By Dolores Madlener
STAFF WRITER

	According to Bishop Listecki’s sister Mary, he has musical talents.

As Mary Listecki, the new bishop’s younger sister, puts it, “We were Polish Twins.” (That’s a humorous twist on an Irish term for siblings born 11 months apart.)

Those 11 months must have been full for Harry and Alfreda Listecki, who married in their 30s. Their first-born, Baby Jerome, was baptized in the heirloom-christening gown handmade by his grandmother, prompting the officiating priest to comment, “He’s better dressed than Prince Charles!” (The heir to the English throne had been born a year earlier.)

Mary, now a reading specialist for grades 6, 7 and 8 in public school District 151 in South Holland, was born a redhead and nicknamed “Penny” by her CTA bus-driver dad who declared, “I’ve got my brand new penny.”

She says about her sibling, “Jerome was always there for me—he took the role of big brother very seriously.” He invariably defended her, the rambunctious kid in the family, pleading, “Ma, it wasn’t her fault.”

He taught Penny self-defense and how to fight and they played football and baseball together in backyards and playgrounds.

He was “a TV addict of Davy Crockett, Twilight Zone and The Three Stooges,” she says. When earning his Boy Scout First Aid Badge it was Penny he bandaged so thoroughly he dislocated her jaw. “But he got his badge!” she brags today.

Growing up he never played being a priest. “Jerome liked to play soldier, he was all-boy. He’d line up all his toys in elaborate formations and I’d come by knocking them all down.”

There was no rivalry between them. “I’ve never seen him angry. Never an unkind word.”

When little Penny didn’t feel like practicing the piano on the second floor of their frame bungalow at 83rd and Greenbay Ave., Jerome took her turn for the extra half-hour, without their parents catching on, so she could run and play.

He was given tap and ballet lessons as well as piano and guitar. “He likes all kinds of music,” Penny says.

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	Growing up his sister remembers, “Jerome was always there for me.”

All his pals were rough-housing kids who liked sports. Jerome was a big wrestling fan and went to matches at the old Amphitheater,” Penny recalls. “His friend Greg Stroble’s dad was the dentist for the Black Hawks so he’d take them to hockey games at the Stadium.” She says her brother used to play hockey, but his skating wasn’t that good “so they made him goalie.” That’s the position once played by a young Karol Wojtyla.

When he was 15 her brother worked with the Job Corps in Oklahoma and then as a soda jerk at the original Gayety’s Ice Cream Parlor at 92nd and Commercial Ave. in South Chicago.

“While at Quigley South,” the high school seminary, “Jerome and his buddies Phil Harrigan and Manny Sosa had a musical group that played for weddings in churches.”

He went through four years without a demerit until the last day. “Traditionally,” Penny says, “no student who ever had a perfect record at Quigley went on to ordination. So when the glass was broken on a fire extinguisher case, Jerome had to be blamed, thus assuring his priesthood!” When he left for the seminary, Penny says, “It was very lonely in the house, like you lost your right arm. My mom and dad missed him the most.”

His first Mass at St. Michael Parish was sheer pag-eantry. “That year’s First Communion class led him down the aisle in procession. They went all out.”

He joined the Army as a chaplain, helping to build roads, went on maneuvers and enjoyed jumping out of planes with paratroopers. As an army reservist “Jerome was set to go to the Gulf War, but my mother cried and prayed, ‘Dear God, please no.’” The day he was scheduled to ship out, the war ended. “He was kind of disappointed, and told Mom to let him know what she was praying for next time.”

Penny says while he would give you the shirt off his back, her brother, who also earned a law degree, understands human nature and reads people fairly well. At the same time, “Worldly things mean nothing to Jerome. His car is six years old. Labels don’t impress him. He’s a worker. Believe me, the church has just made a worker a bishop.”

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