> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Nun recalls joining the convent after college and staying 53 years - URL: https://www.smdp.com/013105-story-20050131-2/ - Published: 2005-01-31T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T06:03:08.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Community, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homeless Why did you become a nun? “Well, I went to Saint Mary College in Leavenworth, Kan., which is a college our community Sisters of Charity run, and I was very impressed with the nuns. They were very common sense, and they really liked each other. You could tell. There was this kind of family spirit among them, and they challenged us intellectually and in every way. We lived in a segregated world, and my parents had always said segregation was wrong, but your parents say something, and you kind of listen with half an ear. I got to college, and the sisters made us think. They made us realize that as women we had a tremendous obligation to the world, whether you were a wife or a mother or a single woman or a sister, you had an obligation to try and make the world better. “I joined the convent thinking, well, I’ll stay six months. Then it was, ‘I’ll stay a year.’ I’ve been in 53 years.” Why the uncertainty at first? “There were things I liked. There were things I didn’t like. A disciplined life is very hard when you’ve been the youngest in a large family, because you get spoiled by the older ones. So when you join the community, you find that we’re all treated alike. Just because you’re that sweet little baby in the family doesn’t mean you’re any different. But the moment I started teaching I knew that this was where I belonged. “You give up having your own family, but I love the freedom of being able to pick up and go wherever I was needed. You’d be teaching in Topeka one year where the next year you might be in Billings, Mont. I’m able to pick up and pack up and scoot off and go do what needs to be done.” Would you have liked to start a family? “This is going to sound ridiculous. I never minded not having children. I was raised in a big family with nieces and nephews all over the place. There were grandkids while I was still in school. I would love to be a grandmother. To have grandchildren would be so much fun. I think there’s nothing in the world as marvelous as a 2 1/2-year-old mind. You learn more in the first six years of your life than you learn in all the rest after. A baby, 2 1/2, is so open to everything.” Why did you leave teaching to work at Saint John’s? “Well, I taught for years. I have multiple sclerosis, and my health began to fail. It isn’t fair to kids if you’re in and out of the hospital all the time, and in my last year I asked the kids who had real learning problems. They weren’t retarded or special, but every school’s got kids who for one reason or another can’t learn. I just ate them alive. I loved them. You’d hear about their families and their lives, and you just thought ‘How do you even get up in the morning and put your shoes on, let alone go to school?’ “I’d always taught, so they asked me to come out and write a book. I thought, well sure, I’ll write a book. Well, my word, did I ever find out the real truth. Writing a book is very difficult. Writing a history is horribly difficult, cause you have to tell the truth and do all these interviews. For every statement you make, you have to have two oral sources and two written sources, and people’s memories are never the same. The best day in the world was somebody else’s worst. > “We could not join the country club, because we were Catholic. Everybody was very cordial the day we met after the cross burning. I’m sure when they met Daddy downtown, they were all, ‘Well hello John. How are you?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, hello Tom,’ even though Tom had maybe set his lawn on fire last night.” “This book came out for the 50th jubilee of the hospital. I enjoyed it. I was very relieved when it was over. It was ironic, ’92 was this kind of high point, and then we had the earthquake. “We had to close for 11 months. When we reopened, and it was like opening a new place. In a way it was wonderful, and in a way it was very difficult. People expected things to be just like before, and things are never how they used to be.” How do you think Santa Monica has changed? “We always believed Santa Monica had a wonderful future. It was a darling little town, and then it’s become a great big town now. People that have been here a long time, forever and a day and not just at Saint John’s, kind of mourn the loss of the small town they grew up in, but it has a lot of wonderful opportunities. “We like being in this community. We work hard for this community. We do all kinds of charitable work, and I’m impressed by the number of our employees who work at shelters, who leave here at the end of a shift and go to shelters. A lot of our employees are social workers, and there’s a real sense of going out and helping the community.” What’s your favorite thing about Santa Monica? “The ocean. As someone who came from the Midwest and the South, I used to call it the river until people correct me. ‘Oh, it’s an ocean.’ And I like the way the town looks. It’s just fascinating to me that you get winter here with sunshine and no snow. I like the people.” Your least favorite? “We have a tremendous problem with the homeless, with homeless people. That’s something we do that’s really degrading, saying the homeless. They are homeless people. We can’t seem to reach a solution. I’d like to see more low-cost housing, but I don’t know the solution and that’s what bothers me.” *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 31, 2005.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/013105.pdf?ref=smdp.com)