Winter 2008 - Sacred Heart Schools

Sacred Heart college
girls relaxing on the
Main Building east
lawn after a long
day of studying.
“They knew we were cloistered
nuns, so they helped us add
college classes to our curriculum.”
classroom in the 70s and 80s), splendid congés, gouté in the
courtyard, primes, visits from our families on Sunday, café
au lait at breakfast, and much study. Bedtime was early, but
it was possible to communicate far into the night with next
door neighbors with Morse code.”
The college girls attended school in the Main Building
along with other girls from ages three to eighteen. They
created their own social life, but it was difficult since Menlo
Park was very isolated at the time. The college girls lived on
the third floor and because so many of the girls had friends
in sororities at other universities, they decided to form their
own which they named the “Theta Thirda Flora’s.”
Sister Welch, who attended her first two years of college
at Sacred Heart, fondly remembered that “[college] was
wonderful. The Stanford professors came over and gave their
services to us. They knew we were cloistered nuns and they
helped us add college classes to our curriculum.”
Sister Mary “Be” Mardel (SHP ’35, SFCW ’39)
remembers that the “college was very small because many
women did not go to college in those days. It was very
isolated and was not much bigger than twenty to thirty
students at a time.”
After a while it became obvious that the college needed
its own home without a primary or secondary school
attached, and needed to be in a location that would attract
more students. Since San Francisco did not have a Catholic
college for women, it was an obvious choice of location. At
the time, the beloved Reverend Mother Rosalie Hill was
Vicar of the Western Vicariate of the Sacred Heart order,
charged with building, designing and/or creating Sacred
Heart schools, including finding a new location for College
of the Sacred Heart Menlo. Sr. Welch was assigned to be
Reverend Mother’s driver for her scouting trips to San
Francisco and remembered taking her up and down all of the
hills in San Francisco which frightened the Reverend Mother.
When she saw the site of Lone Mountain, she knew she had
found the right location and she negotiated with the San
Francisco Archdiocese and Archbishop Hanna (who was very
supportive of the college) to purchase the land.
The Right Reverend Monsignor Joseph M. Gleason
moved with the college from Menlo Park to San Francisco
along with his important library of over 40,000 volumes
that formed the cornerstone of the library for the College.
From 1930 until 1932 when Lone Mountain construction
was completed, the college operated out of 2040 Broadway
in San Francisco. In 1932, the campus for the San Francisco
College for Women was opened, and in 1978, it became a
part of the University of San Francisco.
In 1937, Sister Welch returned to live on our campus
after taking her final vows. She earned a Masters and PhD
from Stanford and later became Mistress of Studies (today
known as Academic Dean) serving in this position for the
Western Province until 1963. She is also well remembered
by her students as the caretaker of the three Great Danes
that served as the school’s mascots and security force.
Sister Connie Welch passed away shortly after she was interviewed
for this article. She entered Sacred Heart as a freshman in 1921 and
graduated in 1925. She continued her studies
at the College of the Sacred Heart Menlo
and graduated in 1929. She later completed
a Master’s and PhD at Stanford. She joined
the RSCJs in 1929, took her first vows in 1932
and began teaching at Sacred Heart that
same year until 1963. She was much loved
by her students. In addition, she served as the
Vicariate Mistress of Studies for the Western Province. When she left
Sacred Heart in 1963, she went to teach at the College for Women
in San Francisco, now University of San Francisco (USF) until 1978,
at which time she moved back to Atherton to retire at Oakwood.
She continued to work after she retired, teaching underprivileged
children how to read. In 1987, she celebrated her Golden Jubilee for
her 50 years as an RSCJ. In 2007 she was moved briefly to Our Lady
of Fatima in Saratoga, CA, a full-care nursing facility, where she died
peacefully, on January 1, 2008.
Wi n t e r 2 0 0 8 H e a r t o f t h e M a t t e r 15