Hang Your Wraps in the Cloak Room! Growing Up Catholic in the ‘Forties

First Grade: A Whole New Language!

“Hang your wraps in the cloakroom.”What? In all my six years of life, I had never heard such directions.

My wraps? What was a cloakroom? Many further mysterious commands would follow.

The speaker, Sister Francesca, towered over her first grade class, her five foot stature bolstered by the elaborate superstructure of her headpiece. (Adrian Dominican Sisters were known among women religious as the “high hats” both for their tall headgear and an attitude of superiority.) Also impressive – a wide black belt with a long, big-bead rosary looped through it. The rosary rattled against the desks when sister strode down the aisles.

St. Mary’s class of l948, about twenty of us, had begun our orientation to Catholic schooling by lining up alongside the old red brick building on Gifford Street in Elgin, first graders at the end of the line. September, 1940. Silenced by the ringing of a brass wooden- handled school bell shaken by Sister Honora, the principal, we marched two by two into the building and up the two flights to the classroom hall to the beat of a drum set jammed into one corner of the first landing.

My mother and I had arrived early to record the proud moment on our Kodak Brownie Reflex camera. Sullen and fearful, I posed reluctantly before the glass front door of the school (a door we school kids never used) gripping my new red tin lunchbox with its thermos jar of milk, sandwich, apple and one tiny piece of candy.

I’d been in school before but nothing like this. I’d managed three weeks in kindergarten in the tiny village of Wayne. The Wayne school being a model of ‘progressive education’, when the administrators learned I could read and add, they promoted me to second grade reading and first grade arithmetic. The huge second-graders, resentful of my presence, treated me roughly and I returned from school each day terrified until my mother withdrew me to grow and mature a bit before facing first grade.

Back at St. Mary’s, we marched in following the second graders and got assigned into the tiny desks firmly screwed to the floor. Slanted, lift-up lids revealed a compartment for books; fold-down wooden seats attached to the front of the desk behind and so on to the very back. A groove across the top held our pencils. A round hole at the top right waited in vain for the fitted glass ink-wells which we wouldn’t see for another three years.

Over forty students – first and second grades - crowded the classroom. Our teacher, Sister Francesca, seemed angry, even close to hysterics on many occasions. I feared her greatly. Many years later I learned that the sixteen-year-old nun now faced her first class. Desperate for staff, the Dominican superiors had taken a girl with one year of high school and one year of novitiate and thrown her to the wolves (us!) After all, who couldn’t teach first grade? And second grade at the same time.

Always a shy kid, I hung back and watched my new classmates. A few vivid moments remain from that first day. Clem Healy rushing up to everybody and saying. “Do you know how to spell “people? I can spell ‘people.’ P - E - O – P - L - E.” And Gene and Joan Knaak, twins! The first twins I had ever seen. I didn’t even have brothers and sisters and here were twins – a phenomenon of nature like the Grand Canyon.

Sister Francesca picked up her trusty staff liner – a kind of comb-like device which held five pieces of white chalk and could draw a music staff on the blackboard. Not music but alphabet followed. As precise as a machine, Sister’s hand drew the letters and we were meant to follow, reproducing them on our large-space blue-lined notebook paper – a task that I found myself unable to accomplish in any satisfactory way, from that day to this.

Reading went better. Sister called out ten of our names and, clutching our primers, we made our way in front of the desks to a circle of tiny red wooden chairs. And we met Spot, the dog. I could read, but had no practice reading aloud to others. I put my head down and mumbled the words as fast as I could manage, both showing off and hiding at the same time. I haven’t changed that much in seventy years!

Thoughts on nuns.

I had only nuns for teachers through grade school and, with one exception, high school. Though they varied in size, age, tone, skill, strategies, they all seemed much the same, due to the head-to-toe stark black and white habit (their clothing, not their way of doing things.) We knew that they were special persons in the Church, not priests nor their equals, but more mysterious, a powerful quality for us kids. We didn’t see nuns in the movies – I think maybe the first leading role nun came in The Bells of St. Mary’s, l945. But nuns have been played by Deborah Kerr, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Julie Andrews (almost a nun), Whoopie Goldberg (pretending to be a nun), and Meryl Streep, to name a few. They have been presented as saints, monsters, romantically conflicted, comical and, all of them, fiercely determined.

When the Catholic reforms of the ‘sixties permitted nuns to give up their distinctive habits, religious vocations declined precipitously. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but imagine trying to recruit for the military without uniforms. The garb expresses and contributes to esprit de corps, or the sense of a community purpose and belonging. There are still lots of young women with strong religious commitments, but where do they sign up?