No Boy Is Born Bad

Father Edward Flanagan arrived in Omaha from Ireland by way of Rome and a Nebraska prairie parish. By nineteen sixteen he was running the Workingman's Hotel near the stockyards, a shelter for homeless young men, and what he learned there sent him in a different direction. He came to believe that children who ended up in the criminal system had not been born to fail but had been failed by circumstances, and that the remedy was simple: a home, structure, and someone willing to claim them.

On December twelfth, nineteen seventeen, he rented a Victorian mansion in downtown Omaha for ninety dollars borrowed from a friend and opened his first boys' home with five homeless newsboys. The home filled within weeks. Within a year he had moved to a larger building on German-American Row. Within four years he had purchased a farm ten miles west of the city, Overlook Farm, where the boys moved permanently in October of nineteen twenty-one.

The community that grew on that farm, incorporated as the village of Boys Town in nineteen thirty-four, operated on a principle Flanagan expressed simply and often: there is no such thing as a bad boy. Race and religion were irrelevant to admission. Boys Town accepted Black and white boys together at a time when segregation was enforced throughout most of Nebraska's institutions.

Spencer Tracy played Father Flanagan in the nineteen thirty-eight film Boys Town and won an Academy Award for the role. He reportedly gave the Oscar to Father Flanagan. Flanagan died in nineteen forty-eight in Berlin, where he had gone at General Douglas MacArthur's invitation to assess conditions in postwar orphanages.

Boys Town continues to operate today, expanded into a national organization providing services to children and families across the country.