Family connections

...In this instance, "old school" also means a priest who has waged a successful battle against one of the great modern scourges...

...Evidently the "old school" operated in journalism as well...

...Naturally, I was apprehensive about buzzing around thousands of feet above the ground in a contraption that seemed more closely related to a lawn mower than to an aircraft...

...O'Brien travels extensively, preaching the gospel that a therapeutic community, not prison, is the best way to treat drug addiction...

...For some reason, being able to take off, land, and hover like a bumblebee seemed less unnatural than being propelled through the sky in a jet...

...No wonder O'Brien likes to fly in a helicopter: he's used to defying gravity...

...Day-top is an international organization, with programs from China to Rome...

...We never had a priest over to the house socially or in any official capacity...

...O'Brien did put me in touch with Creamer, who responded to my plaintive letter with a gruff and dismissive note...

...The older I get the more I have come to appreciate how difficult it is to change anything about one's habits or life...

...Daytop has treated more than 100,000 addicts in its nearly forty years, and has close to 10,000 persons enrolled in its residential and ambulatory programs nationwide...

...But the experience was more exhilarating than scary...

...My mother and father didn't know any priests personally...

...A priest of the "old school," my father liked to say, which usually meant a tough guy who would brook little nonsense...

...It concludes: "Here, together, I can at last appear / Clearly to myself, / Not as the giant of my dreams, / Nor the dwarf of my fears, / But as a person, part of the whole, / With my share in its purpose...

...He was a distant and formidable figure...

...You could call it "old school...

...More than 85 percent of those treated stay clean...

...he sat calmly next to the pilot, reading the New York Times (reading the letters to the editor about Peggy Steinfels's October 22 op-ed piece, as it happens...

...It is a remarkable experience to stand in the midst of hundreds of people who, having confronted the worst in themselves and in many cases the worst this society has to offer, can profess such a faith...

...Not alone anymore, as in death, / But alive, to myself and to others...

...O'Brien, seventy-eight, was not flying the helicopter...

...Cousin Bill" had not told me that he would call on me to speak, so I was a bit flummoxed to find myself addressing a group of recovering drug addicts...

...One of O'Brien's neighbors growing up in Tuckahoe, New York, had been Robert W. Creamer, an editor at Sports Illustrated and a highly regarded biographer of Babe Ruth...

...Yet Daytop has found a way to help people do the seemingly impossible...

...t "old school...

...We visited three other facilities that day...

...But I can only remember meeting O'Brien once or maybe twice as a child...

...Battling addiction seems like an overwhelming challenge, and is often a life or death struggle...

...It is widely regarded as one of the most successful programs of its kind...

...I am here because there is no refuge, / Finally, from myself," it begins...

...He sprinkled his interrogations with wisecracks, and after each boy told his story, O'Brien hugged and thanked him...

...Still, it was humbling...

...At the end of each assembly, O'Brien led everyone in the recitation of the "Day-top Philosophy...

...When I graduated from college and told my father I wanted "to write" (speaking of nonsense), he suggested I drop O'Brien a note...

...I don't recall saying more than a few words to a priest when I was growing up...

...And as it happens, the purpose of my helicopter trip was equally exhilarating...

...He wanted me to tag along with him on one of his regular visits to the residential treatment centers of Daytop Village, the drug rehabilitation program that he founded in 1963 and continues to run...

...O'Brien was greeted with thunderous applause, and I was beginning to feel like I was in a Bing Crosby movie...

...In this ground, I can take root and grow...

...That was thirty years ago, and just about my last contact with Monsignor O'Brien until he came swooping out of the sky in a helicopter like some fabled tycoon to pick me up from Westchester County Airport and whisk me off to Rhinebeck, New York...

...A stream of boys rushed out to greet O'Brien and escort us into one of the buildings where all the treatment center's young clients had assembled...

...I was vaguely aware of the fact that my father's first cousin, William B. O'Brien, was a priest in New York...

...Addiction, he believes, is a symptom of the failure of the modern family...

...Daytop's treatment program tries to create a supportive emotional community in which people feel secure but at the same time are held strictly accountable for their behavior...

...Also onboard was Eugene Porcaro, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and once an altar boy for O'Brien, and James Gilhooley, another archdiocesan priest as well as a much-published writer...

...Standing before the group, O'Brien introduced each of his guests and then called on various boys to explain how they had come to Daytop and what the program, which entails extensive group therapy and a rigorously structured schedule, was intended to accomplish...

...Its success rate is high...

...However, it is impossible not to be impressed with the sincerity and courage of Daytop's clients, and it was not hard to speak to them...

...Drugs are an attempt at self-medication to block out the excruciating pain of family crisis," O'Brien has said...

...We flew up the Hudson, past "Sing Sing" prison and West Point, and landed on a playing field at Daytop's facility for adolescent boys...

...these were for adults, including one with many clients from overseas...