Favorite Photo
For today’s blog, I’m re-upping a favorite topic and one of Amy Johnson Crowe’s prompts from January.
This picture is of my “graduation” from kindergarten in 1964. The priest in the middle is Rev. Bernard A. Peters, O.S.B., the Rector of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Maplewood, New Jersey. I think the nun on the right is Sister Winifred Noon (more on her later). Looking at this photo brings back so many memories – good, bad, and funny.
St. Joe’s was founded in 1914 when the Catholics living in the “Hilton” section of Maplewood petitioned the Benedictine order to found a parish.[1] They had been going to mass at St. Leo’s in nearby Irvington. My grandmother, who was born and raised in Hilton, was baptized at St. Leo’s in 1883 and was married there in June of 1915. A two-story home served as chapel and rectory for St. Joe’s until 1922 when the current parish hall was erected. The school was built in 1930.[2]
In 1962-63, kindergarten classes where held in these little white buildings across the parking lot from the main school building. I think it was a half-day program. During our years there, my siblings and I walked home for lunch since we lived only 4-5 blocks away. I remember when I was older that I REALLY wanted to eat my lunch at school and Mom let me do it one time. It was a horrific experience: loud, hot, and crowded in the basement of the school. That one time cured me of ever wanting to do that again.
This great picture shows a lot of children whose names I have long forgotten, but several precious friends. To Father Bernard’s left are twins Mary Jane and Betty Ann Zegarski. I am just to their left (with the straw for hair). Mary Jane and Betty Ann were just the sweetest girls and I was always next to them since we were the tallest and the line-ups were always by height. Mary Jane had cerebral palsy and was regularly picked on by the other kids. I distinctly recall the first day of kindergarten when Mary Jane had an unfortunate accident and the class was not kind to her. I left St. Joe’s after third-grade (more on that later), but attended junior high and high school with Mary Jane and Betty Ann. Sadly, I think Mary Jane passed away at too young an age.
Speaking of height, while Mary Jane, Betty Ann and I were the tallest, Carol Kelleher was the shortest. In the picture, I think she is the girl closest to Father Bernard’s right on the lowest row. Carol had like nine siblings and when we kids would act-up (which was literally all the time), my mom used to ask (yell?) how come we couldn’t behave like the ten Kelleher kids. The Kellehers didn’t live near us so I suppose my folks saw them at Mass each Sunday and must have marveled at their good conduct (did I mention that we were terrible?). They were to be our role-models, but it never stuck.[3] We behaved so badly at Mass that my mom used to make us kneel silently for an hour after we got home from church as punishment. It tickles me that one of our favorite games to play was “communion.” My oldest brother would be the priest and dole out Necco Wafers as the host. My favorite was the chocolate. If candy was provided at the actual Mass, we would have behaved? Not a chance.
The girl standing on the top row just to Father Bernard’s right is my friend Maureen (Conlon) Zusi. Maureen’s family lived right behind us on Yale Street.[4] Maureen and I attended junior high together, but not high school. Because we were neighbors and attended the same church, we stayed good friends. Her dad used to have separate whistles for each of the kids to call them home (kind of like Baron Von Trapp). I can pretty much duplicate Maureen’s call.
As I mentioned, Sister Winifred Noon was the principal of the school. We were all scared of her and holy-moly she is still alive, having just celebrated her 100th birthday in September![5] On the first day of first-grade we all introduced ourselves in class as one does on the first day and Sister Winifred asked me if my brothers were Jay and Steve. When I answered “yes,” she rapped me (hard) on the knuckles with a ruler to warn me not to behave the way they did. SMH
One of my closest and longest friendships was with Colleen (Brenner) LaScala. She is the little girl in the middle row to Father Bernard’s right. Colleen and her family lived on Oberlin Street and we met in 1960 when we were three. The story is that we saw each other from across the street and wanted to play together. Over the many years that we lived in Maplewood, her house became a refuge for me, her parents like my own, and her sisters like my sisters.
Despite the good reputation Catholic schools have, the experience wasn’t that great for my family. When I was in the third-grade, the school could not keep a teacher in my class. We had multiple substitutes, part-time teachers, and sometimes eighth-grade boys as our teachers. At that time, the public-school system in our town was recognized as one of the top in the country, so my parents decided to pull the youngest of us out of St. Joseph’s and send us to public school (my parents kept my oldest brother there as he was doing well). My mother met with Father Bernard to explain this decision and he so kindly told her that she would “burn in hell” for doing this. No, really, he said that. SMDH
In 2010, St. Joseph’s school closed its doors.[6] After eighty years, the student population had dropped to an unsustainable level. The expected enrollment for the 2010-11 school year was projected at only 140 students in kindergarten through eighth grade after having reached a high of 310 students only ten years earlier. Four other schools in the Newark Catholic Diocese also closed in 2010.[7]
I am happy to report that St. Joe’s today seems to be a progressive church. Its Open Doors group welcomes LGBTQ Catholics and it is a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.[8] The church’s Workers4Justice group feels “that Catholic silence in the face of racial injustice [is] no longer an option.”[9] Their slogan is “Catholic silence is violence.” Yup.
[1] “St. Joseph’s, Maplewood, To Mark 50th Anniversary,” The (Catholic) Advocate, 9 April 1964, p. 16. I remember my friend Colleen’s mother used to read The Advocate and she could not go to any movie that they found to be “morally objectionable.” In this issue of The Advocate, they found the following movies “morally objectionable in part for everyone”: Some Like it Hot, Where the Boys Are? and From Russia with Love. LOL
[2] Ibid.
[3] Carol’s mother passed away when we were still in grade or high school and her dad married a woman with twelve children. Yikes.
[4] Growing up in Maplewood, I lived on Harvard Avenue and Bowdoin Street in an area where all the streets were named for colleges or universities. We also had Rutgers, Colgate, and Wellesley.
[5] “News and Events: A Century of Serving God,” Benedictine Sisters, Elizabeth, New Jersey, St. Walburga Monastery (https://www.bensisnj.org/news-and-events : accessed 3 February 2021).
[6] Richard Khavkine, “Maplewood’s St. Joseph school to close after all,” NJ.com, 23 June 2010 (https://www.nj.com/news/local/2010/06/maplewoods_st_joseph_school_to.html : accessed 3 February 2021).
[7] Ibid.
[8] “At St. Joe’s in Maplewood, Catholic Parishioners ‘Affirm Black Lives Matter,’” The Village Green, 7 August 2020 (https://villagegreennj.com/community/at-st-joes-in-maplewood-catholic-parishioners-affirm-black-lives-matter/ : accessed 3 February 2021).
[9] Workers4Justice Ministry, “St. Joseph’s Workers4Justice Affirm that Black Lives Matter,” St. Joseph’s Church, 5 August 2020 (https://www.sjcmaplewoodnj.org/catholic-call-to-antiracism-work.html?fbclid=IwAR1LD-_YQA9I8kLF8aijeTbjDDo6Y0oBxHwcbtK5U-Zyz12n__JgZKnTTOc : accessed 3 February 2021).
