Perhaps most of us might be familiar with Boys Town from the 1938 movie by that name which starred Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney in roles which won them and the picture Academy Awards. It’s the story of a compassionate priest who takes orphaned and at-risk boys and provides them with a home and, along the way, guidance towards living a better life than they’ve known. I highly recommend it, dated though it might be, if you haven’t seen it.

The real story of Boys Town merits its own awards, and the story continues to grow and keeps getting better and better. The original Boys Town was established by Father Flanagan in 1917 when he used a loan of $90 to rent a home in Omaha to care for five boys. Since then, it has gone from this…

…to this:

The campus that we drove through was every bit as beautiful as Notre Dame’s, although with far fewer buildings. At its peak, it housed up to 880 boys. Since then, their programs have evolved in many new directions, and it now includes girls.

While the initial concept of Boys Town was to form a “City of Little Men,” Father Flanagan envisioned a developed community to be know as “The Village of Boys Town.” The boys elected their own government, including a mayor, counceil and comissioners, and eventually became designated as an official village in the state of Nebraska.

However, Boys Town’s story has grown far larger than Father Flanagan’s most ambitious imaginings. After his untimely death in 1948, new executive directors came along, and with them came expanded fund-raising for the organization that gave it financial security. It also developed the Boys Town Institute for Communication Disorders in Children, which has since been renamed the Boys Town National Research Hospital. The third executive director focused on pioneering new methods and directions of care for the boys he called “social orphans,” which led to the development of Family Home programs, and a Teaching-Family Model to develop community based, family-style, skill-oriented group home treatment foe disadvantaged and delinquent youth. Quite a large order!

And it has proven a successful one, there are now Boys Towns in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, Washington DC, George, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The story of Boys Towns continues with many more achievements, much of which I was unaware of. In fact, until we visited Boys Town, my first thought was always of this image: