Doe Coover was planning to spend her weekend hanging wallpaper in the dining room when her sister phoned Boston with the news.
Over in the corner of the room, Sister Alphonsine, principal from ’62 to ’67, explains that the school’s name comes from Mount Alverno in Italy–where Saint Francis of Assisi stood when he received the stigmata. The school’s motto remains: “For it is in giving that we receive.”
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“I’m in publishing and many of them are nurses and teachers, but it was like 20 years hadn’t passed. We could just start over where we left off. I’ve seen reunions in the east. You go to a reunion at Harvard or Yale and the people are networking. But this reunion was about friendship. This was about girls I hadn’t seen in 20 years.”
“I saw the school enrollment drop,” Sister Vitalis says. “I saw tremendous change. Our students used to come from very stable homes. Their fathers worked, their mothers didn’t. But in the last 20 years, it was very unstable. There were broken families. The school building will be used for various social agencies and smaller schools. But it was the broken families that did Alvernia in.”
“No kidding. We had to have our skirts well below our knees, and on the way to school we liked to roll them up. Once in school, we made sure they were the right length. We weren’t the kind of kids who lipped off. I can’t remember any discipline problems. The nuns never had to hit or punish us. We were girls; girls are different than boys. Boys make trouble for nuns. Nuns have to spank little boys. Our biggest sin was smoking cigarettes. There would be 37 of us sitting in the restaurant on Irving Park sharing one cigarette.”
It’s a little ragged, and Sister Bernadette Luecker frowns. OK, she says, let’s hear the altos. But the altos aren’t listening. They’re chatting. Sister Bernadette Luecker taps her baton against the music stand.
