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).