Utica Catholic Academy

[clarencebunsen]

The last time I was on Bleeker (a couple weeks ago) Charlotte was closed and the area going towards Post was a pile of dirt and construction equipment. The building on Bleeker formerly owned by Gaetano (which was a topic of discussion a few weeks ago) was still standing but I don't think its fate has been decided yet.

[Deleted]

Jun 9, 2012 10:34:40 GMT -5 clarencebunsen said:

The last time I was on Bleeker (a couple weeks ago) Charlotte was closed and the area going towards Post was a pile of dirt and construction equipment. The building on Bleeker formerly owned by Gaetano (which was a topic of discussion a few weeks ago) was still standing but I don't think its fate has been decided yet.

Oh it has been decided. The city began knocking it down this morning. Saturday June 9. Will they get overtime pay. By 3PM it was pretty well down. Lots of cats in the area looking for rats.

Now I wish several more buildings can be raised.

[Clipper]

Yep, and now they can tear down the old Senior Center on James Street and spend another $300K of your tax money when the city is already on the brink of financial disaster.

It will be interesting to see what evolves over the coming years. The outlook seems pretty dim right now. I am sure that Utica will not simply fall down and disappear, but it is going to be rough going, and I am glad I don't live or pay taxes there anymore.

What were once the thriving industrial centers of the Northeast, are now becoming overtaxed, falling down, ghost towns. It is not just upstate NY. One has to wonder what will become of that entire region of the country.

[dave]

Back on topic, here's a personality from the past. Shorty Powers was the basketball coach at UCA as far back as I can remember.

The article is about a new St. Francis boys basketball team in 1974. That surprised me because after the the boys from both UCA and St. Francis went on to inaugurate Notre Dame H.S. in 1960, and the UCA girls continued their school's name in South Utica at the old St. John's/St. Joseph orphanage, and the St. Francis girls remained behind on Eagle and Genesee St. to form an all girls school ... after that St. Francis again opened their doors to boys? Seems odd, especially in view of Notre Dame already filling the need.

Here's the article. It's readable, if you click the article to enlarge. Firefox users click twice.


www.windsweptpress.com/images/shorty 1974.jpg[/img]

[dave]

Here's another larger-than-life personality from UCA's past. Father Bill Donovan had the loudest voice of anyone I've ever known. Even in normal conversation his voice could be heard a block away.

"Keeps the confession lines short," was one of his memorable comments.

An assistant pastor to Msgr. Dooling for years, Bill hailed from Cornhill and Blessed Sacrament parish. In fact, his parents were my newspaper customers when I delivered the Sunday paper on Cornhill. The article says they lived on Clementian Street, which I assume to be true when published in 1968, but seem to remember them on St. Jane or St. Agnes in 1956 and 57. Not that my memory is anything you should bet on.

He came from a family of many brothers and sisters, I think all but one became priests or nuns. The first time I collected at his parents house, I figured their son was Father Donovan, but was surprised when a nun in full medieval regalia opened the door. She was visiting her parents for the week and laughed when she saw the look on my face.

Click as many times as it takes to enlarge for readability.


www.windsweptpress.com/images/donovan 1968.jpg[/img]

[Clipper]

Jun 9, 2012 6:56:00 GMT -5 dave said:

Here's more UCA history from a 1951 Daily Press article. Assuming the reporter got his facts straight, the name Utica Catholic Academy dates to 1848 when the Devereux brothers had the school incorporated under that name.

And the third floor some of us remember so well (two classrooms and the auditorium and stage) was an addition made to the building in 1880.

The article says the orphanage moved in 1912 to South Utica, but doesn't mention when the building was torn down.

The reporter says that UCA was a girls' school until Monsignor Dooling rennovated the place in 1938 and opened it to both boys and girls. In 1905 Msgr. Lynce said UCA was a name covering both Assumption and the girls high school, so I assume after the demise of Assumption Academy for boys ... and I don't yet know when that occurred ... UCA remained for girls until 1938. And of course, UCA became a girl's school again in 1960 when the school moved without the boys to the same building the orphanage had moved to in 1912.

By the way, this article comes from a 1951 Daily Press special page on Catholic Schools in Utica.
A facsimile appears below, and if you want to have a readable copy, send me a note and I'll email you a pdf of the full page. [e-mail]


CLick to enlarge.



www.windsweptpress.com/images/catholic schools.jpg

[/img][/quote]

The separation of girls and boys was also prevalent in the public schools at some point in time. I remember that several of the city schools had girl's doors and boy's doors designated. If I remember correctly Horatio Seymour and UFA both had the genders inscribed in the stone above the appropriate doors as did Hughes and Wetmore. Does anyone else remember that? I also remember that being true of the Main Street school in Whitesboro.

[dave]

I do in fact remember standing in a separate boys line where we assembled prior to the bell before going into school. I'm pretty sure we did that at Blessed Sacrament, Lourdes and the Main St. public school in Whitesboro. All three elementary schools had co-ed classes, however. I went to the Whitesboro school for only a few months in 1952 and don't remember the inscriptions over the doors.

[dave]

Speaking of co-ed, UCA when I attended was co-ed and girls were mixed with boys in the classes.
At St. Francis at that time, the school was co-ed, but girls and boys were in separate classes. Separate faculty, too, I think, because I remember hearing the girls were taught by nuns and I know the boys were taught by the Xaverian Brothers, who began at Notre Dame. I don't know what Notre Dame did when they became co-ed in the seventies.

