Utica Catholic Academy

[Dave]

I attended UCA from the fall of 1957 until the spring of 1960 when it closed. I graduated from Notre Dame H.S. the following year along with other boys from UCA and St. Francis high schools.

I never knew the following. (From an AOH site.)

John C. Devereux - The Catholic



John C. Devereux was the pioneer in the movement to establish the first Roman Catholic Church West of Albany, and the fourth in New York State. Through his efforts, Father Michael O'Gorman came to Utica and on January 10, 1819 said mass in the old Court House and Academy on Chancellor Square. On January 25th, 1819 a meeting was held in the home of Devereux and "the first Catholic Church in the Western Districk of New York" was incorporated. Father Farnam became the first pastor and his residence was a small wooded house on the East side of the quare. John and Nicholas Devereux donated $1, 125 to start the church. Also, in 1830 John C. Devereux donated a piece of property on upper Steuben Street to St. John's Church to be the first Catholic Cemetery. In the year 1834, John C Devereux and his brother requested the Sisters of Charity to conduct a Catholic orphanage and day school in Utica. As a result, three Sisters were sent from the Mother House at Emmitsburg, Maryland. Tradition has it that they arrived, with their scant belongings, by canal boat on May 1st, 1834. The Sisters were lodged in Devereux's home on Broad Street until the first building could be completed for their use. Each of the Devereux brothers contributed $5000.00 and they opened the first orphanage in a small frame dwelling house in the center of the lot just South of St. John's Church on John Street. In December of that year, three children were received in the small story and a half house, which number soon increased to eight. John C. Devereux, a kindhearted man, a lover of children although he had none of his own, visited the orphanage daily. The institution was incorporated in 1848. A day school, the predecessor of Utica Catholic Academy, was opened a short time later in an adjourning building on Burnet Street 4.

(I do think a more colorful "nuns arriving" story is that of the group of nuns who journeyed up from New York City one snowy day in the 1880's to Rhinecliff Station on the Hudson River. Bound for Saugerties about a mile across the frozen river, where they were to begin teaching at the new parish school of St. Mary of the Snows, the women were told to their surprise that no boats plied the waters in winter (back then.) They were informed people crossed regularly by walking over the ice. Paying a young boy to be their guide, they began the tramp toward the church they could barely see .... until the building disappeared when they were half way across as it began to snow. The young lad seemed not to be intimidated by the weather, but the women were by then near hysteria. Shots began to ring out, but the boy said to not be afraid, it wasn't guns they were hearing, but only the ice cracking, a normal occurrence as the swift running Hudson burrowed under their road of ice. Happens all the time, he told them. Not to worry.
They made it across and took the boy to dinner with them before sending him back across the ice.)

[Dave]

Back in the late 1950's, I would grab the window pole and push up one of the 8 or 10 foot high windows for some fresh air in the Chemistry Lab/Classroom on the third floor of UCA. Over our little front yard of grass and beyond the statue of "Mary we crown thee with flowers today," could be seen a gas station and parking lot. I think the rather large building also held parked cars, among other things. Most people down on the sidewalk probably never looked up far enough, but from the top floor of the school across the street I noticed that the roof of the gas station/parking lot was of classic Greek design, the pediment roof sloping upward at the precise angle of a bisected Golden Rectangle of 5 by 8 proportion. And so I assumed the original purpose of the structure was no doubt something more dramatic than a place to park cars.
I believe I was looking at the roof of the former Oneida County Court House, called locally the John St. Court House, and the forebear of the Court House we're all familiar with on Elizabeth Street, the latter built in 1908. The Oneida County Historical Society's web page featuring the building says the old court house was on John St. in front of the old Academy, and I assume that was the Academy known as the Free Academy that would eventually move to Elm St. and become UFA. South of the court house on the corner of Elizabeth was the Catholic Assumption Academy.




From OCHS's page:

www.oneidacountyhistory.org/Landmarks/CourtHouses/CourtHouse.asp

[Dave]

Has to be the court house that I saw. Here's the Utica map from 1883. The orphanage was torn down long before I arrived at UCA in the fall of 1957. The old Catholic elementary school (graduates continued at Assumption Academy) became UCA.

(Note also the UFD's Engine No. 2 station directly across from St. John's. It moved to the new Central Fire Station on Elizabeth St. when built in 1915, plus or minus a couple of years.)

