In Ralph Horner’s newest series, “How I became a St. James altar boy,” Horner writes about growing up in the 1950s next to St. James Church in Goodrich-Kirtland Park and how he got drawn into being an altar boy and, eventually, “a high Anglo Catholic, but not under the Pope Pius XII.”

When I was about seven years old, my family lived in an apartment building next Saint James Church, which was on East 55^th Street and Whittier Avenue in Goodrich-Kirtland Park. I liked to play with my cars and trucks in the strip of dirt in the alley next to the church—making roads and bridges with popsicle sticks.

The goings on that I heard in the church were a mystery to me. The people that I saw walking to that church seemed different to me than the people in our apartment building. I used to watch people going to Saint James Church on Sundays, because they parked their cars on Whittier, where I lived, and walked past our apartment building to get to the church.

I can tell you one thing: They didn't look like they were from my neighborhood. They had a born-and-bred in the Heights kind of look. The men looked like the guy in the suit who worked in the Cleveland Trust Bank on East 55^th Street and Linwood Avenue. The ladies looked like they didn't like anything they saw in my entire neighborhood.

The kids didn't look like my friends did. They looked like they were itching to get the snot beat out of them if they ever wandered into our alley. I can tell you that one of our tough boys would have given them what-for.

Before I ever saw the inside of that church, I wondered what those people did in there—because you could hear a lot of singing and caterwauling going on. They all talked out loud together in this sing-song kind of talking. They used some strange sounding words, and it sounded really screwy. They used phrases like “beseech Thee,” “Thou art,” and “And with thy spirit,” and other some stuff about this Holy Ghost.

I wasn't interested in finding out what the people inside Saint James meant about “And with thy spirit” because I knew that spirit meant ghost and I wasn't interested in why the people in Saint James wanted to be with a ghost.

The word “Beseech” sounded to me kind of like a stuttering “Beach” or “Beech.” The closest thing we had to a beach was the sandbox at the playground that was full of dog doodoo, and the little kids didn't want to go into for obvious reasons.

There is a Holy Roller church on East 55^th Street and we used to watch the going ons through an open window. It was really scary to see the stuff that they did.

The minister would plead with them “to get right with Jesus.” They would scream things like “I got the spirit, I got the spirit” and “Take me Jesus.” and they would roll around on the floor doing this talking in tongues thing, saying real fast something like “Habba poo goochy pooga monga!” It was really spooky!

Whatever the people in Saint James were saying had to be better than “Habba Poo goochy pooga monga! Litle did I know at that time, I was about to find out what the St. James parishioners were saying.