Br. Herbert Adrian

Bartholomew Powers was born on April 1, 1917 in Ossian, Iowa, one of seven children of Edward Powers and Bertha Hangartner Powers. He had one brother, Joseph, and five sisters: Ruby, Elizabeth, Nellie, Ann and Kathryn. He attended St. Francis De Sales School in Ossian from 1923 through high school, and shortly there after joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 1939 he entered the Novitiate at Glencoe and a year later was off to Winona to complete his BSS degree at St. Mary’s College. His first teaching assignment took him to St. George High School where he remained from 1943 to 1950. In May of 1950 he was appointed Director General of La Salle Institute in Glencoe. He remained in that position for six years until 1956 when he was appointed Assistant Principal of St. Patrick High School in Chicago. The following year he was appointed Principal of St. Patrick’s and remained there for the next eight years. In 1965 he was assigned to Memphis, Tennessee, to teach and as the new Christian Brothers High School was being built on Walnut Grove Road he supervised the construction. That same year he was appointed the first Superintendent of the new CBHS, a position he held for the next twenty-two years, during which time he continually improved the campus and established an endowment. “Osh” as he was called by his friends, retired in 1987 and lived the remaining twenty-one years of his life in the Brothers Community at his beloved Christian Brothers High School in Memphis. He had received his M.Ed. from De Paul University in Chicago, Illinois, and in 1994 was granted an honorary doctorate from Christian Brothers University. He holds the record for serving more years on the District Council than any Brother in the history of the District. He died having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for sixty-nine years.