[Dave]

I definitely remember standing in the window marked on the photo, below. (Of course, today the building is gone. The story that floated around was the building had been condemned by the UFD before I got there, and I think there was some truth to it. UCA had no modern amenities. Not even an automatic bell to signal the change in classes. A wide-awake Junior boy who owned a watch was chosen each year to run out of class a few minutes before the end and go to the second floor and press a doorbell button to ring us to the next class... six or seven times each day.)

[Dave]

I haven't done the research yet .... maybe tonight ... but at some point in time what was known as St. John's school became Utica Catholic Academy.

Here's the class of 1921, a bit more than a dozen graduates. The photo quality doesn't allow us to determine if UCA was a girls school when it opened or if it was co-ed. It was certainly co-ed in my memory while we were on John St., becoming all-girl in 1960 when it moved up to the old orphanage on Genesee St. in South Utica.

[Dave]

Click to enlarge.






This would not be the first time I felt Monsignor Dooling was a bit out of touch. I'm not saying he was wrong; in fact, if I had taken his advice seriously I probably would have been the better for it. As I began to read the article I thought, "I must have been there, but I don't remember this particular homily/lecture." And for good reason, it turns out. How he addressed the students and parents on a Sunday morning is beyond me. We were always directed to attend our home parish church, so only the few students who lived in St. John's parish would have been there to hear Msgr. Dooling. Probably his "decree" was read to us the next day by the nuns.

Dooling always appeared to me as very old and a little dotty. Maybe more than a little. We hardly ever saw him in the school. I was surprised the article listed him as the Principal. We called Sister Adele the principal during my three years at UCA. She would have corrected us if she was not.

In fact, I did begin to attend St. John's on Sunday mornings as I reached my Junior year and was able to borrow the family car. By then I had tired terrifically of the newly built Blessed Sacrament Church and its post-modern statuary that made you wonder if you really wanted to go to heaven and be with such strange looking saints and angels, all with huge eyes and facial expressions more appropriate to Purgatory than a Kingdom within the pearly gates. Ten years later when Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" became popular, I always thought of those statues when I heard the song on the radio. That's exactly what St. Joseph and Mary seemed to be saying as they hung there on the wall in somebody else's heaven.

And Blessed Sacrament's pastor ... or Supreme Commander as he evidently thought himself ... who turned off the heat one Sunday after the annual heat collection when he felt we had not donated enough. The man had his problems, to be sure. He built the new B.S. church ... which some liked, though not me ... and threatened one morning from the pulpit to take people to court if they were late making good on their pledges.

Speaking of graven images, the Dog Nativity Set is one of ten items listed in the article, "20 Tacky Religious Products Guaranteed to Anger God,"

at:

www.cracked.com/article_15899_20-tacky-religious-products-guaranteed-to-anger-god.html

[Dave]

For me, before there was UCA, there was Our Lady of Lourdes, as well as Blessed Sacrament.

I‘ve been known to cringe when I hear friends speak of their so-called recovery from Catholicism, or how they survived the nuns for eight or twelve years of Catholic schools. And while I join in the merriment of making fun of all the characters … the irritable nuns and crusty old priests … I remember most of these unsung workers in the vineyard as selfless and caring, but yes, sometimes pissy and arrogant. And I realize that I saw these men and women through the eyes of a child, as I also saw much of the patently ridiculous religiosity some of them tried to teach us.

I still see fellow hostages from time to time who were interned with me at Our Lady of Lourdes School in South Utica during the Cold War. Ike was president, Senator McCarthy was constantly in the news and the nuns were holding us prisoners at O.L.O.L. In truth, I have good memories of the school, but every time I hear its name, one thought comes to mind. Our Lady of Lourdes was hard to say with your mouth full.

O.L.O.L was the school’s abbreviation, of course, but it was also the sound that came out when you tried to say Our Lady of Lourdes around a baloney sandwich stuck to the roof of your mouth. That’s all I remember learning on the first day of fourth grade, which began when I was dropped off by my uncle and wished the best of luck in my new school. Uncle Dan said he’d be back at 3 o’clock to get me, but I hoped he’d be off the streets by then, napping the afternoon away after a few hours standing at the bar through brunch and then lunch at the Uptown Grille, located ten blocks away. I’m sure it was difficult for my mother to allow Uncle Dan to take me to my first day in a new school, but Dad was at work and Mom was still sick with the flu.
In any event, it was good be home, back in a Catholic school. True, I was a little bigot, a prissy Catholic militant in the making perhaps, but I felt like I had just been delivered from Purgatory.

