A Different Path
We were staying at a nearby resort called Merrill’s Breezewood Lodge, a place our family absolutely loved.
Apologies if I’ve written about this before, but we had such great times there.
The property consisted of three houses spread out through the woods, and we would stay at either The Vacationer—a lovely white two story building—or The Hideaway, which was well named, as the gray house sat up on a steep hill and was virtually hidden from the rest of the world.
The place had a swimming pool down by the main house where my siblings would swim and I’d flop around in the shallow end. At night, we’d all gather with the other guests around the pool to shoot the breeze and look for satellites.
One of the guests was a Catholic priest, Father Louis Scavo, who, like us, was from Brooklyn.
Summer Days
I believe we met him through a couple staying at the resort, and he was such a nice man—unlike some of the hardcases we had to contend with at our Catholic school in Brooklyn.
One day Father Scavo approached Peter and me and asked if we would serve as his altar boys when he said mass. It was rather an odd request--at least to us--but we liked Father Scavo so much that we readily agreed.
I remember pouring the wine into the chalice, and Father Scavo would gently raise his hand to signal me to stop.
There was one mishap when I tipped a candle toward me to blow it out and spilled some wax on my cassock.
I freaked out, of course, since I was conditioned to expect severe punishment for any misstep, but Father Scavo was not that kind of guy.
When my grandmother died, Father Scavo comforted our family and celebrated her funeral mass.
A few years later, we were shocked to learn that he had left the priesthood to get married and become a social worker.
We were surprised, but we respected his decision. Our family was pretty fed up with the Catholic Church by this time, so we wished him well.
After that, we lost contact with Father Scavo, and I hadn’t thought about him in years—decades, honestly—until Friday night, when his name popped into my head for no discernible reason and I wondered how he was doing now.
I googled his name and was very saddened to learn that Father Scavo—I still call him “Father”—had died in 2023.
Fighting the Good Fight
But what a life he lived.
“He was a loyal Brooklyn Dodgers fan, a champion high school runner, and one of his favorite activities was playing stickball on the street after Sunday mass,” according to his obituary.
“In 1969 Lou, choosing a different path, left the priesthood and became a social worker in the Division of Youth and Family Services for the State of New Jersey,” the obituary said.
He continued as a social worker in the New Jersey prison system and, in 1990, was appointed chief of the Bureau of County Services.
Father Scavo retired in 2000, but he was determined to protect the rights of prisoners, and he developed a training program for guards and staff to prevent suicides in prison.
He also fought against overcrowding and was always concerned with improving living conditions for the prisoners assigned to his care.
He volunteered for the Office of the Aging in Upstate New York and was a lector, Eucharistic minister, and member of the church council at a local parish.
I am so sorry that my family didn’t stay in touch with Father Scavo. This was before Facebook and Instagram, when it was a little harder to stay connected with people.
I only knew him when I was a child, and I would’ve loved an opportunity to speak with him as an adult. When I think of some of the dark moments in my life, it would’ve been nice to be able to contact him and get some guidance.
And I wound up going back to the Poconos in the 1980s to work as a reporter for The Pocono Record, which we used to mock while we vacationed up there.
My brother Peter died last year, so I'm the only in those old photographs who is still around.
Rest in peace, Father Scavo and thank you so much for being a part of our lives.
You may have taken a different path, but you were always on the side of the angels.
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