Made famous by Spencer Tracy’s portrayal of founder Father Flanagan, Girls and Boys Town marks its 90th anniversary.
BY ALLISON WEISS ENTREKIN
A two-story brick house sits on a large plot of land in a town near Omaha. Eight boys, all teenagers, live in the house, and none of them look like brothers. They share the same parents, Chris and Lori Mathsen, and tonight they are celebrating the victory of one of their own. Jordan Ridder, a 17-year-old high school senior and the house’s understood leader, was just elected mayor of Girls and Boys Town. The nearly six-foot soccer player can’t stop smiling. “I’ve never really had anything like this happen before,” he says. “It’s hard to explain the feeling.”
The Mathsens seem almost as excited as the teenager, describing weekends spent making campaign posters and nights filled with worry that Ridder might be setting himself up for disappointment. After all, he is a teen who wears cowboy boots and sings in the choir, not someone who captains the football team and gets cool points for being tough. But Ridder’s campaign to serve as a kind of student body president for the town’s 550 children was a success.
It is a night about Ridder, but it’s also about his family, whose motto is: Where there is support and hope, there is success.
“There is no such thing as a bad boy,” Spencer Tracy said in the 1938 film Boys Town.
Tracy won an Oscar for his portrayal of Father Edward J. Flanagan, a real-life Catholic priest who created a legacy of his own, one that is now approaching its 90th birthday. In 1917, Father Flanagan borrowed $90 to open Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home in downtown Omaha, and in 1921, he moved his rapidly growing contingent to a farm west of the city. His theory was simple: Every boy needs a safe environment in which to learn how to be a good son, brother and citizen— even when the boy seems beyond help, even when most adults have given up on him.
Today, Girls and Boys Town is an incorporated Nebraska village, complete with fire and police departments, Catholic and Protestant chapels, two schools, a post office and a three-acre garden. It holds 70 homes for boys and girls (girls were first admitted in 1979). Some residents were sent to the town by the courts, others by their parents. But regardless of how they got there and why, the town’s time-tested system remains.
Same-sex groups of teenagers live in homes headed by married couples, or “family-teachers,” who instruct them on how to do their laundry, say “please” and do their homework. Points are awarded for things like speaking with a calm voice and completing chores on time; those points translate into snacks and free time to watch TV. If a teenager becomes argumentative or curses, points are lost and sweet snacks are replaced with fruit, free time substituted for an hour spent role-playing appropriate behavior.
It’s a system that hasn’t worked for everyone, but it has worked remarkably well for most: The results of a 2006 five-year study showed that 82 percent of the town’s alumni earned at least a high school diploma—an astonishing figure, considering 53 percent of them said they were not attending school regularly before they came to Girls and Boys Town. What’s more, 71 percent of the alumni surveyed reported a state of “positive mental health” five years after leaving the town; that’s higher than the national average.
Father Steven Boes sits in his office, a cowboy hat on his head and black suit resting on his six-foot frame. He is the national executive director of Girls and Boys Town and one of his jobs is to serve as a spiritual mentor to the kids under his care. A calendar on his office wall displays pictures of children he served during his previous job as director of an American Indian mission, and his shelves are filled with religious objects from around the world—Christian art, a Jewish menorah, Muslim symbols. On one shelf, a heavy frame holds an image of a heroic looking Father Flanagan climbing a mountain.
“Father Flanagan was a visionary,” Boes says, conviction thick in his voice. “He was really strong on the fact that you can change a child by changing his or her heart. That’s why we believe that every boy and girl must pray, but how they pray is up to them.”
In addition to praying, most of the town’s residents attend some sort of organized worship service, from Catholic masses to synagogue services. They learn about faith and they ask God for help, and they don’t talk much about the past—yet another way the Girls and Boys Town philosophy differs from that of so many other rehabilitation programs.
“We don’t focus very much on what happened before the kids got here,” Boes says. “We don’t sit in a circle and talk about our feelings. We teach the kids how to play football, how to relate to people of the opposite sex. We don’t really philosophically believe that fixing a kid through one daily hour of therapy works. We try to create 15 waking hours around this kid that are healthy and positive.”
Breanna is a 16-year-old senior, a short Latina girl with curly hair and black eyes. She has been a resident of Girls and Boys Town for four years, and she can recite her daily routine without a seconds’ pause.
“I check out of my room at 7:15 in the morning, make my own breakfast, do the morning devotion, do chores, go to school, come home around three, talk to my family-teachers about my day, eat a snack, do homework, show my family-teachers that it’s completed, have free time, eat dinner, have a family meeting, clean up, do chores, have free time, then bed at 9:30,” she says.
The schedule is mandatory, but Breanna’s presence in the town is not— there are no locks on her home’s doors, and she knows she can walk away any time she wants. As Father Flanagan said: “I am not building a prison. This is a home. You do not wall in members of your family.”
Breanna can leave, but she chooses not to; she says the life she lives here, regimented as it may be, far exceeds the one she left behind. “I’ve found myself doing things I never would have done if it weren’t for Boys Town,” she says. “When the First Lady came here, I gave her a tour of my house; it was such an exciting thing for me. And I’ve had a 4.0 this whole entire year. The way my biological family goes, you either graduate or you don’t even come close to finishing high school. If I hadn’t come here, I could see myself not finishing school but acting like everything was okay.”
In the life she chooses to live, Breanna focuses on her grades, works on the yearbook staff and sings in the church choir. She will graduate in the spring, and she plans to live in Omaha and study to become a dental hygienist. She also intends to keep in touch with her “siblings” and family-teachers; after all, the same town that didn’t gate her in will also never shut her out. “I’m excited to leave, but I’ll be sad, too,” she says. “I’m going to struggle with giving back to this place all that it’s given me. Still, when I graduate, I know I’ll be happy.”
She pauses, thinking. “But eventually, I’ll probably get homesick for Girls and Boys Town.”
Located in west Omaha, Girls and Boys Town offers guided tours of its attractions, including its chapels and the Hall of History. For more information, visit girlsandboystown.org or call 800-625-1400.
MIDWEST AIRLINES offers daily flights to and from
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