Early Days

All in all you're just another brick in the wall

Pink Floyd

D Vautier
1-1-2015

The first part of my life was from when I started putting events together in a sequential way (first grade or so) and ended when I emerged from my nuclear family and went to the seminary at St. Edwards in ninth grade. I do remember the moment when I really started putting together a day to day path and not living in jumps and flashes. I was erasing a 1950 calendar so it could be used for next year and grumbling about why someone would mark up a perfectly good calendar. My brother pointed out that you use a different calendar each year because the days of the months changed. He also explained how the world series worked and at that very moment my mind started functioning sequentially.

Grand Street.

When our family moved to Everett we lived in a bunch of different places but by 1946 we landed at our permanent home, 2317 Grand. It was in the Bayside district and only a few blocks from Immaculate Conception Catholic School. My mom asked me if I would like to start school and she took me there and introduced me to the first grade nun. I told her I wanted to wait one more year so I could be a little bit bigger and more able to cope, and besides I could take care of my baby sister Marie. She said OK.

School begins

Bayside tended to be occupied with those of greater income. Houses had a nice view of Gardner Bay and Hat Island. If you go east to the Riverside part of town you find a population somewhat less prosperous. And there was always that ever present smell, the awful awful smell from that stinky pulp mill. That was Riverside so who in the world wanted to live on Riverside. Our telephone number CEdar 1810 told it all. If you lived on Bayside you had a CE prefix, but the prefix RI for Riverside said otherwise.

This is the Immaculate Conception school
on Hoyt street in Everett, still unchanged after
so many years. Some things just never change especially red brick catholic schools.

It was my good fortune to spend my first two years of schooling at Immaculate Conception Catholic School with my sister. The school first opened in 1924. I learned all about Spot and Puff and could add 2 + 2 and wrote out endless pages of repetitious letters in cursive, pages upon pages of loops. The nuns were very nice but also strict. You could not leave your desk or whisper. The school nuns were the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary I believe and their habits had the usual white side blinders. My first grade teacher was named Sister Adelade Marie and she was fat but sweet. My second grade teacher was sister Eilene Marie but I don’t remember much about her. Nuns did not have last names. They were supposed to renounce their last names and give themselves totally to god. The pastors were Fr. Fitzgerald, Fr. Walch, and then Fr. Conger. Mom went to Mass every day just as the kids had to do and she was a great observer and assigned special names for the upper class misbehavers. There was “the great unspanked”, “the unholy three” plus a lot of other kids that received appropriate labels.

The Original Church on The east side of Hoyt Street was an older wood structure which I thought was beautiful with all it's ornate glass and statues. It burned down about 1960 I believe and was replaced by a real ugly thing that I could never bring myself to go into. The red school building still remains much as It always will with its small blacktop playfield.

This is the third incarnation of the Immaculate Conception Church on Hoyt street across from the school. The original church was better looking.

Switching the pitch

In third grade my mom, in her inscrutable wisdom decided to send me to the other catholic school way over on the other side of town, Our Lady of Perpetual Help on riverside of all places where the "low-brows" lived. Apparently she got into a huff with somebody at Immaculate. I never really found out why. Suddenly I was thrust into a foreign environment of complete strangers way over there on Riverside run by a different set of nuns, the Dominican Sisters. On my first day at school I got into a fight with the class bully but at least I made my presence known in a proper and altogether fitting way. They scolded me and sent me home. Mom asked me "Did you beat him up?" I said "I sure did."

Perpetual Help School

Perpetual Help is a two story red tee-shaped brick building that sits on the east side of Cedar Street just north of Everett Avenue. The original church was started on April 23, 1893. A school opened soon after that in 1899 and was called St. Dominic's Academy and had around 70 kids. The present brick structure, including church, school, rectory and hall, were built in 1925. It will probably remain there for another 100 years, at least the church will. Who knows how long? The St. Vincent de Paul second hand store was opened by the parish on Hewitt Avenue in 1941. The store was one of my absolute favorite haunts. Mom would always be willing to give me a quarter or two to go to the “junk store.” There were three junk stores in town but the coolest by far was “St. Vinnies.” In 1987 or so Perpetual Help School shut down. In 1994 Perpetual Help Parish and it’s old rival Immaculate Conception became one pastoral unit because there were not enough priests to support both parishes.

When I attended PHS Fr. Long was the pastor and he was pastor for a long time. Fr. Buck was the assistant pastor.

The Convent

Across Cedar street from the Perpetual Help Church was St. Dominic’s Convent or formerly known as St. Dominic's Academy because it was used as a parochial school until the Perpetual Help school was built across Cedar street. It then became a Seminary Convent for the training of nuns. When I first arrived in 1950 they had about 10 postulants, and maybe 4 novices. Me and some of my classmates would sneak over during recess sometimes and watch the postulants play volleyball. They were all young girls and wore these light blue uniforms. They were so hot. We never saw much of the novices who probably had to hide away and pray somewhere. I also had other opportunities to get a glimpse of the postulants because I had to take music lessons three times a week at the convent, thanks to my mother's misdirected notion that I may posses some kind of desire to play, which i didn't. I absolutely hated the music lessons but looked forward to catching a glimpse of the postulants in their petite sexy blue. There was also an old retired priest who often sat in the courtyard Fr. Vincent Lamb O. P. who said that I was blessed by God with my name and he used to tell me all the great things I would eventually do, which I didn't. Fat chance there, but it was kind of a mystical thing anyway, the Fr, Lamb encounters and all.

Anyway the convent was constructed and dedicated in 1899. It was a very imposing wood structure which dominated the view from riverside. The City was always worried about a danger of fire, especially with all those young girls living there and all the candles and curtains. So in 1963 it was finally torn down and replaced with a newer smaller structure. The nun's residence and the seminary was then moved to Edmonds. All that remains today is a parking lot.