••

As much as they'll miss the details, the congregation will miss his character most.

It looks like Father closes his eyes when he speaks, and he speaks directly. "Carry on," he says when the conversation is over.

"I like that the most," says Mike Anderson, retired St. Vincent de Paul board member. "It's 'yes sir,' and your cue to get moving."

Quirks. Traits.

"Wait," father says, before the interview goes any further, "You're a Catholic aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Very good," he says.

Rassley is leaving behind a legacy, the Holy Family Catholic School among it.

He helped raise money - "a miracle," he says - to get the school built in 2004 after the Catholic school closed in 1971. And Rassley still says mass in the school's gym on rotating Wednesdays.

He says the one certainty in life he's learned along the way is the importance of family structure: "eat together, pray together," and he hopes the school can help build that for the next generation.

"We have to work to carry on the traditions what we have now," he says. "We need to get more vocations to the church and the religious life."

"Every time he does the mass he ends with that, a reminder of the history of getting the school built and all the hard work it took," says Karen Durgin, principal of Holy Family Catholic School, the school that now has an endowment in Rassley's name for operating expenses.

•••

On Saturday, the school will be having a farewell dinner for Rassley from 5:30 to 9 p.m. The event is on a donation basis and reservations must be made by today.

Then on June 28, Father - the last Redemptorist from Coeur d'Alene who vowed a life of chastity, obedience and poverty - will head to Missouri to finish writing the history of St. Thomas.

But it's the traits the parish says it'll miss the most - along with the history.

Rassley waves his hand in the air at that.

There are other dynamic priests, he says, "younger than I am."

But leaving Wednesday's mass at Holy Family, Evelyn Monie stops Rassley.

"I just wanted to say it's so good to see you. We didn't see you Friday night," she says, disappointed. "We saw the bishop. The bishop came and sat with us."

Was that a let down by comparison, she's asked.

"I guess I shouldn't have said it that way," she says. "I just don't know how they'll replace him."

Dinner reservations: 659-8622

Father Rassley, 81, is writing the history of St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Coeur d'Alene, but he'll finish it in Missouri