<Begin Segment 46>

TI: So how big did the Notre Dame High School get? I mean, how many students?

HS: Well, Notre Dame High School was, the biggest it got would be about two hundred students.

TI: Wow, so it was a sizeable...

HS: Oh, it was a sizeable, and eventually it was, the least it got was about, maybe about 150, maybe less than 150. But the thing about it was we had some top-notch teachers amongst them. Well, French, for instance, they all spoke French. They were completely immersed in French, they knew how to teach French immediately. But we also had music, there was a, some of them were musicians, but they also had math, history, all these things at the high school level.

TI: Now, I want to understand -- and they taught this all in French?

HS: They could, no, not in French, but in English.

TI: Oh, so they were bilingual.

HS: They were bilingual, all of them were completely bilingual. We're talking about high quality people in this area. It's surprising that the sisters, some of them, came, of course, came from very prominent families. For instance, one that was called Sister St. Raphael was a very beautiful nun. Her family, her father, was one of the executives of Dupont in New Jersey, but she had, of course, become a sister and gone up to, to Lennoxville. They arrived, in fact, during the time they arrived in a great big Cadillac convertible, hardly getting by those narrow streets. It was so big, but it would cause a sensation, of course, this huge car. They had come all the way from New Jersey to see how their daughter was doing. One summer they arrived, I've forgotten what summer it was, about the summer of '44 or '45, they showed up. And it was, it was, they had a spectacular car because it was a great big, one of those 1945, '44 convertible Cadillacs, that had those big fins and things like that.

TI: And they drove from New Jersey?

HS: They had driven up all the way from New Jersey. And so you were, and then I know that, I was told that one of the sisters, who's a music teacher, her father had been vice president of CNR at that time. CNR would have been the equivalent of Amtrak or whatever the railroad, or Santa Fe, one of those big, big railway setups. So, and all of the teachers were, an area of expertise that they had were really quite knowledgeable. They were really expert people in each of the fields that we had. So much so that the education that we received, which was still basic education, still reading, writing and arithmetic, we didn't have, we had very little, we had no lab equipment, we had no field trips, of course, you didn't need field trips, everything was put into things like French, Latin, literature, history, social studies that they used to call it then, and math, especially math, and sciences. And so each, each teacher had certain expertise in each of these areas. We had six of them, and we had grades from grade nine to twelve, and each year they graduated people from our high school. And in fact, when I left, I left, of course, we left in '46, so I was still not graduated. I had started, by time of, by the fall of '43, they got the school going -- by the winter of '43. We were a little bit slow on the mark in terms of the, my grade nine, but we were, they caught us up. We worked on it, and so I got up to grade eleven, and then I went, when my sister and I were, she was also a year behind me, so she was in high school by the time we left New Denver, came to Edmonton, both of us, when we went to Garnell High School in Edmonton, which was a big, big city high school. Here we came from some hole in the wall. Well, within a month or two, both of us were at the top of our classes in (the big city school).

TI: So the education you were getting at New Denver was, was that kind of...

HS: It was excellent, yeah, no question about it. We received, it was basic, but you got some very (good classes). in fact, when I went there, my French, I was an average student. I wasn't a brilliant student or anything like that, there were other ones much more brilliant that I were, I was. But even my basic French that I received there, when I got to, got to Edmonton, I remember the French teacher coming up to me and said she's entering me into the French competition in the province. I said, "Why?" She said, "Because your French is so good." I said, "Well, no, my French is very average." I really, I can't go into a competition like that, because I know my French is not that good. "Oh, yes, your..." well, I was so much ahead of the rest of the class, that's just because they were not, it wasn't a, it wasn't a, French was a necessity for, for getting to university, but it wasn't something that they spent very much time with. And so my French was so much better than the average in the class. Eventually, she relented and said, "Okay, you don't have to go in it." I was relieved that I didn't get into the French competition, because they would have found out how average I was.

<End Segment 46> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.