WORCESTER —  If Paul V. Mullaney has one complaint about the College of the Holy Cross, the school he graduated from 68 years ago, it's that you can walk right past the small plaque commemorating the Navy destroyer USS Power and not even realize it's there.

Four months shy of 91, the former Central District Court judge, Worcester mayor and city councilor is adamant that the marker “shouldn't be hidden like this.” A highly uncharacteristic frown appears as he stares at the memorial to the now-decommissioned ship named in honor of Marine 1st Lt. John Vincent Power, a Worcester native and Holy Cross graduate, who was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously by President Roosevelt in 1944.

“Jack Power received the Medal of Honor,” says the man still called “Judge” wherever he goes in this city. “He shouldn't be, he can't be forgotten.”

It is at the marker, tucked away in the small traffic island near the entrance to Hogan Campus Center, that Judge Mullaney begins a saga that starts on this same campus and winds its way through the seas off Kobe, Japan; Roi-Namur in the Marshall Islands' Kwajalein Atoll; and the barren reaches of Yudam-ni, near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, before returning home to Worcester.

The tale focuses on two men he thinks should never be forgotten: Lt. Power, killed in the South Pacific only an hour into his first World War II battle; and the Rev. Joseph T. O'Callahan, S.J., a Holy Cross professor who served as a Navy chaplain aboard an aircraft carrier during WWII and who also was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The stories of Lt. Power and Rev. O'Callahan haven't been fully told, the judge is convinced. That two men from the same era, the same city, the same college and who knew each other as teacher and student in the same classroom received the nation's highest military honor for heroism astonishes him still.

Something the judge steers clear of, though, is his own role in the story. He, too, hails from Worcester; sat as a student in one of Rev. O'Callahan's calculus classes at Holy Cross; and became a highly decorated combat veteran.

After returning home safely from WWII following four years as a Marine in the South Pacific, Judge Mullaney was recalled to duty during the Korean War. For his actions in Korea, he received the Silver Star — the nation's third-highest military honor — plus the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

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Holy Cross was a much different institution in the years leading up to WWII.

Male-only and heavily Roman Catholic at the time, the school's enrollment was capped at 1,200 students — less than half of what it is today — and the faculty consisted primarily of Jesuit priests. While the United States didn't formally enter the war until December 1941, fighting already had broken out in Europe and Asia in the late 1930s.

The prospect of their country making it a global conflict weighed heavily on the minds of the college students and their Jesuit professors.

The Rev. Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J., Holy Cross historian and history professor, said he was unaware that Lt. Power and Judge Mullaney were students of Rev. O'Callahan. It didn't surprise him, though.

“Old-timers on the faculty when I got here (in the mid-1970s) described him as having this wonderful charisma, this aura of power,” Rev. Kuzniewski said of the priest who taught math, physics and religious philosophy. That charisma and power, he reasoned, would serve him well when he directed rescue operations aboard the USS Franklin, which had been reduced to a burning inferno by Japanese bombers.

As the priest, wounded in the leg early in the attack on the aircraft carrier, was saving lives, he also was administering last rites and tending to injured sailors.

Most of Rev. O'Callahan's students at Holy Cross would go on to serve in the military and a great many would see combat, Rev. Kuzniewski noted. Who's to say Rev. O'Callahan's traits weren't instilled in Lt. Power, Judge Mullaney and untold others he taught?

“Makes you think Father Joe was teaching something more than math in that classroom,” said Chris Manos, a Marine Corps veteran who spends considerable time trying to get local veterans to tell their stories. The odds of two Medal of Honor recipients along with another man who earned the Silver Star sitting in the same college classroom seem beyond belief, he said.

Since it was first bestowed during the Civil War, not quite 3,500 Americans have been awarded the Medal of Honor. An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 military personnel have received the Silver Star, but a precise number isn't available.

They are small numbers in comparison to the tens of millions of men and women who have served in the U.S. armed services over the years.

Rev. O'Callahan's nephew, Jay O'Callahan of Marshfield, was 6 when he first met his uncle and came to know him well when he enrolled at Holy Cross in 1956. Rev. O'Callahan — “Father Joe” to those who knew him — no longer was teaching at that point, but the sheer magnetism of his personality and the sense he projected of being “one of those extremely decisive people” were still unmistakable, the nephew recalls.

“It's amazing how these things happen,” Jay O'Callahan said, referring to the classroom bond between his uncle and the two students who became war heroes themselves.

Ordained a Jesuit in 1934, Rev. O'Callahan taught at Boston College and Weston College before coming to Holy Cross in 1938, where he stayed until enlisting in the Navy in summer 1940. Of the two Worcester-bred students, Lt. Power, Classical High School class of '37, was in one of his math classes in 1938, and Judge Mullaney, South High class of '38, the next year.

Judge Mullaney remembers “Father Joe” as a tough teacher and an even tougher grader, who had a deep, booming voice.

“I felt fortunate to leave his class with a passing mark,” he said with a smile. “It was clear that the path ahead of me wasn't going to have much to do with mathematics.”

He also knew Lt. Power, although not particularly well, and suspects they likely ran into one another walking from their Worcester homes to Holy Cross. Power would come from his family's house at 10 Austin St., a stone's throw from St. Paul's Cathedral, and Mullaney from his parents' three-decker at 27 Gates St. in Main South.

“Jack was quite popular, especially with the young ladies,” the judge recalled. “He definitely was a ladies' man.”

Lt. Power's youngest sister, Patricia Power Rose, 85, now living in Hyannis, can't recall her brother talking about Rev. O'Callahan, but she distinctly remembers conversations she had with the priest in which he remembered him as a good and determined student.

Those talks happened in the early 1950s, while Mrs. Rose was a student nurse at the old St. Vincent Hospital on Vernon Hill. Rev. O'Callahan was hospitalized there several times after returning from the war and, as fate would have it, was one of the first patients assigned to the beginning nurse's care.

“He was a lovely man, such a lovely man,” she said of the hero priest. “We would talk about Jack, about Holy Cross … about practically anything. Anything except the war.”

TOMORROW: Lives touched by three Worcester heroes. Contact Jay Whearley at jwhearley@telegram.com.

Paul Mullaney and former Marine Corps veteran Chris Manos at the memorial plaque at Holy Cross. (T&G Staff/CHRISTINE PETERSON)

By Jay Whearley TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
 

Rev. Joseph O'Callahan, aboard the USS Franklin, adminsters the last rites to a sailor in March 1944.

 

President Harry S. Truman presented Rev. Joseph O'Callahan with the Medal of Honor in 1946. (File Photo)

 

Rev. O'Callahan

 

Paul V. Mullaney

John V. Power

At ceremonies in 1959 in front of the John V. Power statue at City Hall are his parents, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Power, left, and Brig. Gen Wallace W. Stickney. (File Photo)

On Aug. 30, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented Mrs. George F. Power with her son's posthumous Medal of Honor. In a low voice, he read her the citation recounting her son's heroism. (File Photo)