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Getting off the bus at Cathedral High School in the morning was never an eventful time. I was half asleep and often worried about the homework I half-completed or the upcoming test I really didn’t study that much for.
I shouldn’t say NEVER. There was the morning that Classical High kids painted up Cathedral. I think this was my junior or senior year, so probably 1979 or 1980: Cathedral High football players had weeks earlier vandalized the Classical building with purple paint before a big game. I know the guys who did it—they wrote stuff like “Pathers” instead of “Panthers,” and also painted “CHS,” not really thinking that the initials for Classical were the same. So after that one morning someone from Classical really got us. I forgot what they wrote: “Classical…Bulldogs…Cat High Sucks…” that kind of thing. One kid had gotten onto the roof and poured a can of paint down the side of the building. THAT was impressive.
But that’s not the incident I’m getting at. One morning, probably my freshman or sophomore year (so in the years ranging from 1977 to 1979), there was the hippie dude hanging out at the main bus ramp at Cathedral. “Wow, who the hell is that freak?” students commented as we rolled up the horseshoe driveway. “What is that hippie doing here?”
We used the word “hippie” even though this was no peace-and-love dude by any means. He was more like a biker—like the one in Cheech and Chong’s "Nice Dreams":
He was intently scanning the crowd that was getting off the buses. Definitely looking for someone in particular. Someone that owed him money? Someone that sold him shitty weed? Someone that ratted on him? What is he doing here?
In "Nice Dreams," the biker pisses in a jacuzzi full of people and grabs a slice of pizza from a delivery driver and slaps the bill of his baseball cap with it.
Then he approaches the apartment of Cheech’s girlfriend Donna:
“Hey, open the door.”
“Hey? Hey’s not here.”
“Hey, open the door.”
No, the hippie dude at Cathedral didn’t have a “Give me head ’til I’m dead” patch.
Anyway, in the movie, Donna refuses to open the door; the biker puts his fist through it, grabs the knob, unlocks it, and then all hell breaks loose. Was similar pandemonium going to break out in front of Cathedral that day?
The hippie dude just kept scanning the crowd until Sister Mildred (below) came out and confronted him. I couldn’t hear much of the conversation, except, “private property” and “calling the police” uttered by Sister Millie.
If he gave her any backtalk, I guess she could have called in some reinforcement, like Sister Julie Edwina (below), the school disciplinarian, but she was tiny. With her small body holding up her disproportionately large head, she earned the nickname “The Ant.”
This called for bigger, stronger nuns. Sister Mary James could have (man)handled him:
Sister Mary James (above) had gained some notoriety my freshman year when word got out one Monday that she had grabbed an unruly senior at Cathedral’s “Gong Show” over the weekend, bent him over her knee, and spanked him.
Or Sister Millie could have called upon Sister Thomas Gertrude (above), a fireplug of a woman. Once, when teaching our chemistry class, a kid in the hall was making a lot of noise with his locker, slamming its door multiple times. She confronted him:
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“This locker won’t close!” he said with frustration.
“You’re disturbing my class.”
“The thing won’t close!”
“Look, I’ll shove your head in that locker if you don’t get out of here.”
End of conversation. We didn’t dare laugh out loud.
I guess the Hippie Dude could have been a job for Wally the Cop, but at the time he was busy at the parking lot at the lower level entrance next to the gym, collecting quarters from students who drove to school—and telling them to slow down and to not burn rubber.
Or a social studies teacher—a future US congressman—could have used his political skills to defuse the situation.
Then again, it was probably best that Sister Millie handle the affair. No need for the tougher nuns. The hippie dude, with that “head” bounce in his step, walked away—he must have parked on a side street off of Roosevelt, because that’s where he headed. The student who had pissed him off was off the hook—at least for that morning.
We never got the story on who the hippie dude was. That was weird, because gossip and rumors usually ran through Cathedral like wildfire. I wonder if anyone from my bus (Sixteen Acres Cathedralites) or any others present for that scene remember it. Probably not. The only reason it came back into my consciousness was that I recently cruised by and took a photo of Pope Francis Preparatory School, which replaced Cathedral a few years after the 2011 tornado wrecked my alma mater.
In illustrating this story, I looked for photos of Cathedral’s main entrance, and I found a few, including this one of a boarded up auditorium after the tornado blew out a few windows.
In the strangest feeling of déjà vu, my mind wandered back to the night in high school when Ray Vadnais and I drove by our school and he had to throw up. He told me to pull into Cathedral, got out, and dry heaved. No puke. “Think of eating out Julie Hammond (not her real name—one of the fattest, ugliest girls at Cathedral). That certainly helped: vomit flowed like Niagara Falls.
Ray, the biggest vandal in the Acres, staggered back to the car, grabbed a full bottle of Michelob, and fired it at an auditorium window, shattering both bottle and window. I knew the neighbors kept a watchful eye on Cathedral, so we hightailed it out of there. We didn’t get caught. The next day I returned to the scene of the crime to see the boarded-up panel.
I can only hope my teenage son doesn’t’ pull shit like this when he gets his driver’s license.
Speaking of Cathedral’s neighbors, how did they ever put up with the “alley” between yards connecting Surrey Road with Cambria Street? It was designed as a cut-through for students going to Cathedral and Dryden Memorial Elementary, but it also became a place for teens to get stoned. The Cambria Street side of the alley (below) became a destination for cigarette and pot smokers before and after school. It also became the scene of the occasional planned fight when two students wanted to settle things off school grounds, beyond the prying eyes of teachers, and they didn’t want to drive or walk all the way to Nathan Bill Park to duke it out.
One time, on the Cambria Street side, narcs staked the scene out and approached a Cathedral guy they had seen holding a bag of weed. They frisked him, emptied his pockets, but there was no plastic baggie. “Where is it?” they asked. “What are you talking about? He replied. They looked around the alley. Nothing. The one place they didn’t look: unbelievably, the students brown paper lunch bag, where he had secured it!
I know I’m just scratching the surface here. So many Cathedral stories; so little time to tell them. Cathedralite readers: do you have any Cat High tales? Leave a comment!
