A Priest’s Contemplation Leads to Preservation

The spring in his step is gone, but the twinkle in his Irish-blue eyes still captures his very soul.

Father Patrick J. McPolin, curator of Dominguez Rancho Adobe, moves slowly, with a walker, across the historic adobe’s grounds in Compton. When he was young, the adobe served as his seminary. Now, it shelters him and 18 others in retirement.

They are both getting on: Father Pat is 87; the adobe is 178. He fell for the contemplative charm of the place when he first went there as a seminarian 68 years ago, about a decade after the Dominguez family donated the property to the Roman Catholic Claretian Order.

The lush, tree-studded, 17-acre Dominguez Hill, and the adobe on the hill’s eastern brow, stand as a legacy to a pioneering family and to the Catholic priest who has promoted the family’s history through decades of savvy fundraising and a gift for storytelling.

As a Claretian missionary, whose commitment is to work among Mexican Americans, Father Pat first saw the adobe in 1936 as a young seminarian. He had grown up as a Chicago street kid; this was a world he had never imagined. “It was a completely new life, and I was scared,” he said.

He was born into an Irish Catholic family in 1916, the son of a streetcar conductor who moonlighted as a tavern keeper in the Chicago stockyards. The family cooked up moonshine during Prohibition, and young McPolin was the “rumrunner.”

“It was my job to carry a five-gallon, copper-lined suitcase filled with whiskey from home to the tavern,” he said.

(“Not exactly a great background for his future professions of priest and police chaplain,” writes Betty Gemelli, the adobe’s assistant curator, in her soon-to-be-self-published book, “Dominguez: The Legacy of Two Fathers.”)

He chose the priesthood as a teenager “because that’s what was expected of boys from good Irish Catholic families. And I always wanted to bring people closer to God.”

“I studied all different orders before I found the Claretians,” Father Pat said. “They were run by mostly young Mexican Spanish-speaking priests, working in the steel mills area. They needed young American boys like me.”

He was ordained at the Claretian Seminary in 1943 and returned to Chicago’s South Side, where he served parishioners and police for more than two decades.

He had a rectory on wheels: a private police car. As a volunteer police chaplain, he was on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He drove the streets in his squad car, complete with siren. He listened to officers’ confessions, celebrated their weddings and children’s baptisms, and comforted most of the families of the 43 officers killed in the line of duty during his tenure.

One horrific day in 1958, a fire broke out in a trash barrel at a parochial school, killing 90 students and three nuns. “We could only identify some of the children by the tags on their clothing,” Father Pat recalled. “It was one of the saddest days of my life.”

Despite his rewarding work in Chicago, he never forgot the seminary and Dominguez’s rich historical legacy. The 75,000-acre Rancho San Pedro -- later named Dominguez Ranch -- was Southern California’s first Spanish land grant. It was awarded to military scout Juan Jose Dominguez in 1784 by King Carlos of Spain. Dominguez protected Junipero Serra and other Franciscan padres in the founding of California’s missions.

Originally, the rancho included more than 31,000 acres of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. But the seaside property was lost to the heirs of Jose Dolores Sepulveda, who had used the land to graze cattle and build a home.

A bitter legal battle ensued, and the Sepulvedas won title in 1846. That left the Dominguez family with a mere 43,000 acres. Even today, there are hard feelings between the two families, Gemelli says.

In 1826, Juan Jose’s great-nephew, Manuel Dominguez, built an adobe in the heart of the rancho for his future wife, Maria Engracia Cota. Eventually the land was divided among their six daughters, three of whom had married into the Carson, Watson and Del Amo families.

Remarkably, despite the passage of nearly 180 years, most of the land has remained with the Dominguez descendants. The last of the six daughters, Dolores Dominguez Watson, died in 1924, leaving the rancho to the Claretians “to preserve the family name,” Father Pat explained.

He took his responsibility to the family seriously. In 1941, he dug the grave for Dominguez family scion Gregorio Del Amo, in a crypt beneath the seminary’s lofty chapel.

It was on the grounds in the late 1930s that Father Pat literally discovered history. In his strolls around the property, or when he worked in the rose garden, he kept finding antique bullets. Intrigued, he began researching and learned that the rancho had been the scene of one of three battles waged in Southern California during the Mexican War (1846-48).

Back then, 350 heavily armed Americans invaded Dominguez Rancho in a fight that would go down in local history as the “Battle of the Old Woman’s Gun.” It was named for a worn-out artillery piece that the 200 Californios fired to good effect against the Americans.

During the battle, the Californios tricked the Americans into thinking their numbers were greater than they were. They herded wild horses across Dominguez Hill, kicking up dust and making it impossible for the Americans to count the enemy’s actual numbers.

It was the one battle the Californios won.

Father Pat was enthralled by an ancient tree whose trunk was supposedly marked by gunfire. “We were always finding bullets in the field,” he said.

In 1910, Dominguez Hill was the site of the nation’s first international air show. The three-day spectacle drew tens of thousands to watch bold fliers like Glenn Curtiss sputter and roar just above the treetops. The event put Los Angeles in the forefront of American aviation.

In the 1920s, oil was discovered on the rancho. Five leading refineries leased the land, enriching the Dominguez heirs.

Drawn by his memories, Father Pat returned to Southern California in 1965, supervising 120 priests at the Claretians’ Western region in Malibu Canyon.

The Compton seminary closed in 1974 and the adobe was converted to a museum. Father Pat became curator and began to restore the old structure, traveling to Washington, D.C., and lobbying for National Historic Landmark status. He got it.

A landmark needs money to maintain itself, and fundraising was second nature to Father Pat. He had already raised money in Chicago for a youth community center, talking celebrity friends such as Danny Thomas, Vikki Carr and others into putting on a show for the police.

Here, he often called on politicos and Hollywood stars who were Chicago acquaintances, such as Perry Como and Anthony Quinn. He persuaded them to speak or entertain at fundraising dinners, and eventually raised a few million.

When Father Pat wanted to replace the original windmill, part of a well operation, the smooth-talking priest persuaded a Lompoc farmer to donate his.

Then he talked someone else into delivering it.

He tapped the Dominguez descendants for furniture and clothing, and re-created the early 19th century look of the adobe -- including the bed in which Manuel died.

Father Pat’s office contains Manuel’s books, including his Spanish and English dictionaries. Another room displays a facsimile of California’s first Constitution, which Manuel helped draft. Father Pat also sweet-talked a family member into parting with a portrait of Manuel Dominguez by an early Los Angeles artist, Solomon Nunes Carvalho.

When Father Pat talks about his historical mission, he becomes animated and breaks into a young man’s grin. His most enduring work, he says, comes from what he did at Dominguez Rancho. “My blood is Irish,” he says, “but my heart is Mexican.”