He looks back on life in the Catholic Chuch.

Priests chanted mass in Latin, parochial school students – girls in tartan pinafores and boys in pressed navy slacks – heard nuns read from “Lives of the Saints,” and “got” their catechism by heart.

In “The Perfect Crime…and Other Adventures and Misadventures of an Altar Boy,” islander Dick Krutch makes his authorial debut with a memoir about his early life as an altar boy.

Born in 1930 in Spokane, he evokes the era of the Catholic Church before the reforms of Vatican II. He chronicles the church of a bygone era from an insider’s viewpoint – a Catholic life “from cradle to grave,” defined by boundaries that were comfortably clear.

“Things changed after Vatican II, and I wanted my children to see a slice of life that I experienced,” he said.

Krutch’s father lost his business in the Depression, and the family that included nine children was impoverished as World War II loomed.

But the church was a mainstay for his family as it was for many; Krutch brings the times to life with humor and seeming near-total recall. He animates such formidable figures as the 220-pound Sister Superior, better known to the students as “Sister Soup,” a sort of sacred sergeant who instilled fear in even the biggest kid with the threat of her powerful left hook, and who was known to grab the recalcitrant by the ankles and spin them silly.

After high school in 1948, Krutch traded Spokane for Seattle.

“I was really trying to get away from the small town where everybody knew you,” he said. “I really wanted to see what the rest of the world was like. All 300 miles of it.”

Krutch studied law at the University of Washington, and married Noel Nelson, who had grown up two blocks from him. The couple spent 43 years on Bainbridge and raised a family here. After the death of his wife, Krutch married a high school sweetheart, Kay Orndorff.

It was a friend, island author Ann Coombs, who pointed Krutch in the direction of a writing class at Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle.

Krutch, whose writing had been confined to legal briefs, was intrigued. He joined the class, but found that his busy life could best accommodate memoir.

“I didn’t have time to sit down and create something,” he said. “So I reminisced from my childhood. Every week flying back to Seattle from some city, I would write something and then I would bring it to class.”

His fellow students enjoyed the stories, but Krutch put them away, only unearthing them after he retired.

Once Krutch found his focus, he enjoyed the challenge of fleshing out the stories. Old friends from the Spokane days enjoyed them as well.

“I meet once in a while with my high school classmates, and we do a lot of reminiscing,” he said. “They were all kind of thrilled to read the book.”

Krutch does not sentimentalize the thornier church issues, touching at one point on its institutional sexism.

“The priest would come to the school and say, ‘which of you boys would like to go to a football game?’,” Krutch said. “And I wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with that, except I had sisters who thought there was something wrong with that. They liked football too.”

It bothered him that “we the altar boys would get more grace by serving mass than the nun who gave her whole life.”

But the church of Krutch’s memory did not have the dark side that has most recently come to light in accusations of child abuse. Krutch says he canvassed his high school friends, none of whom can recall such incidents.

“It’s funny, because I know people say that people didn’t talk about those things,” he said. “But you know, I honestly don’t know anyone that was close to that. I don’t think it existed in the numbers, then. And we were tough little kids, we would have said something about it.”

It is those old associates and family for whom Krutch has written. He envisions his readership as largely Spokane and church-based, and he plans to give most of the proceeds to benefit his old parish.

“I’m going to go, one day, to the parish hall and do a book-signing,” he said. “My older sister, who’s active in the Altar Society will be there with her younger brother, who she’s proud of and I’m going to sign those books.

“And that’s my audience.”