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rom Holy Cross School to Charlie’s Candy Shop was one block. You could say goodbye to Sister Alodia McHale in her black robe and seagull headdress and then run to Charlie’s in two minutes. Licorice was a penny. In 1933 many kids didn’t run to Charlie’s because they didn’t have a penny. Mary Sullivan did, though. Her father worked at the Union Pacific railyards down by the river and her mom worked at a fruit cannery and then the University of Portland dining hall in the evenings. Her parents earned enough to pay tuition at Holy Cross for their six children every month: one dollar. The Sullivan children walked seven blocks to school each morning from their house at Fiske and Amherst. School was ruled by the Sisters of Saint Mary of Oregon, the oldest of whom was Sister Clementine Gescher, who taught second grade and was impossibly old. The sisters lived on the top floor of the brick schoolhouse until Father Thomas Jackson became pastor in 1936 and had pity on the women and swapped quarters with them, letting them live in the ample priest’s house and then building them a convent adjacent to Charlie’s Candy Shop. Father Jackson, a converted Jew, a burly balding angel, had been sent to the parish after the previous pastor’s car plunged off Willamette Boulevard down the bluff and he died. Girls wore blue dresses with white collars. Boys did not have to wear uniforms. Mary considered this unfair and took it out on the boys on the baseball field. Father Jackson told Mary that the first time he ever saw her she was sliding ferociously into home plate in a muddy spray. On weekends, the Sullivans walked to the movie house near Portsmouth and Lombard, called the Crest, or took the longer trek, crossing the manmade railroad route known locally as the Cut, to the Saint Johns Theater, where Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper movies cost a nickel. At Fiske and Lombard was the grocery run by a Japanese man who sent the Sullivan kids a sack of candy each time their father paid off his grocery bill. On some Saturdays, the Sullivans would wander down the bluff from the university to the harbor, where they would greet sailors from Europe and the Orient. One had to be careful on the way home across campus, because the Holy Cross brothers tended cattle, including a surly bull who once took offense and chased Mary and her party of explorers across a grassy field. At school, Mary mostly stayed clear of trouble, except for the afternoon
she socked Eddie Armstrong with a sharp left cross. For this crime she was sentenced to the nuns’ parlor. She escaped, at the urging of her brother. Charlie’s Candy Shop, it may be, salved her spirits. (It would later serve spirits; it became the famous Twilight Room tavern in 1946.) Mary went on to attend Roosevelt High, where she met Richard Schiffbauer. They married in 1943. They had eight children; all eight of whom went to Holy Cross School. The University’s Holy Cross priests and brothers arrived on The Bluff in 1902. In 1904 the priests founded Holy Cross parish, less than a mile from campus. In parish school, called the Institute, opened in September of 1912. All male at first, Holy Cross boarded boys from miles around. Older boys tended the boiler in the basement and helped keep the place clean. Girls were allowed to enroll in 1916. The
sturdy three-story building was a house of learning for children of shipwrights, riverboat pilots, railworkers, longshoremen, University staff and faculty. The blue-collar neighborhood was home to immigrants from Ireland, Croatia, Poland, Japan, and the Middle East. In September of 1912, just as Holy Cross school was born, a Syrian Catholic family near the Cut welcomed a baby daughter. They named her Victoria after the Queen of the British Empire. John Tabshy, Victoria’s father, worked in the Willamette River shipyards and raised vegetables and silkworms on the side. He would later become a gardener at the National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother, a splendid Catholic shrine bettter known as The Grotto. The four Tabshy children played under the railroad bridge across the river, sometimest times swinging blissfully from a rope Summer 2013 43
tied to a bridge girder. The Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon who taught Victoria — Sister Eulalia Benedict, Sister Miriam of Jesus Smith, Sister Zita Gilsdorf — were kind to her, but some children were subject to the Sisters’ wrath; Victoria sometimes saw the Sisters walk solemnly to a nearby thicket to cut sticks to use as switches. Victoria went on to Roosevelt High, graduating as the Depression struck. A visiting Lebanese woman was impressed with Victoria’s grace and made a match between the young woman and her brother, Stephen George; they married when Victoria was twenty. All their children went to Holy Cross. Victoria tells me all this in her room in Maryville Nursing Home, in Beaverton. She shows me a doll she won in a Holy Cross school fundraiser, nine decades ago. She will soon be a hundred years old, the
oldest Holy Cross graduate. In the early 1930s, when she regularly walked through the North Portland woods to Holy Cross School with her sisters, Millie Erceg kept an eye out for snakes. It didn’t help that her brave younger sibling Rose would pick up the slithering reptiles and dangle them in the face of anyone who showed fear. Born Milica Erceg in Croatia, she was a year old when her parents brought her to the United States. The Ercegs lived in a two-bedroom house near what is now the Columbia Villa housing project. Five girls slept in one bed; their parents in the other. They milked cows, tended chickens, harvested vegetables, and polished the floors. To get extra money for the family, they picked berries. They wore flour sacks for petticoats. They paid their tuition with fresh milk from the cows. Millie wanted to be