The future Don Bosco beats a showman four times, then returns his money

TURIN, 1885 AD — As a schoolboy at Chieri, Father John Bosco beat a professional showman four times in one day, at running, jumping, balancing and climbing. Then he and his friends gave the man back almost all the money he had lost, for the price of a dinner.

Don Bosco, as all Italy calls him, runs a house for homeless boys at Valdocco in Turin. At the order of Pope Pius IX he has written down the story of his early years.

In his schooldays at Chieri, Don Bosco and a travelling showman were after the same boys on Sundays. Don Bosco’s schoolmates had formed a club around him, the Società dell’Allegria (the Society of Cheerfulness). He wrote that its members looked up to him “as the captain of a small army.” On feast days Don Bosco took the members to the catechism the Jesuits taught at the church of Sant’Antonio. A farm boy from the Becchi, he had been copying the tumblers at fairs since he was a small child.

The boys of Chieri admired a travelling showman who had run the length of the town in two and a half minutes. What did he do to your Sundays?

The showman kept his newest tricks for Sundays and drew away so many boys that Don Bosco had few left to take to church. Don Bosco sent people to ask the showman to stop, at least during the services at Sant’Antonio. The showman laughed, and boasted he could beat any student in the school. The students took the boast as an insult, and they all looked to Don Bosco.

Every eye in the school was on you. Why did you take him on?

Don Bosco’s answer is short: “To please my friends.” Before he had thought it through, he told his friends he would take the showman on. One of them repeated it to the showman, and Don Bosco wrote: “there I was, committed to a challenge.” The race was set for a stake of twenty francs. Don Bosco had no money of his own, so several friends from the Società dell’Allegria put it up for him.

The race was run on the avenue of the Porta Torinese (the Turin gate). Did you pray before you ran?

Don Bosco took off his jacket, made the sign of the cross and entrusted himself to Our Lady, as he did on every occasion in his life, large or small. The showman went ahead by a few steps, and then, Don Bosco wrote, “I soon made up the ground and left him so far behind that halfway through the race he stopped and conceded.”

He wanted a jump next, at a small bridge over a wide ditch full of water. How did you get past his mark?

The showman offered to bet forty francs on the jump, or more if they liked, and Don Bosco and his friends accepted. The showman jumped first. He landed with his foot almost touching the low wall of the bridge, and had to grab a tree on the bank to keep from falling into the ditch. Don Bosco wrote: “I made the same jump, but by pressing my hands on the parapet of the bridge I carried the jump on beyond the wall and the ditch.”

Then he told you to choose any game of skill. What did you pick?

Don Bosco chose a balancing game, the magic wand, for a stake of eighty francs. He stood a stick with a hat on its tip upright on his palm and, without touching it with his other hand, made it hop along his fingers and up his arm and face to his forehead, then back. The showman got the wand as far as his lips. Then, Don Bosco wrote, “because his nose was rather long, it bumped, lost its balance, and he had to catch it with his hand to keep it from falling to the ground.” The showman staked his last hundred francs on a climb: whoever got his feet closer to the top of an elm beside the avenue would take them.

How did you and your friends feel about him by then?

“In a way we would even have been glad for him to win,” Don Bosco wrote, “because we felt sorry for him and did not want to ruin him.” The showman went up first, so high that the crowd said no one could climb further. Don Bosco climbed as high as he could without bending the tree. Then, gripping the trunk with his hands, he pulled himself up until his feet were about a metre above the showman’s highest point.

He had lost every franc he staked. What did you do with the winnings?

Don Bosco wrote: “Who could ever describe […] my pride at having won, not against my schoolfellows but against a master of charlatans?” Then the students offered the showman his money back if he would pay for their dinner at the Muretto inn. Twenty-two of them went, on a Thursday, and the showman got almost all his money back, and a good dinner. When they parted, the showman thanked them all: “By giving me back this money, you keep me from ruin. […] I will keep a grateful memory of it, but I will never again make a bet with students.”