[dave]

From "Nowhere"

In the village, my brothers and I marched into a large brick school building and were ushered into the office of a man who wore a three piece suit that had evidently been serving him well since before the war. Calling himself The Principal, Mr. Welby seemed about as interested in our arrival as he might have been had a toboggan salesman dropped by. We were about to have a personal encounter with the unholy, the profane world of non-Catholics known as Public Schools. Attendance at this institution mounted a terrific assault on my long held philosophy that a basic goodness pervaded the world and the people in it. Life as a sheltered Catholic boy came crashing to an end.

My school mates swore in public and told dirty jokes within 5 miles of the school grounds. They were disrespectful to the teachers. Had they tried any of their antics on the nuns back home at Blessed Sacrament, they would have landed in an orthopedic ward. Many of my new mates didn’t even care about their schoolwork, nor how well they did on tests and quizzes. When I explained to a classmate that the “J.M.J” I had written at the top of my test paper stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph and invoked their blessing on my work, she looked at me as though I was a member of a cult. Now that I think of it, the Irish schoolboy version of American Catholicism in the 1950’s was nothing if not a cult.
Back at Ice Station Zebra, isolation continued to flank us. Once Dad left for work each morning in the family car, we were all marooned for the next 9 hours if school wasn’t in session. On school days, which began to feel like holidays, the arrival of the school bus in the morning was greeted like a long awaited Coast Guard cutter steaming up to rescue drowning sailors. Housewives and live-in grandmothers bribed the bus driver to take them into town along with the kids. But I hated that damned bus, so full of raucous children that it gave me a headache.

Halfway through the winter, Dad was becoming disenchanted with our new home on a frozen slab of concrete, ten miles from Utica and seemingly not too far south of Iceland. The tiny ranch house was indeed small, and didn’t easily accommodate 3 adults and 3 growing boys. Outside among the still heaped up mounds of dirt, most of the folks living around the circle seemed strange and secretive. Grandma had begun to keep a list of suspicious neighbors for Senator McCarthy, who she wrote to monthly.

Myself, I missed Italians. They had constituted half the population of the neighborhood we had forsaken in Utica. For some reason, they were not well represented out here on the tundra. Oh, for those golden warm days on Cornhill, with the smell of tomato sauce cooking, black olives on a plate spattered with oil, vino flowing across festive tables at the Villa Restaurant on Leah St and down on Taylor Avenue at Audette’s Ristorante. Lovers sang O Sole Mio and Italian smiles lived on the faces of everyone, no matter what their nationality. Just to see the vegetable man sleeping in his horse drawn wagon or the rag man singing his way up from Eagle St. Or to hear Mrs. Nicotera lean out from her house and scream at her 7 children playing in the street, finally sighing aloud, “Ooo fah!” and slamming down the window. I couldn’t imagine that Tuscany was any better.

But I put on a happy face and braved the rigors of a future on the ice. At least we had new surroundings to explore. On weekends, all the neighborhood kids would walk up the road searching for igloos and polar bears.

To Be Continued.

Excerpt from the book Nowhere, copyright David Griffin, 2011.

[Clipper]

It's a small world Dave. I also went to Main Street elementary. It was only for a short time for the latter part of 5th grade. We had been living in Arizona and my dad got laid off. We ended up moving back to NY, lived with my grandparents for a month or two, and then in an apartment at 14 Westmoreland Street. Mr. Harold Gehrig was my teacher. He was a first year teacher and drove a sharp looking 1953 mercury. Mr Quayle was the principal at the time. By the time I started 7th grade, my folks had gotten re-established and had purchased a home on Jamestown Ave in N Utica. I went to Seymour for 7th and 8th grade.

Where was that little house you describe in your story?

[dave]

Pinecrest Manor. And of course I embellished a lot. Hahahahaha.
I was at the school in '52 in fourth grade and my teacher was Miss Ballardini, a very nice young woman. The kids were nice too, to be honest. But I'm a storyteller, not an historian.

[Clipper]

I have memories of playing handball against the brick wall on the back side of that school with a small rubber ball we called a "pinky" that we bought from Specht's newstand, and a leather palmed knitted winter glove. I used to practice tennis against that same windowless wall in summer.

[dave]

More research. Here's a paragraph appearing in the OD in 1928 about the UCA Parent Teacher organization. The last paragraph says, "The fifth grade captured the banner for having the largest number of mothers in attendance."

Sounds like UCA in 1928 covered what had been called the St. John's school for elementary grades, in addition to what was probably the girls high school.

www.windsweptpress.com/images/pta 1928.jpg[/img]

[dave]

Here's an issue of the Daily Press that covered the 1934 Centennial celebration of Utica Catholic Academy (founded 1834, but I don't think it was called UCA in that year) with a special tribute to the Sisters of Charity for their work running the school. Msgr. Dooling is also honored for his role.

Below, first is a jpg of the entire newspaper page, which is unreadable. But I have a readable pdf and write me at [e-mail] if you would like me to email it to you.
Also below is a readable (with effort) article on Msgr. Dooling from this same page of the newspaper.


www.windsweptpress.com/images/St Johns Academy 1934.jpg[/img]


CLICK image below to enlarge.
www.windsweptpress.com/images/pays tribute 1934.jpg[/img]

[dave]

Coming Up: A side trip to Our Lady of Lourdes school, where many of the UCA students came from, probably because of the Sisters of Charity's presence in both schools.

I found a news article that announced the plans to build O.L.O.L The School in 1928. Surprised me. I thought the place had been on Barton Ave since before the Indians. Turns out the school was only 25 years old when I went there in the early 1950's. Anyone remember all the composite class photos lining the first floor main hall outside the auditorium?