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Values for a Lifetime?
By Bob Rhoades
Senior Scribe
Probably! My introduction to education started in 1950 at St.
Mary’s School at 3rd and Elm in Greenville. Under the most
capable tutelage of the Sisters of Charity from Mt. Saint Joseph’s in
Cincinnati we all learned our ABC’s and 123’s. My first grade
teacher was Sister Terence Marie, a young nun in her first teaching
assignment. In those days, there were two grades together, 1st
and 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 5th and 6th and the elder statesmen of the school
the 7th and 8th grade each with one nun guiding our learning.
That was sort of neat because you were always learning something new or
reviewing something from the past.
They always say that you learn best by observation and we did
that. Being from Cincinnati, the nuns were all loyal Reds
fans. I’m sure that those who weren’t didn’t tell anyone.
Our principal, Sr. Anne Delores was a baseball nut, even umpiring
recess softball games from behind the plate. She never missed a
call either, like who was going to argue anyway? In my last two
years in the new building, opening day was on the PA system. So
we definitely learned to be loyal to the Reds.
In those days, every day started off with Mass and the little
procession of all of us back across the street to begin the school day
at 8:30. Besides the three R’s we had a fourth R which was
Religion. It was usually first in the morning for about a half
hour some part learning to be a good human being and some part
catechism. The Baltimore Catechism No. 1 laid out in 33 lessons
designed to teach the Christian Faith in an orderly fashion. In
our case it was to lead up to our First Holy Communion which usually
occurred in the 2nd grade. This seemed like a lot for a 1st
grader to absorb, but we got through it. In second grade we all
went to Rike’s in Dayton and got our little white suits and the girls
in little white dresses and on the appointed day marched in a
procession into church to sit in the front pews. At the appointed
time we filed out of the pews and received our First Holy Communion
from Father John Gnau, the parish priest. For a first grader,
just seeing him was enough to put the fear of God into you.
Getting that out of the road let us pretty much function like normal
kids for a while. The next big deal at church would be the
Sacrament of Confirmation. Somewhere in there was also an elected
privilege of becoming an Altar Boy. That meant learning most of
the responses at Mass in Latin. I believe they were fairly well
engrained in my head because I still remember most of them.
Sometime after 1st Communion, Father Gnau left and Father Thomas
Coleman arrived. What a guy! He had been an Army Chaplin during
WWII and been through what a lot of our local boys had been
through. He immersed himself into the community and was well
known. He was also a very ritualistic priest who knew all of the
rituals of the church very well. Being an excellent singer, his
love for the Gregorian chant produced some pretty awesome, very solemn
occasions. After many years, he returned to his home parish in
Springfield and became a Monsignor. While he was here, two
of his seminar buddies, Msgrs. Krumholtz and Schneider would come to
visit every summer. They would get here about 10 in the morning
and want to say Mass. Since we lived across the street, Fr.
Coleman would come get me to be the altar boy for them. Since
he’d never give me a chance to tell my mom, in about an hour and a
half, I would find myself explaining to her where I’d been, in church,
like she’d believe that. I usually ended up with a couple
of shiny 50 cent pieces in my pocket for the service, so it wasn’t all
bad.
The old school had a very squeaky stairway in the front which led
upstairs to the 3rd and 4th grade room. There was a set of large
double doors leading into the room which were usually closed so that
our studious, little minds weren’t distracted by anything out
there. One day there was an unusual amount of creaking on the
stairs which meant that there was an unusual amount of people out
there, something we seldom saw. Suddenly the doors swung open and
there was Fr. Coleman and of all things, with him the Archbishop of
Cincinnati, Very Reverend Karl J. Altar and his entourage.
Holy Moses! I’ll bet we finally crossed the line and one of us is going
to visit Hades in the near future, what else could it be? After
all, for 4 years the nuns had taught us about 1000 things that could
end us up down there and we had probably invented that many more on our
own. After the formalities of greeting the Archbishop and a short
discussion with us about how was school, who was our favorite ball
player, (he was from Cincinnati too), they moved on to the 5th and 6th
grade. Man, we dodged the bullet that time. It’s a good
thing those guys in the other room were mean and nasty; it was probably
one of them they were after.
Friday’s were great because the first Friday of the month was movie day
and the whole school spent the last hour and a half of the day watching
a movie, complete with popcorn. There were other things that
built character, like cleaning the blackboard erasers, being a Safety
Patrol Boy, and in general learning how to act. We had another
thing going too, if you got in trouble at school, Home probably knew
about it before you got there. It was pretty much imperative that
you got good grades because every 9 weeks when Report Cards came out,
Fr. Coleman dispersed them, looking over the top of his glasses at you
standing there waiting for it. Not only were there grades, there
was another side that said what kind of a person you were: Concentrates
on task at hand, works well with others, is disruptive in class.
You didn’t get representation to dispute it either.
Then it happened, the fall of 1956, I was in the 7th grade and we were
in the new school. We had come of age. A PA system that you could
get called to the office on, an office that you could get called to, a
teacher’s lounge where they could talk about you, a kitchen. This
was downtown now. Life was good. In two short years it was
over. We were thrown to the wolves. We were now part of the
GHS Class of ’63. We had made it. You could tell who we were
too. When the principal at the high school walked into the room,
all the dumb Catholic kids stood up out of respect. What’s up
with that? Values for a lifetime, indeed.
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