The sisters or nuns lived together in a house called a convent. this one was separated from the school on Garfield street by an alley to know where. The main purpose of the alley was if you earned detention(an hour, after school, and if you lived where I did, a mile walk home.)I once asked a nun if she and the other nuns lived in a "nunnery?" Which, I found out later from William Shakespeare(get thee to a nunnery) was a house of prostitution. OK, a whore house. My question did not go over very well. I can't remember what religious "order" my nuns followed, like sisters of St. Francis, who today own billions of dollars in hospitals. Anyway, back then, they were the old school of dress: the only parts of their bodies that were visible was the front of the face, and the hands. Everything else was covered in black with a large white, starched bib, to play down their femininity. Also a tall white, starched cap to hold up and in place, their veil. Back to detention: clean and wash all the black(chalk)boards, then take the erasers in a big bucket to the alley, where 2 at a time, were clapped together until they looked clean and new. Didn't they ever hear of child labor laws? What was embarrassing was the back yard of the convent, which was strung with clothes line and all their washed clothes were hung up to dry. Just what a young boy wants to see: row after row of the sisters underwear. A least if you got detention on laundry day, and the wind was blowing just right, you could make the whites whiter by adding chalk dust to them!
Most of the nuns were always mean, frustrated, and they never died: they just looked 80 all the time. They would have felt a lot better and be kinder if they occasionally went to the bar, found a man and got drunk. Almost all changed their first name(and last) to "Mary" Like sister Mary Francis, etc. Physical punishment was justified. The principal, who we called Sister Mary Bear-she was about as big as a grizzly. Needed a paddle. Since our school was small, once a week, the boys would walk over to the public school for mechanical drawling and wood shop. Don't know where or what the girls were doing during this time-probably home economics. The Bear drew out dimensions for a custom made paddle, for which she asked the shop director to make for her. He did. The paddle was about the size of a keyboard with a 1" square 5" long handle . the body of the paddle was tapered and had 31 quarter inch holes-a real work of art that the sadistic nuns relished. No air resistance, just pure , delivered, pain. So, what do you, as law abiding kids gona do? Simple. We stole it from the Bear's office. When she noticed the delightful theft, she turned on the intercom and delivered one of the best, "you are going to burn in hell," sermons. And at weekly confessions every Thursday over at the church, we were ordered to confess our dirty deed. So we did, to avoid the heat thing that Dante wrote about. The priest laughed out loud. Ordered us to return it and then make a good "act of contrition," plus say 3 hail Mary's, a glory be, and an "Our Father," sequence of rote catholic prayers This would officially redeem us.
One big problem" while in our possession, we decided it would look more like a nice piece of furniture if we varnished it. Which we probably did in my dad's boat shop. When Sister Mary Bear saw it's beautiful finish:), she got mad as hell, pun intended, and demanded we sand it all off. One problem: we could not get all of the varnish from the 31 hole's and the paddle was not even worthy to collect dust on a Goodwill store shelf,it was so ugly. School layout next time but a closing side note: In wood shop, we found scraps of oak a little smaller than a man's wallet, to which we would use the drill press and make our own set of brass knuckles-out of oak. Each boy (when the teacher was in the next room) made a set of two-one for each back pocket. Let her paddle away! We now could feel nothing! But the clapping sound made the executioner curious. When the Bear discovered the wood pieces, she became so enraged that she threw the paddle at the boy as he fled. It hit the wall, not his head, because he ducked. It broke in half making it useless as a tool of pain. By the way, when someone was called into the office to be paddled (unless it was in front of the class) the Bear would turn the intercom way loud for all of us to hear her whack away. Also, the kid who ducked was Thomas Themmons. Our class president. As a little kid, he was always playing in the dirt, so everyone called him by his nick name and not Tom. His nickname was the"N" word. We meant no disrespect, it's just the way it was. Back then. No one thought anything of it; after all, the "N" word was from the Latin, meaning, black. And every Catholic school kid studied Latin, for years. And read and sung music in Latin in church. No big deal. We were just practicing our lessons....
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