A pouffy pink chiffon calf-length dress bought at Miss Friths. An orchid corsage from her date still squashed in a book. A gift of a trendy new transistor radio.
A dry grad dance at Club Tango on Oak Bay Avenue chaperoned by parents.
Staying up all night with friends the tradition back in 1959.
All very nice. But the capper that set the graduating girls from St. Anns Academy apart from just about any other grads in Canada had to math lesson with Sister Mary Kieran that followed the all-nighter on Saturday morning. The good nun was determined that the girls who struggled with trigonometry were indeed going to pass Grade 12 and a grad party wasnt about to get in the way.
At 9 oclock, I was in the classroom she had us up at the board, laughs Dorothy Leard Pearce 50 years after the fact. I dont even know what trigonometry is any more.
Her dress, needless to say, revealed no cleavage very, very proper and shes definitely not crazy about it today. A lot of the girls then borrowed gowns, Pearce recalls. It didnt really matter so much. Limo? Heavens no. I think my dad let my date and I use his car. A 1947 Mercury. Nobody had fancy anything. We looked forward to a dress-up dance but it wasnt a huge big thing like they make it now. It just seems like its gone overboard.
Back then, most of the Catholic student body didnt even think about grad until May, compared to todays year-long fixation.
After a demanding education, complete with Latin class and no spares, she was off to clerical school and a bookkeeping job she loved at B.C. Packers.
We wanted to get out and get a job and earn money, Pearce says, who says grads then seemed older than grads today.
I was ready to be married and have children at 22, she recalls.
The class of 59 had only 25 members and was quite close because of it. The reunions started around 1969 and continued as annual lunches for the group with smaller get-togethers whenever and culminated June 6. Two dozen grads, near grads, would-be grads and teaching nuns shared the half-century celebration at Samuels Restaurant so close to their old academic stomping grounds.
Trudy-Anne Richardson couldnt make it because she was in New York City at the United Nations, exclaims attendee Joanne Begley Rogers, who has no idea what her former classmate might have been doing there. But Countess Elfrieda Blank, formerly Schemitsch, who lives in Austria most of the time and Kelowna the rest, showed up.
Rogers was in Grade 11 in 1959, and as such helped planned the grad, which also included a fancy dinner made by the nuns. The graduation ceremony with white gown and cap and red roses was held in September to ensure the girls really did gradate from rigorous St. Anns where school rules included no gum chewing while in uniform and giving up seats on city buses.
Graduation joy was tempered by the residual trauma of the death of Linda Henly on March 25, 1959 following a car crash on the Malahat.
She was an extraordinarily popular girl the spark plug of the class, says Dawn Moist, now Aleknevicus. As far as I know, it was the first death wed ever experienced death.
The grads somberly donned their white caps and gowns normally reserved until September to form an honour guard at Lindas burial mass at St. Andrews Cathedral.
Lindas devastated twin sister Marcia went on to graduate.
The tragedy, along with the premature passing along of some other class members may be one reason why the remaining girls are closer than the norm. On the 50th anniversary, the class of 1959 remembers Dolores Szpradowski, Monique Fortin, Cathy Sweeney, Berta Lopez and Pat Leahy.
As one classmate told Pearce, who spent a week in hospital after the crash: I think that was the day we all grew up.
Still, Sister Frieda Marie, now Sister Frieda Raab, taught at St. Anns in 1959. Shes known several of the girls and life has not been a bed of roses, she says. They have lived through that and come out as very whole women and to me that was the test of the mettle.
In her day, high school grads were ready to go out into the world. Sister Raab is clearly not thrilled with all this fluff about grad starting in Kindergarten and topped off by Grade 12s who want to repeat high school courses. I just dont get it.
At the same time, she sees tremendous pressure on todays grads that her era did not experience. We werent as materialistic or as affected by peers.
She does remember grad as really important to the girls back then. And at St. Anns they had to work harder to find dates , she adds.
She is gratified that even girls who left St. Anns in Grade 8 or 9 still felt part of the class of 1959.
Dawn Moist, now Aleknevicus, attended the reunion but didnt graduate in 1959 because she found St. Anns too demanding. She remembers the time she and friend from public school worked on a paper together, handing it in at their respective schools. Moist got a low mark; her friend garnered praise.
After leaving in September of her final year, she joined the air force. Every time she returned to Victoria from Quebec or Ontario, the first thing she did was contact friends from St. Anns After Id been nice to my parents for a few minutes, she quips.
She went to the ceremony as a guest and still feels part of the grad class.
Theres a lot to be said for girls going to school with girls, Pearce says. You never had any feel feeling of competition amongst us as far as the guys and it definitely leads to closer ties with all the girls. When we meet, we dont say What have you been doing? We carry on as before.
kdedyna@tc.canwest.com