Three months earlier, in the fall of 1952, Dad had the bright idea of becoming a homeowner. No one in our family ever had the money to buy a home. But now that wages were rising after the war, a smart real estate developer named Buzzy Cranston lined up a few local banks to offer mortgages with low down payments. Buzzy, who the year before had been a refrigerator salesman, bought a farmed out rocky field halfway between New York Mills and East Podunk, where he erected tiny prefabricated ranch houses on slabs of concrete. After our inspection of the sales model, my mother wondered if the dwarf house would be large enough, since Grandma had recently come to live with us.
“We’ll have to put all three boys in one bedroom,” she said.

“They’ll fit,” said my father.

“Grandma will have to take the tiny room,” she said. “She’ll have to get rid of some furniture.”

“I’ll help,” said my father.

[Dave]

Dad’s enthusiasm was unquenchable.

“We can’t lose,” he told Mom. “Buzzy will take it back in 90 days if we don’t like it, “ he said. “That’s the deal.”

“I think I’d like it,” said Mom.
“What’s not to like?” said Dad

Well, to begin with, Pine Nut Circle, our new neighborhood, might be styled country living in the whimsical brochure, but it more closely resembled camping. If you fired a rocket from the middle of the housing development to any point on the compass, the payload would come down somewhere in the vast countryside populated only by cows and people who made their living raising them. On our first visit, I saw only one car on the narrow lane during the last mile or two of the trip. After what took forever, Dad pulled the Ford off into the grass and came to a stop, cheerily calling, “We’re here.” Out the window we could see a handful of half built houses in a hay field. Mechanical monsters hissed and groaned down a muddy path Buzzy had named “Monticello Avenue,” Mounds of dirt and mud were being heaved up as if in readiness for a replay of trench warfare.

Grandma crawled out of the back seat, looked around and began to mumble to herself. She would later describe the scene to her cousin Mabel as “what it must be like living on the face of the moon … in February."

Everyone was excited about the move but me and Grandma. I liked my neighborhood and enjoyed walking to school in the morning, sitting in my miniscule garden in the spring and enjoying all the conveniences of living in the Cornhill section of the city. Plus, I’d miss the little girl in my class at Blessed Sacrament School who sat in the fourth desk back in the third row. At age nine, I could depend only on my feelings to tell me this move would come to no good, but I also had Grandma’s opinion to go by. And for all her peculiarities, when it came to disasters most of the time the old woman called the ball in the right pocket.

Life on Pine Nut Circle turned out to be very different from city living. For one thing, no public transportation ever came out our way. And there was no mail delivery. Letters and packages could be picked up only at the Post Office in the village before the 5:00 p.m. closing time. Dad didn’t get out of work in Utica until after five, so we got our mail only when we could pick it up on Saturday, a full week’s worth. I remember the extra wait for a secret decoder ring to arrive. It wrote underwater and I mailed away for it using the coupon cut from the back of a corn flakes box.

The promised garbage removal never materialized, either, and instead the men in the neighborhood all met together on Saturday morning to pick up everyone’s refuse, drink beer, haul the garbage to the dump in someone’s open trailer, drink more beer, come home acting silly and take naps. The womenfolk turned surly by Saturday evening.

[Dave]

As autumn came upon us, it was apparent the little furnace was too small for the little house. It was a high efficiency unit, we were told, and you couldn’t get warm standing near it like the old octopus coal furnace back in Utica. Turns out you also couldn’t get warm cranking the thermostat up to a hundred. I didn’t mind sitting around on cold evenings wearing two sweaters while watching television, but to read a book I had to take my hands out of my pockets and wear gloves. Had we been back in the city with a broken furnace, we would have found excuses to visit neighbors or relatives and take advantage of the free heat. But on Pine Nut Circle, a warm room wouldn’t occur again until July.

Dad took us out to the movies a few times to get warm, but funds were scarce and he couldn’t keep that up. Besides, Grandma was always a problem at the theater. She would sit tsk’ing or crying or laughing uproariously when she thought something was funny that no one else in the theater found amusing. An entire platoon of U.S. Marines being wiped out at Guadalcanal would somehow tickle her funny bone when the sergeant barked out an order with a southern accent.

We were all sorry she went with us to see the movie "Destination Moon." Very impressionable, the old woman believed just about everything she saw on the silver screen. All the way home after the movie, she could be heard in the back seat muttering, "How could they just leave him behind there on the moon? There's nothing to eat!" And after she saw “The Sands of Iwo Jima” she had wanted to buy War Bonds, even though it was six years after the war ended.

