SPX II -- Where have all those classmates gone?

Like I said before, a class at St Pius X was a unit. For eight years we spent some 180-200 days/year at 6-7 hours/day together (for those counting that's around 10000 hours) in the same place doing the same thing. That's a LOT of shared time..... maybe more than is shared with anyone else in a lifetime. That being said, the day that graduation picture (previous post "Introduction to St Pius X") was taken was the last time I ever saw most of those classmates. It didn't seem strange at the time, we all went on our separate ways to new schools, new classmates and besides, even having shared all those hours in a common experience, many of us were like social strangers anyway. But still, looking back, it is a little sad to think we never hear or know about each other as life goes on and the years go by. I bet there would be a lot of interesting stories if we could somehow organize them.

Many, if not most, of the class went on to one of the several Catholic High Schools in Rochester. St. Agnes and Nazareth for girls and Aquinas for boys were the mainstays. I don't think anyone from our year went to Mercy and a few went to McQuaid, which was then about 10 years old. Some went to the newly opened Cardinal Mooney and maybe some to the also newly opened Bishop Kearney. And many went to Gates-Chili HS. The trek to the Catholic schools was long. It involved getting on early buses at our local stops, transferring at a place in Gates to a bus headed to one or more of the high schools and finally arriving about an hour after leaving home. Then a reverse repeat in the afternoon. Actually, it was a pretty amazing system that was dependable and free (well, we didn't know about school taxes at that age). The only downside was that if you missed the bus, either in the morning or in the afternoon, you had to find a way to get to where you were going - and that wasn't always convenient.

But back to SPX for a minute. I want to mention the connection between the school and the church. Since, in the "new" school, they were attached, we could easily move from one to the other. We did this for occasional confession days - like a class soul cleaning, and occasional masses and lenten services. We altar boys might be called out of class to go serve a funeral. Also, the convent was attached to the other end of the school. It was a mysterious place to us -- a place where all the nuns lived, our teachers. For all the time we spent around the nuns, I for one, knew very little about them. They wore those full black robes with white dressing around the head. All I do know is that some were very, very kind to me during those years - something that I have remembered with gratitude all my life.  I don't know how they managed to keep such order in such large classes but they did (in my memory).

Streetcorners

In some ways, 7th and 8th grades were awkward years. Too young to play the games that always kept us busy before and too young to really have any sort of independence or self-reliance, we just had to find the best ways to deal with our changing social awareness, hormones, relationships with adults, etc. Before online social networks, regular organized activities, even cable TV, that often meant just hanging out.

There weren't many places to go every day after school, weekends, or during those glorious and endless summers before having to work or even do a lot of homework.

What we often ended up doing was just walking around in small gangs which meant oftentimes "hanging out on street corners" as our parents often complained.

But, besides street corners, we were lucky to have had a house which was under construction, seemingly forever, where we could hang out in the afternoons after school. It was on Chestnut Drive, right across from the Volunteer Fire House #3. We were oblivious to any concern anyone might have had regarding these young kids milling around the house under construction and certainly we neither meant nor did any harm. It was just a place to go, a place to be. But I can just imagine all the eyebrows our presence must have raised.

We would also play basketball or pool at someone's house, but things were different when girls entered the equation. Somehow we got through it all. We knew so little, we talked so much, we dreamed, we fantasized...and eventually we got our driver's licenses.

Roadside Ice Cream Stores

On Chili Avenue, across the street from Washington Irving elementary school (in Gates), was the nearest ice cream store for we Chili folk in the mid twentieth century. Carvels had soft ice cream, usually only chocolate or vanilla. When we were kids, at seemingly random times,  our parents would load us into the station wagon to go to Carvels to get ice cream cones. Some were slow eaters, they could make an ice cream cone last forever taking one little lick at a time, and some were gobblers, like me,  who found the treat so tempting it would be devoured before we got back home .... 10 minutes, at most, away. As  teenagers we would often get sundaes -- my favorite was the Mexican Sundae which was hot fudge over vanilla ice cream with Spanish nuts sprinkled over the top. I remember the cones being 25 or 50 cents at the most, the sundaes maybe a dollar....but then, gas was 35 cents so I guess inflation makes it all comparable.

Carvels had competition. Abbotts, first at Charlotte Beach of Lake Ontario, and later across from the airport offered delicious custard, something I still seek out each trip back to Rochester (and swear, if I were more of a business entrepreneur, I could make a fortune on bringing to other parts of the country, just like Rochester hot dogs - reds & whites). And there was Meizensahl's Dairy (a dairy outlet we passed on the way to Conesus Lake) which had absolutely delicious ice cream in a great variety of flavors. Stopping at M's was a great treat after a day of swimming at the lake.

Nearly across the street from Carvels was the Idylbrook Farms (estab 1946) ice cream parlor. It was a little fancier than Carvels. You could go inside and sit down to enjoy your treats - unlike Carvels which was strictly drive by - and they served more than ice cream. I've been told that Idylbrook was a dating spot for Rochester west-enders in the days before the post-war suburbian mushroom.

One thing I always took for granted growing up in Rochester was the simple pleasure of pulling your car into an ice cream stand and getting a cone or a sundae or a milk shake. Sometimes we don't appreciate what we have until we don't have it anymore.