"Friar Tuck"

Now maids and men, hark well to me, Sing Aleluya--wellaway! Full blest shall such a wooing be, Sing hey, God loves a lover! For they that meet in chapel cell, Are wooed and won and wedded well; Their lives ring sweet like chiming bell, Forever and forever!

Rollicking verses like the foregoing (Chapel Wooing) have appeared in Chicago newspaper columns, over the nom de plume "Friar Tuck," for 20 years. Lank, bushy-browed Friar Tuck is a copyreader, feature-writer and religion editor for the Sunday Herald and Examiner. He is also, under his real name of Rev. Irwin St. John Tucker, an Episcopal minister, rector for eleven years of Chicago's St. Stephen's, nicknamed "The Little Church at the End of the Road." Last week, upon the publication of Friar Tuck's latest thin volume of verse, Bishop George Craig Stewart named Rector Tucker the official poet laureate of the Chicago diocese.

Friar Tuck is proud that his little church is called the "Poets' and Artists' Church." Its walls are lined with paintings, sculpture, poets' manuscripts (including those of Edwin Markham, Carrie Jacobs Bond).

Among the church's oddities: a font made of a broomstick and a bread bowl; a stained-glass window of dust from precious stones; a window offered to another church by Lotta Crabtree, and refused because she was an actress.

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