Comedy and Cuisine

St. Cecilia’s enrollment exceeds 1,900 in 1959 - and there seems to be no end to he student boom. The parish is growing too; the rectory is demolished in 1963 to make way for a new rectory and office complex.

A World-Herald photo from 1962 features 11 sets of twins enrolled in the school. St. Cecilia’s dispatches school buses each day to surrounding neighborhoods. Its educational program is the largest in the archdiocese.

But the size of its schools isn’t the only thing that sets St. Cecilia’s apart. It also is recognized for providing a quality education, complete with cutting edge technology. It is the first school - "independent or tax supported," a news story notes - to fully equip its typing classes with electric
typewriters. This is a hallmark of St. Cecilia’s education: separating the wheat from the chaff in educational and societal trends.

“When it comes to tried and true methodologies, they stick,” said Father Greg Baxter, a graduate of St. Cecilia’s who became a priest of the Omaha Archdiocese. “Experimenting and fads aren’t part of the program. Yet enhancements are added into the program when appropriate. When something good comes along, they are willing to incorporate it.”

On the football field in the 1960s, St. Cecilia’s is a force. "Wonder of Wonders!" a nun writes on Nov. 4, 1965. "Sister Manuila brought a message from Mother Benedicata which was — ‘The sisters have permission to attend the Homecoming football game at Benson Park.’ Monsignor Graham arranges a bus for the sisters, and the outing proves successful. "Our undefeated team won the game," the sister notes.

Not long after, the sisters hold a private Thanksgiving dinner, capped off with a "delightful" skit put on by several sisters — "Teaching Singing to Sophomores." The reviewer’s relish makes it clear this is not an entirely flattering portrayal of the 10th graders. The sisters express more hope for their younger vocal students. The 137 children who take first communion in November 1965 sing their hymns "with vim and vigor. If they continue to produce such volume," a sister writes, "the singing should also improve within a few years."

In this era of social upheaval and Civil Rights progress, St. Cecilia’s recognizes it is not an island. Omaha becomes embroiled in a school integration struggle and more families leave the core of the city. While it needs students, St. Cecilia’s earnestly follows the archdiocese policy of not becoming an outlet for white flight. “The whole idea of white flight was big in those days,” recalled Father Baxter. “We did not allow families to put their children into our schools to get away from integration. In our own schools, most of us were white, middle-class kids. But we were becoming more diverse. We had African-American students in our class, some Cuban refugees, an interesting mix of kids.”

In June 1968, Msgr. Graham retires, after 23 years as senior pastor, the longest tenure of any Cathedral pastor. He is replaced by Fr. Schad.

The Cathedral High School football team wins the state Class B football championship that fall. The high school boys’ basketball team claims the state Class B basketball championship in 1971.

St. Cecilia’s also receives Title 1 status in 1971. This is a federal program designed to bring additional money and academic services to lower-income areas. Enrollment in the grade school drops to 765. Both the parish and schools encounter financial difficulties, and Fr. Paul Peter becomes pastor. In October 1971, Archbishop Daniel Sheehan writes to Father Peter: "I am pleased that you have come to the conclusion that the Cathedral High School and Grade School must remain open... Your schools are important - not only to the young people who attend, but to the entire neighborhood." The parish starts bingo as a fundrais¬er that year, followed by its first Octoberfest two years later. Fr. Peter becomes well-known for “recruiting” help from parents.

In the 1971-72 school year, the grade school hits the human resources jackpot: A 15-year teacher named Bonnie Pryor, herself a St. Cecilia graduate, is named principal. Mrs. Pryor is the first lay principal, not only for St. Cecilia’s but also for the archdiocese. Despite her early apprehensions, Mrs. Pryor finds the nuns to be supportive. The nuns see Mrs. Pryor as carrying on their traditions. Sister Marie Patrice, the last nun still in the school, says Mrs. Pryor is as Dominican as any Dominican sister. "We Dominicans educate the whole child," Sr. Marie Patrice said. "I
look at all the awards these youngsters get, and the compete in everything: art, science, history day, everything. They have talent, and they show it, and the teachers get it out of them.”

From the start, Mrs. Pryor puts her own mark on the school.

