My Old Grade School—Since Renamed

Between September 1951 and June 1958, I attended Saint Henry Catholic School in Cleveland, Ohio. It was taught mostly by Dominican sisters who had a two-story convent on the premises. I started in second grade after having finished only half of first grade at Harvey Rice Elementary School in the old Buckeye Road neighborhood. My persistent nightmare is that someone will find out that a illegally skipped half a grade and force me to go back to Cleveland and sit at one of those tiny desks and spend my days trying to puzzle out phonics.

I suspect that we moved to the Harvard-Lee neighborhood primarily because, when I lived in the old Hungarian neighborhood, I didn’t speak English, which didn’t help my academic standing.

The good sisters at Saint Henry forced me to become more of an American (and less of a Hungarian). With my poor second grade marks, Sister Frances Martin O.P. (short for Ordinis Praedicatorum, or Order of Preachers) would sneak up behind me when I misbehaved, pull my ears and call me “cabbagehead.”

My grades improved, until in fifth grade I was considered less of a wiseacre and more of an “A” student. My seventh grade teacher, Sister Beatrice, was in her eighties when she taught my class. In eighth grade, I had Sister Rose Thomas.

Back at Saint Henry, we typically had an average of 55 students per class. At some point, the Harvard-Lee neighborhood became majority African American and (probably) Baptist. The church (whose entry is the door on the right in the above photo) was closed down; and in 1993 the school was renamed Archbishop Lyke School Saint Henry Campus, with an average of 17 students per class.

While I was in college, my parents joined the “White Flight” to the all-white community of Parma Heights on the West Side of Cleveland, where my brother attended Holy Family School.

When last I was in Cleveland—for my mother’s funeral in 1998—I couldn’t recognize the old Harvard-Lee neighborhood. The trees that were planted when the neighborhood was new right after the Second World War were now massive. We never had anything like that in the way of shade during the 1950s and 1960s.