St. Anne's Orpphanage and the Orange Story

My brother in South Carolina has been after me to write this story for some time now and it will take some time to complete so please be patientI It goes way back to I would say the summer of 1943 during the heart of World War 11. I was a little kid going to Middlesex Ave School and it was summer vacation. I lived on Gordon St. off Hamilton St. and there was a girl who lived up the end of the street who would disappear each summer. ((She later became a nun.) She came from a French Canadian family.Her name was Jeanny Benoit. One day I stopped her as she was walking up the street and asked her where she went every summer, " Oh, I go up to St. Anne's.Orphanage. You play baseball and they even give you oranges!" Well, getting fresh fruit during the war was a real luxury and made me sit up and listen. The first thing I did was tell this story to my mother. I teased my mother to send me to the orphanage for a vacation, Whatever prompted my mother to do so I do not know, but she telephoned St. Anne's Orphanage and told them she had to go into the hospital and needed someone to take care of her little boy (me). The nuns agreed to take care of me for the next two week for %7 a week and that is what happened--and we did get oranges and played baseball. We kids also slept in dorms and were handed two pieces of felt each morning to put on the bottom of our pajama feet and we padded around a parquet floor which had a statue of the Virgin Mary in it and a polihed floor so shiny it would almost blind you. It was a playroom that nobody played in, but the floor was the shiniest floor I have ever seen. My mother came to see ma at the end of the first week and I begged her to get me out of there, but a bargain was a bargain and I wasn't getting out until the two weeks were up.I never saw Jeanny during that two weeks, but I learned how to stuff and sew mattresses (and cut my fingers). became friends with a set of triplets whom I had to leave behind as real orphans, and find out what it was like to march with nuns and clackers everywhere we went and also to have corn flakes for breakfast each morning with the sugar already mixed in the milk.My mother showed a lot of wisdom in teaching a young child such a lesson about having a family. Years later I had occasion to return to St,Anne's as a teacher (GED) and that parquet floor looked pretty much as it did years before. (I didn't see anyone with oranges though.)