St. James Parish celebrates 150 years in our community

Believe it or not, the first Catholic Mass in Davis was celebrated in a downtown bar

Our beloved town of Davis has been blessed by a number of great faith communities since its very beginning, including my parish of choice, St. James Catholic Church.

As it turns out, St. James is celebrating its 150th anniversary, which included a dinner for 500 parishioners last Saturday night that featured an 1875 menu of beef stew, grilled whole carrots and boiled potatoes, plus luscious lemon cake for dessert.

It’s hard for me to believe that this church has been in Davis for 150 years and even harder for me to believe that I’ve been a member of St. James for exactly half of those years.

The first Catholic church was built in 1875 on the northeast corner of Third and I in what was then known as Davisville.

St. James Church at 3rd and I, 1875

There were a whopping 12 Catholic families living in Davisville, population 500 at the time, and the Reverend Peter Kaiser from Woodland was named the first pastor, making St. James a mission of the already established Holy Rosary Parish in Woodland.

The Diocese of Sacramento was not created until 1886, so in 1875 Davisville was part of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, just a bit south and west of the Diocese of Grass Valley that stretched all the way into Utah.

The current Diocese of Sacramento, of which St. James is now a part, has 102 parishes.

The Diocese, which is named after the Blessed Sacrament, is one of the largest in the country, covering 20 counties, with nearly a million Catholics and stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics and touching both the Oregon and Nevada borders.

It is the only diocese in America where you can water ski and snow ski on the same day.

The No. 1 requirement for a bishop in the Diocese of Sacramento, in addition to a love for God’s people, is to have good tires on his car.

The first Mass in Davisville was held in 1869 in the popular bar of Maurice Reardon’s hotel at 3rd and C.

Not sure what sort of refreshments they served after Mass.

Many years later that bar became Deebo’s Pizza, which was a favorite hangout for students at the University Farm, which ultimately became known as UC Davis.

From humble beginnings we were born.

The first St. James wedding joined June Rose Plant and Valente Francis Dolcini.

Land for the first cemetery was donated by Mrs. Bridgette Chiles.

The beautiful brick church at Fifth and C, which might not survive another earthquake, was built in 1931 and is now adjacent to the UC Davis Newman Center, which was chartered by Bishop Armstrong in 1935. The church is still standing, but not in use.

Second St. James Church built in 1931 at 5th and C

The first wedding in the brick church joined Audrey Chrisman and Lloyd Doneen.

Names like Dolcini, Chiles and Doneen are still prominent in Davis today.

St. James School opened in September of 1965 with 90 students taught by three nuns from the Daughters of the Holy Spirit.

The current church at 14th and B was built in 1975 and the Memorial Center and gym opened in 2005.

When I was a kid, my brother and sisters and I would ride our bikes down Russell Boulevard from our home in the newly developed Oeste (rhymes with “toasty”) Manor to that old brick church for Saturday morning Catechism class while our non-Catholic friends stayed home sipping hot chocolate and watching Crusader Rabbit on television.

Our mom was a nurse working nights who didn’t get home until around 4 a.m., and on Saturday mornings my brother and I would pull the covers up over our heads and pray to God to let our poor mother sleep so she wouldn’t wake up in time to send us to Catechism class. God never answered that prayer.

In those days, the term “Irish priest” was redundant in the Diocese of Sacramento. They were all Irish.

The first pastor I remember was Father Paul Degnan, who happened to be an ardent Notre Dame football fan.

This was at a time when those little pocket transistor radios had become popular and I would smuggle mine into Catechism class to listen to the football broadcasts from South Bend or wherever the Irish were playing that day, with the three-hour time difference meaning the game would be played smack in the middle of class.

One day in confession, Father Degnan whispered to me, “Bobby, what’s the score of the Notre Dame game?”

And then there was Father Andrew Coffey, who came to St. James in 1963 and served our parish community for nearly 50 years.

After the school opened in 1965, he would always say the Friday morning Mass for the children from St. James Elementary. One day he admitted he was in a hurry, so he omitted his homily and finished Mass in a world record 28 minutes.

After that the kids started calling him Father Instant Coffey.

One day when he was visiting a classroom, one of the kids asked him how they “make” holy water out of plain old Davis well water.

With a straight face he said, “we boil the hell out of it.”

And then there was the day when I was in high school when Father Coffey pulled me aside after Sunday Mass and said I really ought to get a haircut.

If only he could see me now.

At one point in its recent history, St. James featured both Father Dan Looney and Father Thomas Blin at the same time, which caused some of us to start calling it the Looney Blin.

Everyone thought that was funny, except, of course, Father Looney and Father Blin.

Not only was Father Looney a great and treasured pastor, but long after he left St. James, he came back at our family’s request to say the funeral mass for our mother, Dorothy.

We are everlastingly grateful for his kindness and compassion and willingness to walk the extra mile.

St. James Parish. Long may it thrive.

In fact, I already have my dinner reservations for when St. James will celebrate its 200th anniversary in the Year of Our Lord 2075.

Reach me at bobdunning@thewaryone.com