Nun Too Happy

September 18, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Nun Too Happy!

By Leo Racicot

The good Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur would be horrified to see or worse try to read my spidery, hieroglyphic scrawl; they labored tirelessly to drum into us students the Palmer Penmanship Method. I sometimes can’t read my own writing a minute after writing it. For years I did my creative projects in longhand on yellow legal pads like I’d heard real writers did. I did this until the final product became indecipherable. Thankfully, I’ve succeeded in transitioning from the pen-to-paper method to the fingers-to-keyboard technique.

The nuns of Saint Patrick’s School in those times worked, and worked valiantly, to teach us many skills they felt would serve us as we journeyed through life. They could be cruel in doing so but that was the way of a Catholic School education in the 1960s. My friend, David McKean, for example, was a southpaw, performed his cursive painlessly with his left hand. This didn’t sit well with the nuns who decided David needed to be retrained in the proper way to write; conformity was their strong suit, the way it must be which seemed to be the tenor of the times, governmental, cultural, societal. They wrapped David’s right hand in tightly wound elastics to keep it intact. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he winced in pain struggling to shapeshift his hand into what the sisters told him was the one and only way to write. The poor kid was prone to nosebleeds through his school years. And no wonder…

Equally harsh, especially on our knees, was the morning habit of classroom prayer. Each day we would as a unit say the rosary along with then-Cardinal of Boston, Richard Cushing, who’d be piped in over the intercom. Taught to obey the commands of the nuns’ clickers, crude, hand-held wooden contraptions designed to keep kids in line, like trained seals, we’d first stand up next to our desk then kneel down on our hard wooden seats and recite the second half of the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be following Cushing’s recitation of the first half of the prayer. The rosary is a long prayer and Cushing spoke very slowly, his low, bass growl sounding like Boris Karloff seeping through the disembodied wall before us. Glory be is right! I don’t remember how long we children were on our knees but it was a… long… time…

Equally torturous, if not downright terrifying, was the nuns telling us that if we were bad or crossed a line, we’d be taken to The Spanking Machine, waiting for us behind the doors of the press (the press was the name they gave to the back-of-the-room closets — nuns gave odd names to lots of things. For years, we sat perfect still, hands locked in a praying position, silent as mice, in fear that if we so much as budged, the doors of the press would be flung open and Sister would drag us by the ear to THE SPANKING MACHINE. It never occurred to us that every morning when we hung our coats and belongings in the closet, we saw no such beast. I imagined that until it was called for, this torture device remained invisible until needed to inflict whacks on a naughty child’s backside. Alsoo unforgettable and a lesson in learning to think twice before impulsively letting loose with a curse word was the time Alfred Bellerose let the F bomb fly and was made to eat a bar of soap in front of the whole class. I don’t mean lick it. The sister forced him to take a chunk out of it and chew it. “That’s it, Bellerose. Get all the juices out of there!”, she ordered him. The screwed-up look on Alfred’s face as he did as he was told is still with me.

Medieval disciplinary tactics notwithstanding, I have a lasting gratitude for the nuns. They gave us a lot of good. Many of them were intelligent women, passing on their ample knowledge. In mid-century America, entering the convent was for women if not the only means to receiving a solid education, it also provided an escape from the limited path females in those days were expected to follow, roles as housewives, as secretaries. The religious life provided an accessible avenue to an intellectual life, future professional work they might otherwise be denied. Love ‘em or not, the sisters guaranteed we students received a solid educational foundation. Sure, the times inflicted some emotional scars at school as indelible as getting the strap from dad, a spanking from mom at home. Those were the times. That was how things were done. I survived the strictness, The Spanking Machine, the molasses tones of Cardinal Cushing, lived to tell the tale, this tale, in fact, told with a tinge of bitterness, sure, but with more than a whole lot of gratitude and praise.

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