Catliolic Ed1,catio11al Endeavors
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on the burden,· hoping year after year that they would be relieved. Late in the summer of 1931 Brother Arsenius, former director of St. Nicholas in Santa Fe, arrived in Galveston as the new principal, accompanied by Brothers N. Charles, B. Patrick, and A. Raymond. Aided by the Kirwin Athletic Association, the Kirwin Ladies Auxiliary and the Kirwin Alumni Association, the school had grown_rapidly under the administration of the Christian Brothers, and has become the leading Catholic High School for boys in the City of the Oleanders. 117 Price College, Amarillo, 1938. This college, taken over by the Chris- tian Brothers in 1938 at the invitation of the then Bishop Robert E. Lucey of Amarillo, was originally founded in 1928 by the Most Reverend Rudolph A. Gerken, first Bishop of Amarillo. It was begun as a "diocesan institution conducted for the higher Christian education of young men," through a grant of $50,000.00 from the American Board of Catholic Missions and the Catholic Church Extension Society. It was originally named St. George's College after His Eminence George Cardinal Munde- lein, Archbishop of Chicago. When first opened in 1928, it was staffed by Fathers F. X. Hillen, Gregory A. Boeckman, Raphael H. Kramer, Francis H. Kaminsky, Bartholomew O'Brien, Louis Thomas, and Mr. Clarence Koob. The first fifty students who enrolled attended classes in the basement of Sacred Heart Cathedral while waiting for the comple- tion of the building on the forty-acre tract acquired for the purpose. The i-tudents and faculty moved on February 4, 1929, to the three-story brick ouilding just completed, where they had ample dormitory space, adequate classrooms, and all the other facilities for a modern school. In March of that year Mrs. Katherine E. Price, widow of the late L. B. Price, wealthy store operator for many years in Texas, who was anxious to build a memorial to her husband, agreed, after a meeting with Bishop Gerken of Amarillo and Bishop O'Brien of Chicago, to give her support to St. George College. Immediately, substantial additions and improve- ments were begun, at an estimated cost of over $125,000. Two new units were added that summer, and when the school was reopened in the fall, its name was changed to Price Memorial College. Mrs. Price continued her benefactors from that day until her death. She built a home for the Bishop on the campus and purchased a 640-acre tract for an experimental farm in connection with the college. Her steadfast devotion to the cause of Catholic education received merited recognition in 1936, when Pope
117 /bid. [51-53, 65-66].
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