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Memories – 1930s and 1940s


1948

Name: Sister Clement Mary
School:  Epiphany (Detroit)
Memory: I always loved Sister. I thought she was sooooo pretty. She was good to us. Often reading to us so we could put our heads down and rest a while. She had a way of getting our respect too. Like the way she made us think that she would take our cameras away from us if we snapped a picture of her on the playground during graduation. And we believed her. What a bunch of dummies.

1942

Name: Sister Theodine, IHM
School:  St. Matthew (Detroit)
Memory: Sister Theodine (Eleanor Henning) is the nun who really taught me how to pray and talk with Jesus, and have Jesus be my friend. It didn’t help with my behavior very much as I still did a lot of wiggling around when I was supposed to be sitting perfectly still. We received two basic sacraments that year: first communion and with that first confession. Towards the end of the school year when we were about to make first communion, sister called my mother crying, “Tommy is going to ruin the entire communion class. I don’t know what to do with him. Please talk to him and ask him to sit still and be quiet in church.” And I guess I did behave and her efforts paid off.
Submitted by: Thomas McKenzie
Note: Sister Eleanor (Theodine) Henning, IHM taught at St. Matthew-Detroit from 1936-47. She died Dec. 20, 2002.

1935

Name:
Sister Davidica Cronin, IHM (10/13/09 – 6/29/07)
School: St. Agnes (Detroit)
Memory: (This is an excerpt from a Remembering written by Kenneth Crawford which was read at his own funeral recently. The family requested that this portion be included here.) …One more note about St. Agnes School. One of our IHM teachers was a Sister Davidica. I always liked her. She was a good teacher – not one to throw chalk or apply the ruler to misbehavers. She had a technique that was much worse to get the discipline she wanted.

She would talk! Never raising her voice for one moment, she would quietly discuss the problem in a manner that left the wrong-doer swearing that the error would never again happen. I recall that some of the tougher kids in the class would go into the cloak room with her and come out ten minutes later literally in tears. And she never raised her voice. I thought a lot of her.