Once winter set in on our windswept prairie … the last week in September … life took on the flavor of a snow-bound military base, just like the one in the 1950’s classic film Ice Station Zebra. Trying to scare my 4 year old little brother, my main form of amusement at the time, I told him to never walk near the edge of the ice pack or he’d be lost forever in the Artic Sea. When he refused to go outside the next morning and told my mother why, I was labeled a troublemaker and would have been sent to my room, but I didn’t have one. I shared a bedroom with my older brother and he’d just negotiated a hour for himself in there to play his Les Paul and Don Cornell records on the small phonograph we shared.

[Dave]

In the village, my brothers and I marched into a large brick school building and were ushered into the office of a man who wore a three piece suit that had evidently been serving him well since before the war. Calling himself The Principal, Mr. Welby seemed about as interested in our arrival as he might have been had a toboggan salesman dropped by. We were about to have a personal encounter with the unholy, the profane world of non-Catholics known as Public Schools. Attendance at this institution mounted a terrific assault on my long held philosophy that a basic goodness pervaded the world and the people in it. Life as a sheltered Catholic boy came crashing to an end.

My school mates swore in public and told dirty jokes within 5 miles of the school grounds. They were disrespectful to the teachers. Had they tried any of their antics on the nuns back home at Blessed Sacrament, they would have landed in an orthopedic ward. Many of my new mates didn’t even care about their schoolwork, nor how well they did on tests and quizzes. When I explained to a classmate that the “J.M.J” I had written at the top of my test paper stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph and invoked their blessing on my work, she looked at me as though I was a member of a cult. Now that I think of it, the Irish schoolboy version of American Catholicism in the 1950’s was nothing if not a cult.

Back at Ice Station Zebra, isolation continued to flank us. Once Dad left for work each morning in the family car, we were all marooned for the next 9 hours if school wasn’t in session. On school days, which began to feel like holidays, the arrival of the school bus in the morning was greeted like a long awaited Coast Guard cutter steaming up to rescue drowning sailors. Housewives and live-in grandmothers bribed the bus driver to take them into town along with the kids. But I hated that damned bus, so full of raucous children that it gave me a headache.

[Dave]

Halfway through the winter, Dad was becoming disenchanted with our new home on a frozen slab of concrete, ten miles from Utica and seemingly not too far south of Iceland. The tiny ranch house was indeed small, and didn’t easily accommodate 3 adults and 3 growing boys. Outside among the still heaped up mounds of dirt, most of the folks living around the circle seemed strange and secretive. Grandma had begun to keep a list of suspicious neighbors for Senator McCarthy, who she wrote to monthly.

Myself, I missed Italians. They had constituted half the population of the neighborhood we had forsaken in Utica. For some reason, they were not well represented out here on the tundra. Oh, for those golden warm days on Cornhill, with the smell of tomato sauce cooking, black olives on a plate spattered with oil, vino flowing across festive tables at the Villa Restaurant on Leah St and down on Taylor Avenue at Audette’s Ristorante. Lovers sang O Sole Mio and Italian smiles lived on the faces of everyone, no matter what their nationality. Just to see the vegetable man sleeping in his horse drawn wagon or the rag man singing his way up from Eagle St. Or to hear Mrs. Nicotera lean out from her house and scream at her 7 children playing in the street, finally sighing aloud, “Ooo fah!” and slamming down the window. I couldn’t imagine that Tuscany was any better.

But I put on a happy face and braved the rigors of a future on the ice. At least we had new surroundings to explore. On weekends, all the neighborhood kids would walk up the road searching for igloos and polar bears.

[Dave]

Well, in 1918 UCA was a girls school. Here's the graduation announcement in the Utica Herald Dispatch. Tough to read, but worth it for the family names you might recognize.

Click to enlarge. Firefox users click twice.

[Dave]

Here's a very interesting piece from the June 20, 1905 Utica Herald Dispatch about that year's UCA graduation. I'll let you ruin your eyes scanning the top part for familiar family names. Below, I've transcribed the important part of the article, so you can save on eyestrain.

CLick to enlarge. firefox users click twice.






The second half of the article quotes the remarks the school's leader, Monsignor Lynch, made to the graduates and guests. It explains that in 1905 UCA was the overall name for both the girls' school and the boys' Assumption Academy, right up the street on the northeast corner of John and Elizabeth. Monsignor doesn't say, but I believe the girls attended classes in the old St. John's school building next to the church, the building where I attended classes from 1957 to 1960 in what was then a co-ed UCA. My father went to St. John's school from about 1916 to 1924, and I think it's true that the building held BOTH the elementary boys and girls and the high school girls, with the high school boys attending up the street at Assumption.

