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A Vanished Legacy

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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.

Cleveland 28, Ohio

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The ’Burbs 1951-1962 (The Red Arrow Was Our Home)

In 1951, we moved to the Harvard-Lee area of Cleveland, the extreme southeast corner of the city. Buckeye Road was only a few miles north and west of us and easily reachable by way of the Shaker Rapid light rail line. The next stage of my life was to consist of seven years attending Saint Henry School (which is no more) and the next four attending Chanel High School (which was just demolished this summer).

Several things were different in the suburbs. For one thing, there were a lot of bullies around, including our neighbors Jimmy and Joey Fordosi and Jack Rulison, three doors south of us. I guess that was because I reached the age when bullies magically appear; and it didn’t help that I was very young-looking for my age. Could it be that my pituitary tumor had already begun, stunting my growth? Throughout my years at Saint Henry, I was either the shortest or second shortest kid in class, including both boys and girls.

Chanel High School as It Was 1958-1962

When I “graduated” from eighth grade (there was no real ceremony), I was surprised to find that I had won a scholarship to Chanel High School in nearby Bedford, Ohio. In fact, my parents never had to pay a penny for tuition, because in each of my four years at Chanel, I received the highest grades in the elite, or “A” section. I had outgrown my slowness in the English language and in fact proceeded to make the language my own.

I was helped in this by four successive English teachers who were so good that I decided, when I graduated, to work at becoming an English professor. There was Father Gerard Hageman SM (Society of Mary “Marist”) in 9th grade; Father Raymond Healey SM in 10th grade; Father William Parker SM in 11th grade; and Father James Murray SM in 12th grade. These four priests provided an incredible education in literature and language—one for which I will be eternally grateful.

My graduation from Chanel was a much more formal event. Not only was I the class valedictorian, but I had won the Mr. Chanel award for all-around academic and extracurricular achievement. And I was going to an Ivy League college with a full scholarship. Those were my glory days.