Elementary school stirs memories

As "Bro" Duffy unlocked the chain securing the back door of the long-neglected St. Margaret's School in Narberth, he shook his head. He knew I was not going to like what I was about to see. St. Margaret's, which opened in 1925, was built in the decade that the Ku Klux Klan marched up nearby Windsor Avenue and burned a cross in the little town where I grew up.

When I walked through those doors as a first grader in 1955, that cross burning was as fresh in the memory of adults in Narberth as the 1985 MOVE confrontation remains to Philadelphians who lived through it. Within St. Margaret's stone walls, I was taught that there were people who hated us for being who we were.

As Duffy unchained the doors to our childhood, I took a deep breath. "Bro" was three years ahead of me at St. Margaret's. Since we were Catholic-born baby boomers, we both had brothers and sisters spread throughout the school. His sister, Janet, was in my class.

Bro was born Bernard John Duffy, and he was the only Bro I knew in grade school. He goes by "John" now. He gave up his nickname when he transferred to public high school. There were too many other Bro's. As the owner of Duffy Real Estate in Narberth, he has the keys to the kingdom that was St. Margaret's because the building is for sale - but not the memories.

It looks like every Philadelphia archdiocesan grade school built during those years, imposing yet gray and anonymous. Not until last week did I notice the crenulated wall tops, the series of notches common to medieval castles, on all four sides. From here Catholic archers could fire arrows at hooded KKK marchers, or better yet, pour boiling oil on godless communists attempting to storm our sacred keep.

In what had been my first-grade classroom, sections of the pressed-tin ceiling had collapsed from a leaky roof above the fifth-grade classroom on the second floor. The water damage was even worse in the basement - our old lunchroom - where I had broken my front tooth in half on the tile floor while horsing around as a Boy Scout, and where we had celebrated our eighth-grade graduating class' well-attended 20th reunion.

The school smells of must, mold, and decay. During my visit there was an incessant beeping from an unseen smoke alarm. The "new" St. Margaret's opened a block away in 1968, and the old school had been used as a Hebrew school for a nearby synagogue and later as a parish hall and adult-education center.

Duffy shook his head again. Damage like this doesn't happen overnight or even in a year or two. There had been talk of selling the unused building since 2001. Now that it's on the market, despite its condition, he says it should sell quickly.

"If you're not going forward," Duffy said while we surveyed our first-grade classroom.

"You're going backward," I answered.

That phrase is the secret handshake of St. Margaret's alum. From 1953 through his death in 1965, Msgr. Cornelius P. Brennan was pastor at St. Margaret's. He was a former missionary who talked to us as if we were natives new to the English language.

One of his pleasures was to personally distribute report cards four times a year to all students, one by one, grade by grade in a ceremony notable only by its unwavering consistency.

"Tell me not in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream," he would recite from "A Psalm of Life" to uncomprehending first graders. By fourth grade, the smart kids would win a prize for knowing what came next, "For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem."

By eighth grade we were placing bets with Longfellow odds as to when we would all join in with a singsong: "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal. Dust though art to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul."

Later in the principal's office, Bro had a St. Margaret's flashback: His father and Bill Chain's dad had been summoned for a disciplinary session.

The boys had tested the scientific validity of what their nun had told a girl classmate who had reported that she had attended a wedding ceremony in a Protestant church. Horrified, the nun warned: "You could have been struck by lightning."

That afternoon, the boys risked catastrophe and stepped in and out of four Protestant churches in Narberth. "Why he did this, I'll never know," Bro said. Young Bill Chain confessed their recklessness in class, reporting triumphantly, "We weren't struck by lightning."

The most profound epiphany I experienced in the same building took place when I was 15. By then I was at Lower Merion High School, but I was still expected to attend religious classes at St. Margaret's on Monday evenings.

One night we gathered in the basement lunchroom to meet the new monsignor, Joseph Gleason. He seemed pretty cool and down-to-earth, not preachy.

When he invited us to ask questions, my friend Jimmy O'Neill came up with a doozy. "Monsignor," he asked, "is it a mortal sin to french-kiss a girl?" To Catholics, a mortal sin is a grievous offense that, if unconfessed and unrepented, is a one-way ticket to hell.

After thoughtful consideration, the monsignor said yes, it is a mortal sin because a french kiss is about arousing lust, not merely a sign of affection.

Jimmy, perhaps speaking for all teenage boys in 1965, followed up with a question that today might be called moral relativism: "Well, Monsignor, if it's a mortal sin to french-kiss a girl, why not just go all the way?"