Bye bye, St. Anthony's

St. Anthony's School, Winsted, Connecticut

Winsted, Connecticut, where I started school in September 1946, was like much of the rest of New England, a town with a mixed population. Because I had a Scottish (i.e., “non-foreign-sounding”) surname, I had entrée into the society of WASPish types, some of whom actually went back all the way to colonial days. If you went to my church and took a seat in the cushioned pews the first thing your eye would settle on would be the Pilgrim Hymnal. The youth group which was my social center through my high school years was called the “Pilgrim Fellowship” and there was no mistaking the heritage I was expected to identify with.

My best friend in high school was Tom D’Amore. He lived with his Italian immigrant family, including one maternal and one paternal grandparent, who came down to the table each day and fiercely refused to talk to each other. Tommy and I hung out after school most days together and I was often at their table at mealtimes, marveling at the passion, the cacophony, the broad reaches across the table and the high volume verbal exchanges, and wishing that the atmosphere of my more austere German/Scottish home could be more like theirs. My growing up was all about either/or categories: waspish or immigrant, Italian or Northern European, Catholic or Protestant. The nuances were swept under the rug, the fact that with a German-born mother I too was an immigrant - and, for that matter, my paternal grandfather was born in Kirkconnel, Scotland - and the fact that, with factory workers for parents, I wasn’t really a part of the ruling class of waspish “real New Englanders,” except by racist implication.

In the 1940s and 50s, the term “melting pot” still applied. There were two public elementary schools, one at each end of Main Street. Both fed into a single middle school, so eventually every public school kid could, at least theoretically, get to know every other public school kid in town. The rich kids and the poor kids, the ones with Anglo-Saxon names and the ones with names like Centrella or Martinelli.

Main Street was dotted with stone churches. My own, the First Church (Baptist and Congregational) was at the east end and the Second Congregational Church was at the west end. In between were the Methodist and Episcopal churches and a church that stood on a hill and dominated the entire downtown space, St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church. And St. Joseph Parish supported its own Catholic parochial school. Originally named St. Joseph School, its name was changed to St. Anthony School because William L. Gilbert, when he left money for the formation of the local high school, specified that no children from St. Joseph would be allowed to attend. Or so the story goes. I’ve hunted all morning for confirmation of what may be my first encounter with an urban legend, and cannot find any. If someone can dig out the facts for me and add them to the commentary, I would be grateful.

In any case, just as the kids from the two public elementary schools funneled together into the public middle school, the kids from the middle school funneled together with the kids from St. Anthony's into the high school, and although a second high school was eventually built, in my day, at least, I could say with some justification that the name of every kid in Winsted was familiar to me. Family names, at least.

The rivalries that may have existed among the adults were softened as the kids made friends across these identity barriers. I balked once when looking at the St. Anthony textbooks of the D’Amore kids and noted that they portrayed “Catholic countries” in a better light than “Protestant countries,” but I found it more amusing than offensive. Bizarre, rather than wrong. I sympathized with my friend Camille, who had nothing good to say about the nuns who pushed her around rudely during her first communion at St. Joseph’s because she was a “public school girl” and who resented the way the priests would visit her home to determine how much the family might contribute to church coffers every year. It wasn’t till much later that I came to cultivate a laser-beam loathing for the Roman Catholic Church as a major part of the locus of homophobia that poisoned the self-image of many of my gay friends and led in some cases to suicide.

St. Anthony’s was the model in my imagination for the Catholic school portrayed in one of the wittiest plays of all time, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it all for you, which came out in 1979 (and was later made into a movie starring Diane Keaton in 2001). Sister Mary Ignatius stood in front of the class in her traditional habit, channeled violence into her pointer stick, which she slapped against the blackboard and scared the bejeezus out of her students. The play offended the hell out of traditional Catholics and some tried to have it banned, but most of us who saw the play performed laughed till we cried. Take that, you goddam Catholic indoctrination machine, said the little voice in my head. Die, sucker die. There was some real hatred and resentment developed by the time I grew up and left Winsted for greener pastures.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings at reading the other morning that St. Anthony’s School, after educating/indoctrinating (you choose) kids as the longest functioning parochial school in the Hartford Archdiocese would be going out of business at the end of the current school year. The negative reaction to Roman Catholicism in America, exacerbated, and no doubt primarily brought on, by the disgust over the way it responded to the child abuse crisis in the church, has found its way into my home town. Not only are Catholic churches closing right and left. So are the schools.

I’d need to go into deep meditation to find out how I feel about this. Up here at the surface all I know is that the part of me that once raged at the church as an institution wants to go out and dance in the street. But another part of me, the one that has let go of the rage and has come to sympathize with the good Catholic folk who simply want their kids to be raised with high standards and look to the church to provide them, is washed over with sadness.

Mostly, though, it has little to do with religion. It has much more to do with the fact that I don’t like anybody messing with my historical memories. The older I get, the more I want history, or my childhood construction of it, to remain untouched by the ravages of time.

But the Buddhists are right. The only truth you can ever count on is that everything changes. Nothing ever remains the same.

photo credit: https://winstedphoenix.org/index.php/2020/03/16/st-anthony-school-to-close-after-155-years/