Br. Brendan Charles

Martin Fahey was born on March 26, 1864 in St. Louis, Missouri, and was baptized in the Old Cathedral. Martin attended Annunciation Elementary School taught by the Brothers as well as at Christian Brothers Academy at Eighth and Cerre in St. Louis. He entered the Brothers at age twenty-one on January 8, 1885, and was sent to the Novitiate at Amawalk, New York. It was there that he received the habit of the Brothers and the religious name of Brother Brendan Charles. His first assignment in 1886 took him to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he remained until 1891 when he was assigned to the Old Cathedral Commercial Academy in Kansas City, a place where he was to spend almost twenty years of his religious life, twelve of them as Director. Brother Brendan built the De La Salle Academy on the Paseo and was named its first Director, and at times was known to "work with his own hands along-side the construction men as they built De La Salle." He returned to teach at St. Bridget's in 1896 and but was named Director in Kansas City in 1899. After a brief year in Minneapolis in 1911 he returned to his beloved Kansas City in 1912. He worked for two years (1916-1918) in the New York District where he taught in Albany and New York City before he was assigned to De La Salle High in Chicago in 1918. He served in Joliet from 1923 to 1933 and at St. Mary's College in Winona from 1933 to 1938. He retired in 1938 to the Community of Ancients in Glencoe in 1938 but came out of retirement in 1941 to serve as Director of Public Relations at Christian Brothers High School in St. Louis in 1941. He died four years later at age eighty one, having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for sixty years, having celebrated his diamond jubilee shortly before his death.