While flying for Eastern Airlines, Tom had much more time for his family. They lived in Marietta, Georgia, and the boys – 4 boys now – went to St. Joseph Catholic School. Due to the many moves and various hardships that they overcame, Tom and Mary Ellen became much more prayerful. It was during this time that they began saying a nightly family Rosary.
It was “the 70’s” and everything was changing. The schools, even the Catholic schools, began teaching sex education. Tom and Mary Ellen took their boys out of those classes. The school put them in a room where the teachers came to smoke. Tom and Mary Ellen were not pleased with this type of situation for their boys. They even rented out their house and moved into another house closer to the school so that the boys could ride their bikes home instead of having to sit in the teacher’s “break room”. They wanted their boys to be taught the true Catholic faith and, in their minds, their boys were not receiving it at St. Joseph’s.
After doing some research and reading about Seton School in Manassas, Virginia, they decided to move to Northern Virginia in 1981. Seton was just beginning a boarding school at the time, but Tom said: “If the boys go, we ALL go”. So off to Virginia they all went. They initially rented a home in Haymarket, then moved to another house in Manassas. Tom always wanted to go back to the “simple life on the farm”. They learned about a 27-acre property being sold near Manassas from people they had met at All Saints Catholic Church. Tom and Mary Ellen bought the property. Since Tom always wanted to have his boys nearby, they had the property subdivided so that each of the boys – now 7 of them – had sufficient land to eventually build their own home one day.