Br. Octavian Jean

John M.  Gidon was born on December 27, 1881, in Bessamorel, Haute Loire, France.  At age seventeen he entered the Novitiate  at La Saulsie, France, and received the habit and religious name of Brother  Octavian John on March 19, 1898.  On  completion of his Novitiate and Scholasticate he was, for a short time, an  instructor in his native land.  In 1904  he volunteered to come to America and was assigned to the St. Louis District  and served in Glencoe, Missouri.  In  1906 he was assigned to Christian Brothers College in Memphis, Tennessee, but  returned to Glencoe in 1910 to redecorate the Chapel with murals and to build  the shrine of Our Lady of Peace.  The  remainder of his tour of duty includes Christian Brothers High School in St.  Louis, Missouri; Cathedral High School in Duluth, Minnesota; La Salle High  School in Joliet, Illinois; De La Salle High School in Kansas City, Missouri;  Christian Brothers High School in St. Joseph, Missouri; Glencoe, Missouri as  Director of the Scholasticate in 1923-25; St. George High School in Evanston,  Illinois; St. Mary's College in Winona, Minnesota; and Cretin High School in  St. Paul, Minnesota.  He was famous for  his art teaching as well as his own artwork with murals and wood carving,  especially his personalized napkin rings he fashioned from broken baseball  bats.  He spent the last thirty-one  years of his life at Cretin High School where he died at age ninety, having  been a De La Salle Christian Brother for seventy-three years.