Tag Archives: Catholic High School

Saint Mary Of The Angels Academy 1965-1969

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Saint Mary of The Angels Academy

My first memory of St. Mary’s was getting measured for the school uniform. I couldn’t get away from wearing uniforms. I wore a different uniform in Catholic Elementary School. But, on the upside, I wasn’t wearing hand-me-downs anymore. The first year I attended St. Mary of the Angels Academy, a private, Catholic, all-girl high school in Haddonfield, NJ, was the Fall of 1965. I spent my freshman year going to high school in a house that used to be a boarding school for rich girls. It was a Victorian house on King’s Highway in Haddonfield—a town where wealthy people lived.

The house was Victorian. It had winding staircases, bathrooms with claw-footed tubs, and fireplaces in the classrooms. It was a unique experience. About 200 female students attended the school. Most were from well-to-do families in Southern, NJ, which included Haddonfield.

My dear mother is the kindest person I was lucky enough to have for a mother.

My family was not wealthy. My father worked for Septa, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, as the district manager for over thirty years. My father took a second mortgage out on our house so we could attend St. Mary’s. I believe my mother wanted to keep us away from the boys.

I became even shyer and avoided boys altogether—however, the rest of the SMAA (ST. Mary of the Angels Academy and most of the rest of the student population were obsessed with boys. Spending endless hours discussing how to meet boys, kiss boys, etc. It was the sixtie,s make love, not war generation.

I had an “elite” group of friends: Christine Conn, Mary Beth Elliot, Delores O’Hearn, Anne Marie Rafferty, and Janice Short(who left after Freshman year. My sister, Karen, had her own friends, a more popular group. I spent most of my time at SMAA complaining about the nuns trying to avoid taking showers and going to the gym.

When I entered 10th grade, the house (school) was demolished and knocked down, and a vast new school was erected, state-of-the-art for that time period. But it certainly lacked the charm of attending school in a Victorian house with chandeliers. I did not excel in school as I lacked confidence in my intelligence. As I had spent my childhood hearing from my father that he didn’t know if I was lazy or just plain stupid. Karen probably did better, but probably would have done much better if she hadn’t procrastinated and spent so much time avoiding her school work. Let’s say that both Karen and I did not livie up to our potential.

The nuns(or sisters, as we called them) who taught the students were Franciscan, which was a difficult job. Their highest concerns at the time seemed to be keeping everyone’s hair out of their eyes and making sure the tuition was paid on time. This concern became more understandable when the school went bankrupt the year after we graduated.

It is difficult for me to remember the good times. I can’t really say that high school was an enjoyable experience for me. Although I had my own group of friends, I wasn’t really accepted into the general population of the school. I was shy and had a somewhat offbeat sense of humor, and I was received differently than most kids my age. I never experimented with drugs or alcohol, as some kids my age were doing.

My life at home stayed pretty much the same. All my siblings were out of the house except for my twin, Karen. My siblings had all married and had families of their own. My parents got along by having very little conversation at all. My father continued to work for SEPTA until he was 62, and then he retired. My mother worked at Wanamaker’s as a cook in the employees’ kitchen until my senior year of high school. I believe she was fifty-nine at the time. She worked hard all her life for our family and never even whispered a word of complaint. I often wondered how much happiness she experienced in her life. I fear precious little at all.

There was a great deal of turmoil politically at that time, 1969. The war in Vietnam was in full force. Many of my grade school friends (boys) were drafted. Many did not return alive or were permanently altered. There was a great deal of drug experimentation going on at the same time. I was not a participant in any of it.

My senior year of high school, I was offerend a full-time job at Dr. E.G. Wozniak, a local dentist I Oaklyn, New Jersey. I was offered a job at his dental office as a dental assistant and receptionist. I stayed there until I was twenty-one. I had a quiet life. When I was twenty-one, I met a boy through my brother-in-law, David Gatelein. He was about one year older than I. He gave me my first kiss—no big thrill. But I had little knowledge of sex. And my first experience with him was not great. Probably, because I hadn’t formed any real attachment to him, it turned out that David, though a nice looking boy was pretty screwed up. He had spent three years in Vietnam. He was given a dishonorable discharge because he attempted to “frag” (kill) his commanding officer. He dumped me like a bad habit. And I was deeply hurt by the whole thing. It took me a long time to get over it. But, eventually, I did. It turned out that he was an alcoholic, and once I found that out, I stopped talking to him. And that was the end of that.

After I quit Dr. Wozniak, I got a job at Ancora State Mental Hospital through my brother, Harry, who had worked there at one point as a psychologist. I was trained as a nurse’s aide with females in the active psyche ward. I had hoped to work with emotionally disturbed children. It didn’t last long, and it was a very bad experience.I only stayed at Ancora for a year.

Then I found a job working for the Ellis Brothers, who sold high-risk Auto Insurance. It was not a difficult job, and for the most part, I enjoyed working there because the Ellis Brothers didn’t have very strong work ethics and often wanted to go out and do something fun, including going out to breakfast every workday. And they paid.

In early 1972, my best friend Joanie set up a date with her first cousin Bob Culver, who had just left the Navy. I had a crush on him since I was about ten years old. That was the beginning of a whole new chapter of my life, which will be published next week.

