Comedy and Cuisine

High school student Elaine Wolff is chosen to crown the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the 1938 May procession. One year and three months later, Miss Wolff receives the habit and becomes Sr. Mary Florette, a Dominican nun along with fellow Cathedral graduate Margaret O’Keefe, now Sr. Marie Joan.

The local Works Progress Administration (WPA) Orchestra brings music instruction and appreciation programs into the school in 1939. School repairs are made in the summer of 1940: new stairs at the main entrance, new linoleum on the first floor, and “a new telechrome electric clock in the hallway.” Before the school year begins, the PTA entertains the sisters with an outdoor dinner at Gifford Park.

As recalled by a student from this era, Sister Duchesne Maxwell, the parish and its schools are the focus of family and social life in a thriving neighborhood full of big families.

“We grew up at 801 N. 42nd St.,” remembers Sr. Duchesne, whose six siblings include Bonnie Pryor. Theirs was not a large family for this era. Many of their classmates help make an even dozen in their own families. “We’d have our oatmeal for breakfast, then we’d shoot up the hill to school.”

The hills around Cathedral are alive with children in St. Cecilia’s uniforms morning and afternoon as students walk to and from school. The children work hard; school is serious business.

“Being serious about school was very much expected,” Sr. Duchesne said. “I loved school. We had to work, but we had fun. It helped prepare you for life, and I think it’s still that way.”

World affairs come home to St. Cecilia’s too, and the school involves itself as a citizen.

In 1941, Sr. Rafael leads 39 girls and three faculty members in a Red Cross knitting group, making things to send to American troops overseas. In 1942, the high school’s Knit Wit Club pledges to make afghans “for the boys in service.”

Grade and high school students participate in a national scrap drive in October 1942. Several loads are hauled away, aiding in the war effort and netting the school over $90.

James Cahill, a Cathedral High graduate, becomes the first alumnus to die in World War II when he is killed in the Philippines in January 1942.

The school begins selling defense stamps in 1943, and children bring money from home to buy them. Sisters and students join local Red Cross volunteer groups making surgical dressings for the boys in the service. Eighth grade boys and girls, led by their teacher, Sr. Francis Aloysius Dwyer, grow a Victory Garden, helping the war effort and providing the nuns with fresh vegetables.

In October 1944, St. Cecilia students pack 50 Christmas boxes for refugee children of foreign countries, a Red Cross project. Thank you letters come the following January from English children displaced by the war. The school merits the privilege in February 1945 of flying a “Schools at War” flag. “This was achieved,” the
sisters note, “by 90 percent of the pupils of each room buying war bonds or stamps.”

Students sing such songs as the “Marines’ Hymn” in music class. They celebrate Victory over Japan Day in 1945, the year Sr. Duchesne becomes an eighth-grader.

“After the war ended, our eighth grade teacher, Sr. Francis Aloysius Dwyer, got some parachutes and taught us to make priests’ vestments out of the material,” recalled Sr. Duchesne, who graduated from St. Cecilia’s grade school in 1946 and Cathedral High in 1950. “We said the Rosary for the conversion of Russia as we sewed.”

In her years, the high school occupies the third floor of the building that now houses St. Cecilia’s day care. The students jokingly call it “Attic High School.” What later would become known as the minigym is the auditorium, and home to school dances – chaperoned by priests.

In 1945, Father Ernest G. Graham returns to St. Cecilia from a posting at another parish. He becomes the pastor. In 1947, Cathedral High School enrollment is so large, a cloak room becomes a classroom. That same year, the parish buys the Barmettler home on Burt Street for a kindergarten. It opens its doors to 50 tots, with Miss Virginia Flanagan as the teacher.

The war is over. The school is poised to take off.