The Herald Dispatch reporter writes:

In addressing the graduates, Monsignor Lynch said: "Let me say a few words about the school. Let me remind you that the Utica Catholic Academy is composed of two parts, that grand old Assumption Academy, the other the girls' part that dates back about 70 years. These two schools have been united under the name of the Utica Catholic Academy and has received a charter from the regents. Our graduates are few because the standard is so high. It is a real academy with from 125 to 130 students and we might call it the Utica free academy because it is practically free. The education is almost nominally free, exacting only a small fee. It might be well to ask why there is a Utica Catholic Academy, why there are 100 people who just have a school of their own. Where does its support come from? From the church, as it receives none from the State or the city. We find no fault with the others if they want these other schools, let them have them. But we want this kind and are willing to pay for it. Why do not these boys and girls of the Utica Catholic Academy go to the Utica Free Academy? don't we pay our share of the taxes supporting that academy? There is one reason - because we do believe our young ladies and young men should be educated in separate schools during their academic course. Maybe not all of you agree with me, but it is the history of the Catholic Church that has extended over 2,000 years that teaches they should be separated. We also believe that these girls should be taught by women and not men, that they can be polished and cultivated by woman teachers in a way they could not with men. We believe they should be taught by consecrated women, that they should be trained to virtue. We do not believe that the only thought in their academic course should be to train them to get some rich husband. We teach them higher motives than that, that the marriage state is not the highest. And we believe that in the academism of the State the society features are too highly exercised. We do not believe that in the course there should be dances, balls and parties lasting until 3 o'clock in the morning. The taxpayers do not wish to pay for it. The schools should stick to their purposes and that is one of the reasons why we have our own school.

"The Catholic religion teaches to withhold approval from schools where religion is not taught. We therefore do not approve of the other schools because the constitution and laws of the State forbid the teaching of religion in them and they are almost pagan. I have read many addresses delivered to graduates in the last two weeks and all were filled with advice - furthering worldly ends. You graduates should remember that your life belongs to God; find out what He purposes you to do."



A couple of thoughts: I'd like a citation for " The Catholic religion teaches to withhold approval from schools where religion is not taught." I don't think I've ever seen that teaching. Also, the clericalism in the following statement is apparent: " We teach them higher motives than that, that the marriage state is not the highest."

Also: "… it is the history of the Catholic Church that has extended over 2,000 years that teaches they (men and women) should be separated." Actually, historically men and women have existed side by side in many Catholic institutions. Some medieval monasteries were set up for both men and women. And although the Church was never one to turn a blind eye on sexual indiscretion, it's only in the past 200 years that a general hysteria has set in regarding sex.

[Dave]

Here's more UCA history from a 1951 Daily Press article. Assuming the reporter got his facts straight, the name Utica Catholic Academy dates to 1848 when the Devereux brothers had the school incorporated under that name.

And the third floor some of us remember so well (two classrooms and the auditorium and stage) was an addition made to the building in 1880.

The article says the orphanage moved in 1912 to South Utica, but doesn't mention when the building was torn down.

The reporter says that UCA was a girls' school until Monsignor Dooling rennovated the place in 1938 and opened it to both boys and girls. In 1905 Msgr. Lynce said UCA was a name covering both Assumption and the girls high school, so I assume after the demise of Assumption Academy for boys ... and I don't yet know when that occurred ... UCA remained for girls until 1938. And of course, UCA became a girl's school again in 1960 when the school moved without the boys to the same building the orphanage had moved to in 1912.

By the way, this article comes from a 1951 Daily Press special page on Catholic Schools in Utica.
A facsimile appears below, and if you want to have a readable copy, send me a note and I'll email you a pdf of the full page. [e-mail]


CLick to enlarge.

[Dave]

Here's a personality from the past. Shorty Powers was the basketball coach at UCA as far back as I can remember.

The article is about a new St. Francis boys basketball team in 1974. That surprised me because after the the boys from both UCA and St. Francis went on to inaugurate Notre Dame H.S. in 1960, and the UCA girls continued their school's name in South Utica at the old St. John's/St. Joseph orphanage, and the St. Francis girls remained behind on Eagle and Genesee St. to form an all girls school ... after that St. Francis again opened their doors to boys? Seems odd, especially in view of Notre Dame already filling the need.

Here's the article. It's readable, if you click the article to enlarge. Firefox users click twice.