Alums return for Our Lady of Lourdes School’s 100th

The bathrooms are indoors now, but the old blackboards, steam radiators and tin ceilings are much as they were, nostalgic touchstones for generations of Catholic students who attended Our Lady of Lourdes School in Overbrook.

"Even the creaks in the stairs are the same," marveled Tim Quigley (Class of '73), who joined hundreds of alums who returned yesterday to mark the school's 100th anniversary. "The place hasn't changed much."

The stone school at 63d Street and Overbrook Avenue once was home to actor Will Smith, ABC sportscaster Jim McKay, Tasty Baking Co. president Charles Pizzi, real estate developer J. Brian O'Neill, and local TV broadcasters Bill Baldini and Ed Cunningham.

Another alumnus, Bishop Joseph McFadden, celebrated a centennial Mass for 500 parishioners and guests in a standing-room-only service across the street at Our Lady of Lourdes Church.

"It's wonderful to be able to come home," McFadden told the parishioners, recalling First Fridays at the school, when "all of us were routed across the street for confession."

Other former students exchanged memories - good and less good - of their years at the school. They gathered in the old classrooms and outside under a tent to remember the fence that once separated the girls' schoolyard from the boys', the quick treks home at lunchtime, the classmates and the teachers. Especially the teachers.

Sister Cecilia. Sister Amabalis. Sister Lupita. Sister Alicia.

"Who was the little old nun who taught us history? We had to be nice to her," Suzi Barton Carroll (Class of '68), of Broomall, asked Al Smith (Class of '66), of Havertown.

"I just saw a picture of Sister Marie Louise from 1937," said Quigley, who now lives in Plymouth Meeting. "I had her in 1970! She taught my father and my brothers. And we thought she was 100 years old then."

There was Miss Taylor, who taught second grade, famous for her beehive hairdo and because "she smelled delicious," said Carroll. And Mrs. Hannon, who could calm unruly fourth- and fifth-graders by diverting their attention to God's trees and bushes beyond the tall windows.

Moira Jackson (Class of '86), now a pharmaceutical rep who lives in Havertown, got a familiar, unpleasant sensation in one room.

"This used to be the principal's office. When I walked in there now, my stomach did flip-flops."

The school opened on Oct. 5, 1908, nine years after the church was built in the new parish in Overbrook Farms on the western edge of Philadelphia. It cost $35,000 to build and enrolled 78 students that first year.

Today, with a 1963 addition, it has about 250 students from prekindergarten through eighth grade.

The school, like many Catholic schools, was much more crowded during the 1950s and '60s.

"Isn't it hard to believe that in my one class, there were 67 students?" said centennial cochair Hannah Dougherty Campbell (Class of '65). "How did the nuns and lay teachers do it? How did they follow lesson plans and keep order in a room where sometimes two kids sat in one seat of a desk?"

Catherine Tighe Kensil (Class of '43) scanned old photographs, looking for the girls' basketball team of 1943. She found '42 and '44, but no '43. She remembered what a chore it was to go to the outhouse during the winter.

"There was one for the boys and one for the girls. In the winter, you had to get your coat and hat and everything, just to go to the bathroom," said Kensil, who now lives on Long Island. "It was a big deal when we got indoor bathrooms."

Today's students, such as Noni Davis (Class of '08) of Wynnefield, have computers and TV monitors and a Web site (www.ourladylourdesschool.com). She has only 24 students in her class and is preparing to attend Germantown Friends next fall.

"I've had good teachers," she said yesterday, sounding a bit like an alumna already. "It was really fun here."