Insight: Irreconcilable and parochial

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

If I had to do it all over again, there would be quite a bit that I’d do differently if I was back in Catholic grade school again.

Ed Pierce in fifth grade at Our Lady
of Lourdes Catholic School in
Brighton, New York in 1963.
COURTESY PHOTO  

My father had been hospitalized for a broken leg after falling off a ladder while hanging outdoor Christmas lights on our house and when a priest came to visit him, he told him about me. With my birthday falling one day after the established date for public school kindergarten, my father thought I could excel in first grade instead of waiting a year to go to kindergarten, and the priest agreed and enrolled me at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School.

From the age of 3, I was reading books that were intended for students in Grade 3 and so when my First-Grade teacher, Sister Felicitis, started lessons to learn the ABCs, I was uninterested and bored. She passed on to other teachers at the school that I was a problem student, and it created a reputation for me there that followed me from year to year.

The school itself was on three levels and the stairwells were on each end of the building. You could climb the stairs up to the third level and look down at the people coming and going from the school entrances unobserved, unless someone happened to look up.

One day when I was in third grade, my friend Patrick O’Brien and I climbed to the third level before school started. He dared me to lob a gob of spit down from over the balcony to see how fast it would travel. Unfortunately for me, I did this while a nun who taught at the school was entering the building. The nuns were from the Sisters of Saint Joseph order and wore traditional black habits and a headdress with a flat top.

My gob landed on top of her headdress with a thud, and she immediately looked up and saw me. For my wrongful action, the principal assigned me a month’s duty of raising the U.S. flag each morning at the school flagpole and lowering it after school every day. I also had to apologize to both the nun and my classmates for my thoughtless action.

In fifth grade, I was involved in another incident and my parents both had to attend a meeting with the principal. When the quarterly report cards were issued, I was given a C in math, and I knew that my mother would throw a fit seeing that grade. I never showed it to her or my father and paid my younger brother 25 cents to sign my mother’s name acknowledging that she had seen the report card.

The nun teaching our class suspected the signature was a forgery because it was done in blue ink while all the previous report card signatures were in black ink. She asked if I had forged my mother’s signature. I said no. With that, she turned me in for disciplinary action to the principal. The principal asked me repeatedly to admit that I was the one who forged my mother’s name and since I physically did not do it, I denied it every time.

During the meeting with my parents in her office on a Saturday morning, she said I had lied time and time again to her about signing the report card. She painted a bleak future for me to my parents and insisted that unless I admitted that I had signed the report card, I was in danger of being expelled.

My father took me out in the hallway and asked me to be honest and tell him the truth. He asked if I had signed the report card, and I told him I had not done that. When he asked that if I hadn’t signed my mother’s name, who did? I explained to him that I had paid my brother a quarter to sign the report card, but the principal wanted me to admit to physically doing something I hadn’t done.

We returned to the principal’s office and revealed the facts. I told the principal that she had not asked me if someone else had signed the report card and if she had, I would have admitted that. She gave me a month’s chore of sweeping the hallways after school and picking up litter on school grounds when I was done with that.

The next year I inadvertently broke a window while trying to unlatch it and even though it wasn’t my fault, I was back on flagpole duty for a week as ordered by the principal. That same year I was given a classroom job of maintaining the classroom aquarium filled with tropical fish.

One Friday before a blizzard was supposed to hit the area, I bumped the fish tank heater up what I thought was a just few degrees to try and keep the fish warm during the snowstorm. Back at school on Monday I was sickened to discover I had made a mistake, and the heater was set on high, and all the tropical fish had died.

My Catholic school experience is not something I fondly remember, but without it, I wouldn’t be who I am today. <

Insight: Welcoming back my favorite month

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

Ever since I was small, the month of September has always been my favorite time of the year. While it’s still warm enough on some days to go without a jacket, there’s also a pronounced change in the seasons in the air, heralded by cooler temperatures. 

As a young child, September meant going to the Sears store in Rochester, New York with my parents on a Saturday morning shopping for back-to-school clothes. Not that there was anything glamorous about selecting new underwear and socks and as a Catholic school student with mandated school uniforms, my new clothes typically consisted of several blue shirts and a black clip-on tie, blue pants, and shiny new black shoes.

But as mundane as choosing that apparel was, I then got to accompany my father over to the coat department and he would let me pick out a colorful jacket of my choice for the coming winter. It also helped that the Sears aisle on the way to the jacket section had a fresh peanuts section that my father always had to stop at, and he usually bought a bag of Spanish peanuts and shared them with my brother and myself.      

One of the best clothing selections I ever made ever came when I was in seventh grade in September 1965. There was one young men’s jacket that caught my eye, and it was within our price range at $8.

It was a bomber-style jacket, green in color with white sleeves and a large New York Jets emblem on the left front side. Being a football fan and especially of the start-up American Football League at the time, my father suggested that I try it on, and it was a match made in heaven, fitting perfectly. We purchased it as my next jacket, and I was thrilled.

The Jets were led that season by the much-publicized rookie quarterback named Joe Namath and my friends in school were mostly either Buffalo Bills fans or more traditional NFL fans of the New York Giants and the Cleveland Browns. I took a lot of flack for wearing the Jets jacket everywhere I went and was proud to wear those colors each day.

In later years, I laughed when I watched actor Fred Savage’s character Kevin Arnold on the television program “The Wonder Years” wearing the exact same jacket on the show as I had almost three decades earlier. And I also reveled when the American Football League merged with the National Football League in 1970, but not before the Jets and Joe Namath defeated the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969. I had the Jets bomber jacket for three years before I outgrew it and it got passed on to cousins much younger.

Besides going back to school after Labor Day every year, the month of September also had a slew of new television shows making their debut on the only three networks airing at the time, ABC, NBC and CBS. I recall one September in 1966 when our family watched classic premiere episodes of “The Monkees” and “Star Trek” on NBC along with “That Girl” on ABC and “Mission Impossible” on CBS.

Back in the old days, new TV shows and cartoons for children also made their debuts on Saturday mornings in September. CBS was my preferred Saturday morning network in the early 1960s because it included many of my favorites such as “Captain Kangaroo,” “Mighty Mouse,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” and “Rin Tin Tin.”    

For our family, every five years or so the month of September also meant going to the car dealer so that my parents could purchase a new automobile. New models of cars were typically unveiled in September in the late 1950s and 1960s and sometimes the introductory sale prices for the new models would be affordable for my parents. 

My father wouldn’t drive a car more than five years at a time, saying he didn’t want to pay expensive repair bills and he’d rather be behind the wheel of a new car as it was less expensive to operate. It seems like only yesterday when my father traded in his Ford Fairlane for a brand-new teal-colored 1962 Chevy Impala and our family got to ride home with him in that new car. By 1966, it was traded in for a new white Ford Galaxy 500. 

September on the calendar also marks the arrival of the first official day of fall. Usually before that happens, leaves begin dropping off the trees as nights turns colder and what kid doesn’t like to jump into a pile of freshly raked leaves? It like a rite of passage for many, including me.  <