Br. Elzear Stephen

John  Kelly was born on February 22, 1858, in St. John's in Newfoundland, the son  of Michael and Mary Dwyer Kelly.  Ten  years later the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where John was to attend  St. Patrick's Academy in 1870.  One  year later on July 19th he entered the Novitiate at Carondelet, Missouri,  where he received the habit and the religious name of Brother Elzear Stephen  on August 14th.  His first teaching  assignment took him to Annunciation School in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1872  but one year later he began an assignment at Christian Brothers College in  St. Louis that would keep him there for twenty years.  In 1893 he was named Director at Manhattan  College in New York where he remained until 1895.  That same year he returned to CBC in St.  Louis for two years before being named Director of Christian Brothers College  in St. Joseph, Missouri.  In 1898 he  was named Director of CBC, St. Louis, and his tour of duty from 1899 to 1912  took him to Santa Fe, Chicago, and Kansas City.  Brother Elzear was named Director at  Christian Brothers College in Memphis in 1913, but in 1915 took charge as  Director of Ancients in Glencoe.  He  served at Rochester, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Duluth before returning to  spend the last seven years at his beloved CBC in St. Louis.  After serving a total of thirty-four years  there he died at age seventy-nine, having been a De La Salle Christian  Brother for sixty-five years.