Then I went to high school and I was a good student, but my mother was very strict with me. In penmanship and she would say, “Why don’t you get 100, 98 isn’t good enough!” and she was a real task master.

I was a good student and I skipped a grade in high school. I went to Diocesan high school called Bishop MacDonald. I went to an annex for two years which was somewhat close to where I was born. My parents lived in that street because my mother lived around the corner from my father. My uncle, the attorney was a grand knight for the Knights of Columbus and my mother and father met at the Knights of Columbus and then they were married.

My grandfather, my maternal grandfather who was Irish said, “Get rid of that Kraut! I don’t want him here!”

Apparently my one uncle said how he fed him castor oil because – I think he took castor oil to get my father out of there because my grandfather was carrying on so much.

No, they gave it to my uncle so that – he said he took it because he figured then my father would go, but they married anyway. It was like the Italian and Irish. I mean, I know a lot of families where they just got half fit if you marry an Italian.

My grandparents spoke German but my father only knew a few words. My other grandmother, actually, her maiden name was German but her people came to upstate New York in the 1800. She had, you know, sisters, and they were in the funeral business so she came from a family that had more money.

My grandfather, I guess, with being out of work and then he had health problems later on because he was the first one to die. But, I generally had a good childhood because I was spoiled by my aunts and uncles because I was the only girl for a long time. Then on my father’s side I had a cousin but she was the fair-haired girl over there, so, you know?

I was a good student, but first when I went to school I ran home every day for four months. We had 75 children in the class and we had an old nun, Sister Cortilla, and she was tall, a tall woman, you know, she was a Dominican. I had Dominicans most of my life. Even in nursing school I had Dominicans.

I still got over that, and then, of course, the boys would tease me or they’d come up and want to kiss me and things like that but I used to say, “Yuck!” One nun she thought it was funny. I remember some of the boys; they were slapped with the ruler. I remember that, but I had very good penmanship and I was a good student.

The only thing, just before I graduated there was another girl but the nun liked her better than me because I didn’t like her. She was very rude, and so she gave her just like a half point more so she got the general excellence. At any rate, I was still up from her.

I went to high school the first two years and then I went to Brooklyn right near Addis Field in Flatbush, and there were like 600 in our graduating class. They came from all over Long Island, and Brooklyn and Queens, Nassau, and you had to take a test and my parents couldn’t afford one of these private academies. Some of my classmates went there.

But, I did very well in school. I never had any problem. I graduated when I was 17. My uncle who was the attorney had had appendicitis and he was in the hospital but it was sort of walled off. He had a young student nurse there and I think he took a shine to her. He never married because there was just no way he could. He sort of, you know, talked about nursing. Anyway, I met Angela and she was a very nice person. My mother said, “If you are a nurse you’ll always have a job.” So, that’s when I went to nursing school.

I had gone to the hospital to visit my uncle a lot of times. It was St. Catherine’s in Brooklyn which is not longer there. It was a three-year program. The Dominican nuns were there. They weren’t always gracious, some of them. They were kind of mean.

But, I had a good time in nursing school. I had to be in at 10 o’clock at night. They only had one night, and then we did an affiliation in Brooklyn at a state hospital and then also for contagious diseases where we had people with typhoid and polio. That was in the height of polio.