Utica Catholic Academy

[Dave]

At Lourdes, I quickly became lost in an ocean of children. Fourth grade teacher Sister Clementia managed 56 children in a classroom built for 26. That’s not a typo; fruitful Catholic parents, heeding their Church, were hard at it procreating in those years and the schools were bursting at the seams. Mothers were worn out and fathers worried about money, but the Bishops were evidently happy.

Up until I lost it years ago, I had a photo of our fourth grade class, Sister Clementia sitting up front near the camera and myself way back on the horizon of the fifth row, my finger just coming out of my nose. The nun looks pensive as she sits there under a huge Flying Nun hat called the Cornet, dressed in a cute little French outfit from the 15th century. She may be wondering if a jungle outpost in Borneo would be more to her liking than bronco-busting tens of boys and girls each day.

I think the photo may have been taken on a Tuesday, and if it was the third Tuesday morning of the month, Father Fudzniak, who absolutely hated children and cared even less for nuns, was probably then walking from the rectory over to the school to preach at us. Without asking, Father always chose his topic with no regard to what we were studying in our Religion lessons. He might lecture us nine year olds on the evils of birth control or he might summarize the major points of the Third Lateran Council, which took place about two hundred years before Sister Clementia's clothes were designed. Father Fuddy was an overly serious man, having lost his sense of humor in the war while assigned to an outpost in Borneo.

Still, I was relieved to be back in a more militarily crisp environment where the order of the day was set by the nuns rather than the ping-pong precepts of modern child psychology. Little man that I was, I appreciated someone being in control. Whatever weapons were used …. rulers or blackboard pointers or “the back of me hand”….. it didn’t matter to me. What did matter was a predictable environment I could enjoy for six hours each weekday.

NEXT: Conclusion of "Nowhere"

[Dave]

Here's an article from 1966 that gave me a chuckle when I read the paragraph about UCA's new biology lab and remembered what we had to work with in the old UCA building prior to 1960.

Not much. Sister Mary Joseph did all the Bio experiments while we stood around her at the tiny workbench/sink station that in any other high school would have probably been one of a dozen such stations. In fact, mostly what I remember from Biology in my high school years was memorizing Regents Review books.

[Dave]

You can't say I don't know how to exaggerate. Here's an example, brought on by memories of UCA.



Dragon Breath

We were in trouble so often that year that it is hard to remember which imbecilic prank got us suspended from school for 2 days, leaving us to roam around downtown Utica trying to avoid our parents. But I think it was the flash in the urinal trick that George and I immediately conjured up in our General Science class when we witnessed Sister Mary Anthony throw a pinch of pure magnesium … a small pinch … into a beaker of water. The most brilliant, beautiful flash of purple lit up the lab and George and I were immediately electrified with the promise of mayhem. I remember looking over to him. His eyes shone a bright and manic comprehension of the possibilities. All we needed to do was get some pure magnesium powder … just a pinch.

A fellow student named Burton was Sister Mary Anthony’s pet and the keeper of all the locked-up chemicals in the lab. I can’t really tell you how we bribed him into giving us a pinch of the powder because, even years later he would be so embarrassed by the subject of the blackmail that he would probably sue me for writing about his crime of nature.

Suffice it to say that we obtained a rather large pinch and were able to keep it in a stolen test tube overnight. The next day, just before lunch, by which time the boys’ bathroom urinals were always dry, we carefully poured the magnesium powder toward the rear inside of one of these ancient porcelain monuments that looked like upended bath tubs, built wide for boys with impaired aiming ability.

Next: conclusion

[Dave]

I had meant to post this before. The kids in the following article were in the UCA class of '59, and I believe they were coming back from an informal class picnic. Even though this group came way almost without injury, one of the tragic aspects of high school has always been friends lost to car accidents. The night before my daughter's graduation, four of her classmates hit a tree and were killed. A tragedy for the parents and the class.

Click once or twice to enlarge.

[Dave]

This has nothing to do with UCA, but while researching the old newspapers, I came across the article, below, which tells of pilot having to land his plane in a farmer's field near Utica because he couldn't see through the snow. I was struck by the primitiveness of the art of flying barely 25 years after the Wright Brothers flew their first powered airplane down Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina's Outer Banks.

A lot of the aerodynamics had been worked out for improved flight by '28, and radio was in use for air to ground communications, but basically you were hanging up there in the sky on a wing and a prayer and you had to come down when you couldn't see. Or when snow ever so slightly changed the shape of your wings and you lost the lift that held you above the ground.

From the Sunday OD of December 30, 1928.

Click once or twice to enlarge.