 

GROWING UP CATHOLIC IN THE 1950’S AND 1960’S

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     I was born in 1951; I have a fraternal twin sister. We came from a large Irish Catholic family, of which my twin sister and I were the youngest. I had four older siblings. My brother, Hugh, was twenty years older than me, and my eldest sister, Jeanette, was nineteen. My sister Eileen was eight years older than me, and my sister Elizabeth was seven years older. My mother gave birth to my twin brother several years after my twin Karen and I. Unfortunately, they were premature and didn’t survive. When I was in my late teens, my mother and father took me to the cemetery where my younger brothers were buried. I hadn’t been told about them before, and I was upset to find out my little brothers had passed away.

It wasn’t unusual for children of my generation from Catholic homes to have large families. I do not know whether this was by choice or because no birth control adequately protected mothers in those early years from unplanned or unwanted pregnancies.

My mother in the 1950’s.

However, I didn’t feel out of place since I lived in a neighborhood where most of the families were large. My parents were married in 1929, which explains why there was such a lengthy age gab between my older siblings and my twin and I. We were born in 1951, during a time when we were referred to as the Baby Boomers. After the war, there was tremendous growth in the birth of children and larger families, so large communities were formed, and small towns grew and expanded.

When I was old enough to attend elementary school in 1958, there were over sixty students in my class and three first-grade classes. My teacher was a Sister John Michael, she belonged to the Sister’s of St. Joseph. And let me tell you, she ran that first-grade class with its sixty-plus students like we were in the military. The classrooms were overcrowded and stifling in the warmer months and cold in the winter. When I was in the third grade, my classroom was situated right next to the boiler room. And let me tell you, it was hot as hell. It wasn’t easy to concentrate when you felt like you were going to pass out at any moment.

House I grew up in.

Our home in the early 1950s in Maple Shade, NJ.

In addition, since all the classrooms were overcrowded, everything was routine. We have an assigned time to go to the bathroom, and woe is the child who had problems with holding it in or intestinal issues. I was one of those unfortunate children. One day, I kept raising my hand because I had to go to the bathroom. Dear Sister John Michael ignored me as usual. So, on that particular day, I was in distress, to say the least. I was called up to the front of the class to work out a problem on the blackboard; I tried to explain to Sister John Michael that I had to go. But she ignored me completely, so while I was trying to complete the math problem, I had an accident and peed my pants. I forgot to mention that Catholic School Uniforms were made of heavy wool: winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall. As I stood in my puddle, all the students laughed as they observed my accident. Sister John Michael smacked me hard, and yelled at me in front of the whole class. I tried not to cry, which would only call more attention to myself, and Sister John Michael told me to go to the girl’s laboratory and clean myself up. When the lunch bell rang. I was the first one in line. Students living nearby were allowed to go home for lunch and then return to school to finish the day off.

When I arrived home for lunch, we lived only two houses away from the school, and my mother could see I was crying. It took a while for my mother to get me to tell her what happened in school. She said she was going up to the school and giving Sister John Michael a piece of her mind. My mother rarely lost her temper or raised her voice, so I kept begging her not to go to school since I believed Sister John Michael would be angry if my mother criticized her for anything.

After that unfortunate event, I refused to drink anything at breakfast before I went to school. Since, I couldn’t bare a repeat of the previous event. Although this must seem such a meaningless event that was soon forgotten, I can tell you I never forgot it, Or I wouldn’t be able to tell you about this unfortunate event. The nuns left their mark on me for sure; that made a big impression. By the luck of the Irish, my third-grade teacher was a lay female teacher, whose name was Miss Norris, and she turned out to be the polar opposite of the “dear nuns” that I had up to that point in my academic career. Under her tutelage, I bloomed. She never yelled at the students, called them stupid, or smacked the student’s palms with metal-edged rulers. She was calm and never said a harsh word Or called any student a mean name. As a result, the classroom and the students in it maintained themselves and didn’t fight, argue, or carry on.

As for me, I began feeling more confident in myself and my ability to do better in school. I opened up to the other students and made many friends during that year and the ensuing years through eighth grade. At this point, the students in the eighth grade, which included me, had to decide what Catholic high school we wanted to attend. We all had to take entrance exams before we were accepted into High School. By some miracle, I passed both exams and was accepted into both Catholic High Schools. My parents decided for my sister and me to attend Saint Mary of the Angel’s Academy, which coincidentally was an all-girl high school and was located in Haddonfield, New Jersey and was a town where most of the residents were wealthy, which was a whole different environment from Maple Shade where I lived. There weren’t wealthy people living there. My parents struggled to have their children attend private Catholic Schools.

St. Mary of the Angel’s Academy was a different kettle of fish from Our Lady Of Perpetual Elementary School. Everyone in Maple Shade was working, living in smaller homes, and not having much money. Most parents both worked full-time. My mother worked and cared for the house, as did my siblings and me. I never heard a word of complaint from her, not ever. My mother was the kindest, most decent woman I ever knew. I feel blessed to have such a wonderful mother. My father worked hard and often had two jobs to make ends meet. I feel blessed that I had two such wonderful souls for my parents. I never went without. We had homemade dinners every night of the week. And there was always food in the fridge. I never lacked anything. We had all our needs met throughout my childhood and my adolescence.

St. Mary of the Angel’s Academy- All girl highschool

When I graduated from St. Mary of the Angel’s Academy, I found employment at a dentist’s office in Haddon Township, New Jersey. I had no experience working in an office, let alone a dentist’s office, but Dr. Wozniak trained me. His office was part of his house. And so I came t know his decent and kind wife, Connie. I worked there for five years until I met my now husband when he was visiting his cousins in New Jersey. He was living in Florida. And that, my friends, is a whole new story about my experiences living in Florida and then, later, California.