It was the spring of 1941, in the quaint village of Hempstead, Long Island. The Great Depression had darkened the lives of many, but the shadow of war had not yet struck, and in the immaculate first-grade classroom of Sr. Mary Verita Riordan, BVM, pictures of the Guardian Angel and the boy Jesus cast a peaceful light on fifty squirming first-graders. Alphabet letters on the cork board, word families on charts, and phonics displays revealed a world of primers and pre-primers. Life in this classroom was all about printing neat letters and sounding out hard words. It was about reciting the Hail Mary, bringing your peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and finding a friend during recess. It was about being a Catholic kid from a large family at a time when the center of life was the parish, the family, the neighborhood.
On this spring morning Sr. Mary Verita, who could have been a poster nun for vocation brochures—had vocation brochures been necessary in those days—called us to attention with a question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Anxiety tightened our grips on the balls of clay we held in our grubby hands. This question was larger than phonics drills and addition sums. Around the room, up and down the aisles, as Sr. Mary Verita summoned each student, children murmured “teacher,” “doctor,” “fireman.”
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