Gentleman of the Old School

The soul of Mater Dei High School lives behind the gym, in a slightly tilted trailer he shares with a scrappy stray cat.

Josef D’Heygers is 84 now and stooped, but he gets around campus much like he has for the last 45 years, taking care of this and fiddling with that--fussing over the Santa Ana private school he has made his home.

D’Heygers watches over what, with 2,100 students, is the largest coed Catholic high school in the West. He has fended off vandals, opened hundreds of lockers after hours for students and guarded the school’s namesake statue of the Blessed Mother from young pranksters who always want to crown it, a tradition that D’Heygers says he just doesn’t understand. He is the school’s unofficial, yet undisputed historian, citing the administration’s lineage like his own family tree and recalling the dates of special athletic victories.

But to the students who have roamed the red and gray hallways, he has been more--a welcome constant in a changing world.

“It’s the first thing [former students] all ask whenever they come back to visit,” said Carol La Rosa, who has worked at Mater Dei for 20 years. “ ‘Is Josef still here?’ ‘Is Josef still around?’ They want to make sure he still has a place.”

Thumbing through a stack of greeting cards in his cluttered trailer, D’Heygers talks fondly about the boys and girls who have come and gone. Some send him pictures of their own children now, snapshots he keeps on his coffee table. As he shows them off, his eyes blink behind glasses as thick as ashtrays.

“Mater Dei is my family,” he says in his thick Belgian accent. As a tear slides down his cheek, he reaches for a handkerchief tucked in the breast pocket of his plaid jacket. “They are so good a family, so good to me. With them I belong.”

D’Heygers was born in Belgium with a malformed right ear, which he says made him an outcast. He had few friends and in school was the last to be chosen for any team or activity. Once, at a town dance, a young girl extended her hand as though she wanted him to take her onto the floor. Eagerly, D’Heygers stood and reached for her.

“Just kidding,” she said and ran off to join her giggling friends.

He left school after the eighth grade, and when he was 14, his parents sent him to work in a shoe factory. He became skillful at cutting leather and stayed there for 25 years, until an old friend who had moved to the United States wrote to him about a job at Mater Dei.

His parents had died; his sister had married and started her own family. He didn’t speak English, but, figuring he could always return to make shoes, he left Belgium in 1955 with a knapsack of clothes and a portable radio.

Mater Dei opened in September 1950 with 111 students and a small faculty composed of teachers and Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

By the time D’Heygers arrived, there were about 500 students. He admired the orderly campus, how the bells rang at the same time each day and how the students laughed, talked and slammed their locker doors.

He began transporting the school’s nuns from local convents to the campus. He did some painting. He planted the school’s first lawn. He did extra work too, partly to avoid going home. At the time he was staying with a Belgian friend, and the man and his wife argued frequently, which made D’Heygers uncomfortable.

He started showering in the school locker room after hours and eating in the cafeteria. Finally, he mustered the courage to ask the principal at the time, the Rev. Michael Hanlon, if he could move onto campus. They turned an unused restroom into a place for him.

In those days, Josef directed groundskeepers, handled maintenance and security. He dumped trash and repaired windows. While caring for the sports equipment, he forged friendships with a few football players, who treated him to bags of French fries from the old A&W; drive-in across the street.

“He was the central figure here,” said Patrick Murphy, the current principal who also is a former basketball coach. “He’s seen everything. He watched us grow up.”

And the stories and rumors that students have passed on about D’Heygers have grown over the years too.

“There was always something mysterious about Josef,” said Bridget Reid, a 1962 graduate who recalls that he always dressed impeccably and nodded politely to any student who looked his way. “I mean, he didn’t speak our language very clearly, and there was the physical thing with his ear. When you’re 16 and in high school, well, you can see how that kind of stuff would get mileage.”

Some said he lost his ear during World War II when Japanese soldiers tortured him or when he was injected with a flesh-eating virus at a German concentration camp or when some battlefield surgery went wrong. (D’Heygers never served in the military; his birth defect included a hearing impairment that disqualified him.)

Despite all the stories, he insists the students are his family. “They are kind; I am kind back. . . . You get what you give.”

“The kids see a certain vulnerability in him that makes them want to take care of him,” said Jean Keating, a secretary who befriended D’Heygers when she began working in the front office 13 years ago. “His mystique has made him a legend here, and it’s like nobody wants anything to happen to him on their watch.”

D’Heygers rejected a retirement package long ago. These days his doctor has recommended that he stop climbing ladders, and arthritis has affected his hands. So he shreds documents, escorts visitors, changes lightbulbs and sweeps the gym floors. The school has 24-hour security, but he’s still the “lights and locks man.”

He has never returned to his homeland for a visit, although friends have urged him to do so to over the years. It’s too cold, too far, too expensive, he says--and his sister always comes to visit him.

“Saves me the trip,” he says with a shrug. “Why should I go back there when this is paradise? This is my home all along.”

His friends suspect he’s afraid.

“It’s like he’s worried about losing his place here,” Keating said. “It’s like he thinks everyone will forget about him if he’s gone for a single day. As if that could happen.”

A few people who have connected with D’Heygers--teachers, office workers, graduates and some parents--have become what he calls his “bonus family.” They take him to the doctor, the store or out to dinner. They celebrate holidays with him and remember his birthday, often stopping by the little trailer on campus that Mater Dei officials helped him buy more than 20 years ago. The trailer is D’Heygers’ pride and joy, a place where he can enjoy things he loves such as opera, old movies and televised Masses.

“You’d be surprised by the things he likes most,” said Susie Moeller, who met him when she was a parent volunteer a decade ago. “He doesn’t take anything for granted. He’ll point out a street that’s lined with palm trees, and he’ll think it’s the most beautiful thing on the planet. He gives you such a different perspective on life.”

When Mater Dei launched a massive, $25-million renovation program this year, D’Heygers’ trailer had to be shifted from one side of the campus to the other.

“He had to stay with one of us for a few days while the trailer was moved, and it was like his whole world was falling apart,” Moeller said. “He just knew it wouldn’t be there when he got back. Nothing we said could change his mind.”

It was waiting when he returned. But Principal Murphy also was waiting with the blueprints for a caretaker’s apartment, to be built above the new campus ministries building, next to a new chapel.

The old man buried his face in his hands and sobbed, unable to speak for several minutes. But then, Murphy said, he quickly composed himself and pointed at the principal.

“He said, ‘You’re spending too much money,’ ” Murphy recalled with a chuckle. “That’s our Josef.”