In the late 1960s, one of my younger brothers and I shared at least one goal. We both wanted to send a ball over the wall at San Quentin State Prison.

If you managed to do that, one of the prisoners there would paint your name on the wall at the place where the ball had passed.

The San Rafael Little League, as this column has noted before, played its games in that era inside San Quentin. Some prisoners there, who were called "trustees" because they were allowed to live on the grounds of the prison but outside the high walls of the main lockup, umpired our games.

They did a great job.

The Catholics among them — as well as those within the main lockup — also belonged to the same parish we did. That was St. Raphael — home to Mission San Rafael Arcangel, one of the Catholic missions founded in California by Spanish Franciscans more than 200 years ago.

A story that ran in the San Francisco Examiner on April 23, 1934, carried this headline: "150 Confirmed at San Quentin Rites."

"Following a high mass celebration which jammed San Quentin prison's mess hall with the 3,000 inmates, Archbishop Edward J. Hanna yesterday presided at confirmation of 150 prisoners," it said.

"It was San Quentin's annual confirmation ceremony," said the story. "For it, prisoners in the San Quentin furniture shop had constructed a special throne for the Archbishop. The mass was sung by Father Thomas F. Millett of St. Raphael, assisted by Prison Chaplains, Fathers George A. O'Meara and William J.........

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