[Dave]

I was just thinking ..... I suppose it's possible that the Canadian pilot first tried to land near Blessed Sacrament school in Cornhill, but was scared off by this group of women in the Home Guard. (Their Habit is very similar to the Franciscans who taught at B.S. Could be them!)

[Dave]

And I don't know where these nuns are from, but their attitude seems more in keeping with my experiences with nuns these days.

[Dave]

And as long as we're on the subject of nuns, here's a piece of art of Sisters of Charity (or Daughter's of Charity) at work in a convent. They wear the wimple, the piece that wrapped tightly around the head and covered the neck and top of the shoulders, surmounted by an older style of cornette, which was more like a hat and not as starched or stylized as those that survived into the 1950's.

[Dave]

Here, finally, was the end of the UCA that graduates from the 1800's through 1960 remembered. The building next to St. John's Church had certainly worked itself to death producing Catholic scholars and mothers and dads and workers and professionals and religious for over 125 years, most of them remaining in Utica to contribute to the life of the city.

A year after this article ran in the OD in June of 1959, my graduating class (1961) was scattered to the winds. Or so it felt.

Click once or twice to enlarge.

[Dave]

By 1976, separating students by sex seemed no longer important to the clergy. I could have told them it was a bad idea. In fact, I think I did. I believe this might have been the first time I felt the sting of getting kicked around in the religion of my fathers. No, come to think of it, that occurred a year or two before at Blessed Sacrament when the pastor turned the heat off. Or maybe it was when .... Oh, well. What does it matter?

Anyway, I have no knowledge of what went on at UCA after 1961. (Nor Notre Dame, for that matter.) My last memory of UCA comes from the spring of 1961 after the school moved to South Utica and a girl I was dating was elected the Valentine Queen. She deserved it. When she asked me to escort her to the dance, I was by default automatically made Valentine King, probably the least deserved honor of my entire life. I have never been Valentine material, except to one lady who married me.

So for me, UCA fades into history. If anyone would like to post their memories post 1960 (or anytime), please feel free to do so.

I'm done.


Click once or twice to enlarge.

[Dave]

I forgot to run the conclusion to "Dragon Breath," so here is the story in its entirety.


Dragon Breath


We were in trouble so often that year that it is hard to remember which imbecilic prank got us suspended from school for 2 days, leaving us to roam around downtown Utica trying to avoid our parents. But I think it was the flash in the urinal trick that George and I immediately conjured up in our General Science class when we witnessed Sister Mary Anthony throw a pinch of pure magnesium … a small pinch … into a beaker of water. The most brilliant, beautiful flash of purple lit up the lab and George and I were immediately electrified with the promise of mayhem. I remember looking over to him. His eyes shone a bright and manic comprehension of the possibilities. All we needed to do was get some pure magnesium powder … just a pinch.

A fellow student named Burton was Sister Mary Anthony’s pet and the keeper of all the locked-up chemicals in the lab. I can’t really tell you how we bribed him into giving us a pinch of the powder because, even years later he would be so embarrassed by the subject of the blackmail that he would probably sue me for writing about his crime of nature.

Suffice it to say that we obtained a rather large pinch and were able to keep it in a stolen test tube overnight. The next day, just before lunch, by which time the boys’ bathroom urinals were always dry, we carefully poured the magnesium powder toward the rear inside of one of these ancient porcelain monuments that looked like upended bath tubs, built wide for boys with impaired aiming ability.

Hiding ourselves in one of the nearby pooper stalls, George and I waited and soon our random victim walked in to use the very urinal we had salted. We couldn’t have prayed for a better dupe.

Eddie was a year ahead of us in school and was an excitable kid, being Italian, and rather effeminate to boot. He was what today one might call a drama queen, and his reaction to any upset was always sure be over the top.

Eddie unzipped and whipped it out. A split second later the boys’ bathroom erupted with a clap of thunder, accompanied by a blinding purple flash. Eddie staggered backward, peeing up the wall and across the floor, he even managed to piss up his shirt and tie. He ran from the scene as if he had just been licked up the front by a fire-breathing dragon. Not pausing to put himself back in nor to zipper up, Eddie bolted out of the bathroom and down the hall about 30 feet before colliding with Sister Mary Anthony, who was approaching the area at high speed for obvious reasons.

“Put that thing back in your pants, Mister,” shouted the nun. I don’t think I have ever heard the word “thing” pronounced with such malevolence.

Laughing uproariously, George and I danced in the pooper stall as the nun came crashing through the bathroom door. Our stall door opened only inward and the two of us were having a problem getting out. As Sister’s feet pounded toward us, George pulled down his pants and sat down on the toilet. The stall door crashed open, knocking me backward onto a sitting George who said simply, “He did it, Sister.”


From "Real Writer," Copyright 2007, David Griffin
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