Mrs. Pryor remembers corporal punishment during her student days at St. Cecilia’s. Her miscreant students, she decides, will experience the pain of sitting silently outside her office - on Saturday mornings. For a student in trouble, that is only a little better than being in her office. “You’d get that look,” Father Baxter said. “It was very pronounced. It’s a look that says, ‘I can see right through you.’ You didn’t want to mess with that.” Mrs. Pryor’s philosophy on discipline has never wavered: Be firm and consistent, yet reasonable. "A rule is a rule," Mrs. Pryor said, "but you have to be willing to make an exception." Maintaining order in the school, at times, has meant keeping outside influences at bay. For example, when long hair hit boys’ shoulders in the 1960s, Sr. Monique and then Mrs. Pryor just said no. Father Baxter recalls boys being called on their hair length in the late 60s, while Sr. Monique was principal. Even then, his seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Pryor, also would observe and comment. “If she thought your hair was too long, you would know it,” Father Baxter said. Mrs. Pryor took a similar hard line on body piercing years later, sending a student teacher packing when she showed up pierced.

During her quarter century in the principal’s office,Mrs. Pryor’s name has become synonymous with St. Cecilia’s.A product of the school’s tradition, she also carries it forward.

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.

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.

St. Cecilia parishioners have been worshipping in a small wooden church at 4117 Hamilton Street. The parish, formed in 1888, is an outpost, distant from most of Omaha. Like the swelling city, though, the parish is destined to grow. The time comes for a new Omaha cathedral. Bishop Richard Scannell chooses to build it at 40th and Burt Streets, on Omaha’s western fringe. The cathedral will be St. Cecilia’s parish home.

Some 30,000 people watch the dedication and laying of the cornerstone for St. Cecilia Cathedral on Oct. 6, 1907. The very next day, St. Cecilia Grade School opens for the first time.

Five determined Sinsinawa Dominican nuns from Wisconsin make up the first faculty. The school occupies a two-story building near the Cathedral construction site. But there are only enough students and teachers for four classrooms. The teachers: Sr. M. Dionysius Hurley, first and second grades; Sr. M. Donata Wohl, third and fourth; Sr. M. Olivia Moran, fifth and sixth, Sr. M. Cecilia Renn, seventh and eighth; and Sr. M. Celeste Hurley; music.

Even as the Cathedral rises, the sisters lay the foundation for what would become a century of excellence, equipping St. Cecilia children with an education at once rooted in the Catholic faith and competitive in the wider world. This fits the Dominican motto: “To contemplate, and give to others the fruit of your contemplation.”

The sisters’ annals, handwritten in perfect penmanship, relate a telling story. St. Cecilia’s pastor, Fr. Daniel P. Harrington, wants “his school to have a standing in the city.” He wants his graduates to enter public high school as equals of public school students, without having to pass an OPS admission exam. The OPS superintendent balks. “He told me that the teachers constantly complained about the pupils coming from our schools,” the sisters’ scribe wrote. “They nearly always had to be demoted.”

The superintendent proposes waiting two years. “And then if everything is satisfactory, I shall allow them to enter on presenting the diplomas you give them,” he says. “Is that satisfactory?”
“I told him it was not,” the author of the annals wrote.

The sisters accept a compromise. Send him written tests monthly. Allow him to examine the students in June, before their promotion to Omaha High School.

The superintendent, good to his word, visits St. Cecilia in June 1909. He brings a crew. They spend the entire morning examining the students, until 12:20 p.m. The results are satisfactory.
“He said he had no eighth graders in any of his schools that he considered any better. He congratulated the pupils, the pastor, and the teacher. He said our diplomas would always be honored and he would be glad to get pupils from St. Cecilia’s School.”

St. Cecilia graduates its first grade school class in 1908. It has six girls and one boy. By 1914, enrollment goes through the roof – literally. The parish adds a third floor to the school to accommodate the burgeoning student body: 850 strong.

In 1917, new Archbishop J.J. Harty makes complimentary remarks to that year’s 30 graduates. He adds a temporal blessing. “His Grace,” the sisters note, “sent five dollars and a nice little note, telling us to have a treat of ice cream for St. Dominic’s Day.”