Albert Bricker was born April 1, 1906, in Barberton, Ohio. He was baptized two weeks later in St. Augustine's Church. Augustine became his second name. His parents were William Bricker and Florence Pearl Weaver Bricker. After his mother died, he was given for adoption, at the age of three, to Karl and Mary Nieser. The Niesers had immigrated from Saarbrucken, Germany; Karl was a pressman in a rubber factory. Much later in life Albert was surprised to meet a natural sister whom he did not know he had.

Albert Nieser attended St. Augustine's Parish School and Sacred Heart Academy in Akron. Eventually he graduated from Aquinas High School in Columbus, Ohio, at the age of twenty-three. He attended Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island, until the summer of 1931, when he entered the Dominican novitiate in Springfield, Kentucky. After his first profession he studied at the Dominican House of Studies in River Forest, Illinois. He made his solemn profession of vows in 1935. He studied theology in Somerset, Ohio, and Washing ton, D.C., where he was ordained to the priesthood on June 16, 1938.

His religious name was Bertrand, but he became best known as "Slug." He claimed that he earned the name by his batting average, but it may have derived from his love for cops, robbers, and mystery stories (a copy of a literary work from his college days, The Showdown, or the Dis appearance of Mr. Stern, is in the Provincial Archives).

Father Nieser was assigned to teach history at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois. He continued his own studies and completed a master's degree at Catholic University in 1942, having written a thesis on The Status of Research on the Rule of St. Augustine. He then continued studies at Loyola University, Chicago, while teaching at Fenwick until 1949. His vision was deteriorating seriously, to the degree that his physician insisted that he quit his studies. Efforts to stop him, by doctors and Dominicans, failed. One of his contemporaries compared him to V.F. O'Daniel in saying that "what Slug lacked in brilliance he made up for by monumental perseverance and industry."

In 1949-1950, Father Nieser was permitted to travel to various archives in Texas, California, Mexico, Rome, and Spain. He collected thousands of microfilms and photos of manuscripts dealing with the Dominican missions in Baja California. Seeking various permissions at every step of the way, he wrote to the Provincial, Father Hughes," These Spaniards certainly scattered things all over creation." He expressed a hope for a teaching position at Loyola or DePaul, or "at Fenwick or at whatever you put me," hoping at the same time to complete his translations and a thesis in a single year. He remained assigned and teaching at Fenwick and continued his studies at Loyola for two more years. In 1960, his dogged industry was rewarded by a Ph. D. His dissertation is entitled The Dominican Mission Foundations in Baja California, 1769-1833.

From 1952 to 1957, Father Nieser served as chaplain and instructor for the Dominican Sisters at Racine, Wisconsin; from 1957 to 1960 at Sinsinawa, living and working with

another historian, Bernard Walker; and from 1960 to 1965 at the Dominican Monastery of the Perpetual Rosary in Milwaukee. In 1965, he was sent to Aberdeen, South Dakota, first as chaplain in St. Luke's Hospital, and then in the infirmary of the Presentation Sisters. On one occasion Father Nieser was roused from a siesta because a patient was dying. Under the circumstances it took him a little time to get to the room. When he arrived and was told that the woman had died, he replied, "Oh well, we've all got to go some time. It happens to the best of us." This was his calm acceptance of human reality, spoken without violating his unfailing gentleness and kindness.

Slug's time to leave the active ministry came, much to his chagrin, in 1980. After some time in an extended care facility near Chicago, he moved to St. Pius V Priory. As he became increasingly senile and needed constant care, he was moved to the Little Sisters of the Poor Center for the Aging. When all neurological activity was "essentially negative,'' his body persisted calmly in good health. But "finally he died," on February 25, 1987, at the age of eighty. He was buried in the Dominican plot at All Saints Cemetery, Des Plaines, Illinois. At the funeral Mass at Saint Pius on February 27. Father James Brendan Kelly, who had been Father Nieser's student at Fenwick and then had looked after him in his final years, preached the eulogy.

Father Nieser had always been a quiet, unpretentious man, and his final years were spent in total silence. He had had little family from the age of three, and in the end no survivors. It seemed ironic that the printer mistook the order and delivered 10,000 memorial cards for Slug.