Memories from the St. Francis de Sales Parochial School

(Editor's note: For a fuller history of the school, see St. Francis de Sales Parochial School.)

My mother and several of her brothers and sisters went to St. Francis de Sales, as did all of my siblings and I, and some of my brother Lon's children. For three generations, St. Francis de Sales was our learning place.

The nuns -- and many lay teachers -- were dedicated to teaching and made their life’s work at the school. Many of the nuns came to St. Francis as very young women and remained there into their retirement. My mother and I had the same teacher, Sister Mary Luke Keenan, in the third and fourth grade, 30 years apart.

In first grade Sister John Marion gave each of us a cardboard sheet with letters of the alphabet, a pair of scissors and a small box with a top that slid open and closed. We cut the tiny letter squares, and put them into a box with the sliding top. I shook the box next to my ear, like a maraca, and thrilled at the sound of the letters hitting the sides of the box, whispering possibilities.

Whenever possible I practiced penmanship by writing on the blackboard, which filled the classroom’s entire side wall. At home, to my mother’s consternation, I continued my writing practice by writing up and down the wall of our back stairway with a dark lead pencil, in large Palmer Method interlocking curlicues.

As we passed into the upper grades we left our lead pencils behind, and "graduated" to scratchy pen points dipped in deep black ink in the ink wells built into our desks. The nuns taught us most subjects: in the eighth grade a local fireman came into class to teach us science. I still remember his lessons about cumulus and cirrus clouds.

Mrs. Prior, in seventh grade, was our first non-nun teacher. She was so crisp in her suits and high heels, as she stood in front of the class reading literature, while encouraging us to enter Father Campbell’s essay writing contest. He would award $5 for what he considered to be the best essay about the Bunker Hill Monument.

I entered and won -- the first money I ever earned for writing -- but felt certain that Campbell had given me the prize to make up for yelling at me earlier that week for doing who knows what. Either way the money was mine and I bought a bathing cap.

When you’re young, school is such an adventure. Who knew that learning the letters of the alphabet in first grade would lead to reading Animal Farm in the eighth? I read that one afternoon sitting on the stone steps in the Doherty Playground. Who knew that reading could lead to a new way of thinking?

To my classmates: Peggy Donohue, Philip Lyman, Donna Hickey, Cathy Boyle, Eileen Kirk, Tommy Dowd, Steve Cedarchuck, and Ann Marino, among many -- most of us knew each other for nine years, kindergarten through eight.