Comedy and Cuisine

Ground is broken for a new high school building in summer 1949. It would accommodate 500 students. Archbishop Gerald Bergan dedicates the building May 18, 1951. It’s well on its way to filling the same year, when 408 students enroll.

In 1950, the school spends a large sum of money to start Individual Reading Adjustment in the grade school. In April 1952, the Missouri River surges out of its banks and threatens the city. Cathedral High School

boys join the thousands of volunteers working to strengthen the levees. High school girls help care for children in evacuation centers. A spur-of-the-moment penny collection in the grade and high schools nets more than $50 for medicine and treats for children in evacuation cen¬ters.
The grade school gets new wiring and is fitted with fluorescent lights as part of 1952 renovations. Two eighth grade rooms move to the so-called “little school.” The kindergarten moves to the apartment the sisters had occupied. Classroom 207 is fixed up as a dorm to accommodate the sisters.

The baby boom is booming, and it’s felt at St. Cecilia. School opens in 1953 with 1,014 students in the grade school, and 466 in the high school. That fall, an addition is built on to the convent. More than 1,200 people visit the sisters when they have an open house in 1954. In the fall of 1954, an extra 9 a.m. Mass begins on Sundays in the school auditorium, to relieve the congestion in the Cathedral.

It is decided the parish needs a new grade school building. Construction begins in May 1954, after three houses are removed from the site. Over $600,000 is spent to erect the new grade school building and renovate the old one. The new school opens in September 1955. It has 28 rooms, including two kinder¬gartens and 18 sections of grades 3 to 8. There are eight classrooms for grades 1 and 2 in the old building. At the east end, a stairwell connects the old to the new. The new building is three stories, built of reinforced concrete. Its brick exterior, the sisters note, is neatly contrasted by Bedford limestone trim, and aluminum windows and doors. There are terrazzo floors in the corridors and stairwells, a cheery library, “an unusually efficient main office” and acoustically treated ceilings. The 26-by-32-foot classrooms have built-in wardrobe and supply closets.

The opening day of the new school finds our grade and high schools with one-seventh of all the pupils in Omaha archdiocesan schools. St. Cecilia’s has 1,710 pupils, including 1,216 grade-schoolers.