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Jill
Crokett’s
Reform School: Memoirs of a Nun
Chapter 1
In 1999 I received a
telephone call from a man who introduced himself as an attorney calling from
San Francisco, in America. The only unusual thing about the call, other than
the fact that I had never heard of him, was the fact that I live in the town of
Dubbo, in Australia, several hours drive west of Sydney.
My father’s side of the
family has lived here in New South Wales for generations, but on my mother’s
side my grandfather was from the Midwestern American state of Indiana,
emigrating to New South Wales as a young man in the 1930s. He had four brothers, none of whom I ever
met, and a sister, who I met just twice, the first time being when she visited
my grandfather during a trip to Australia in 1973. At the time I was sixteen, she would then
have been about sixty.
I remember my great aunt Veronica as an
independent, intelligent woman who seemed to behave in a manner younger than
her years. She owned her own business, a private employment agency in San
Francisco, with another woman partner.
The employment agency had apparently grown to become quite successful,
contracting with the hordes of young Americans swarming westward into the city
in the heady days of the 1960s and 70’s. My grandfather told me that his sister
Veronica had been a nun for many years, eventually leaving the convent in the
late 1950’s. She had never married.
Other than her visit in
1973, the only other time I saw my great-aunt Veronica was at my grandfather’s
funeral ten years later, in 1983. She was the only one of granddad’s American
relatives to attend, and in fact she was still the only one any of us had ever
met. After the funeral Veronica stayed on in Dubbo for over a week, doing tea
with gramp’s relatives and enduring a weekend trip to Sydney with me in my
rusty old 1969 Holden. I distinctly
remember that, for a woman of seventy, she was quite fun to talk to, and she
even invited me, more than once, to visit her in California sometime. I never did.
The substance of the
call from San Francisco in 1999 was surprising to me, given that I had only
spent time with my great aunt on two occasions.
Somehow, despite our limited contact, I must have impressed Veronica on
some level. The man calling from San
Francisco told me that my grandfather’s sister, who had no children, had
included her Australian grand-niece in her will.
Veronica left the
primary asset of her modest estate, her beautiful single-family home in the
city’s Mission district, which she had purchased with her business partner for
next to nothing in 1966, to the niece of her late business partner. What the
87-year-old matron had left me, the lawyer said, was the contents of a single,
small safe deposit box.
My trans-Pacific journey
to retrieve the contents of the box was uneventful, but opening it, as I stood
alone in a small quiet office off the lobby of a swank San Francisco bank, was
unforgetful. Enclosed in the long, short tin box I found seven certificates of
deposit of varying maturity dates, each worth roughly between $20,000 and
$40,000. Under them was a thick,
yellowing envelope containing a stack of old United States Savings Bonds,
together worth about $20,000. Beneath
the yellowing envelope was a carefully folded document , neatly typed on white
stationary with an old ribbon-style typewriter.
I told everyone about the money right away. It has taken me seven years
to find the courage to reveal the content of the neatly typed document I found
at the bottom of the tin box that foggy morning. As reluctant as I am to
release the following document, I feel obligated to do what my great aunt
wanted done following her death.
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Veronica Smelts San Francisco, Calif. Nov. 10, 1978
As I reflect back on my 65 years, a little more than 25 of
which I spent as a nun in the Order of the Sisters of St. Michael of the
Angels, I look back from the perspective of the social changes brought by those
years, changes that shaped both my personal life and society in general, and I
feel it is important to record the history of my formative experiences as a
young nun in the 1930s, as well my experiences as an established sister of my
order in the 1940s and 50’s.
This, my personal testimony of those times, is given in
light of the changes in social and religious thought that has evolved since
that rather dark era. While I feel it is important for me to tell my story, it
is a story which I am only comfortable telling after I am gone. It is all very
true.
In the summer of 1934 I knelt humbly yet proudly on the cool marble floor in the chapel of our order’s motherhouse in Chicago and professed to the Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to my Superiors, dedicating my life to the Order of the Sisters of St. Michael of the Angels.
For two years I had prepared for that special day by serving as a novice there at the order’s reform school and main convent, or motherhouse, in Chicago. On taking my permanent vows as a nun that day, I also took a new name. My heart swelled with pride as the bishop laid his hands on my head and proclaimed me “Sister Vincent” before my parents, brothers, and fellow nuns.
My mother and father, who had traveled from our farm in rural Indiana to be there that day, looked on as their only daughter, bathed in the multicolored light of the chapel’s stained-glass windows, dedicated her life to the service of those youth who were most urgently in need of God’s guidance and unending love. Their daughter had become a nun.
My father, though he never told me so directly, was disappointed with my choice. My mother on the other hand, a devout, strong-willed woman who had successfully raised five God-fearing sons, was proud of my decision. She felt, as I did, that my chosen vocation would allow me to help make the world a better place. As I look back on that day I regret that I never told her that she had been my inspiration. Growing up I had watched her persuasive, caring hands guide my brothers through the difficult challenges of youth at a time when other boys, less guided, would have fallen astray.
My chosen religious order, the Sisters of St. Michael of the Angels, was founded in the shadows of the youth-filled sweatshops of the late 19th century. It was a time when parents, often with no understanding or control over human reproduction, were blessed with many mouths to feed. Overpopulated orphanages frequently ejected incorrigible boys as young as 12 or 13, forcing them to fend for themselves on the streets of large cities. Government social programs for delinquent teens did not exist at that time.
If caught stealing, courts of the day offered these youth only adult justice for their crimes. To combat this inequity, many young males found security in criminal association, and gangs of incorrigible teenage boys roamed the streets vandalizing, stealing, intimidating, and extorting, often with impunity.
The dedicated sisters of St. Michael’s established their first reform school in a donated building in Chicago in 1888. Boys from 13 to 16 years old, who were found to be unmanageable by either their parents or their orphanage, were chronic runaways, or had been arrested for an adult crime and sent by the court, were taken in by the sisters. The novel new religious order grew rapidly on a philosophy of behavioral reform for incorrigible boys through the application of strict corporal discipline. It should be noted that the mission of the founding sisters was not just to keep troubled boys out of adult prisons, but to reform their character as well, returning them to society as law abiding, productive Christians. Needless to say, it was a most challenging mission.
As new reformatories opened in other cities, additional sisters, mostly women from strict, religious, Midwestern farm families, volunteered to join the order. These new nuns were trained in the judicious administration of strict discipline, and by the early 1930s, reform schools were being operated by the Order in nine large American cities. Social service programs for misguided youth were rare at the time, and the sisters often received direct referrals from the courts, gaining the praise of judges and civic leaders, both Protestant and Catholic alike, who believed that our order of nuns offered the best hope for reforming criminalized youth.
My parents were
happy that my first assignment was to the sisters’ reformatory in Indianapolis.
There they could visit me on the occasionally weekend, driving in from the family
farm near Jeffersonville. In Indianapolis I would undergo training which would
prepare me to become an Assistant Director of Discipline at one of the order’s
other reformatories. Sister Joseph, the Director of Discipline in Indianapolis,
would be my Superior, schooling me in both the application of disciplinary
procedures and the administration of a disciplinary office.
I was told by
the Mother Superior in Chicago that, after two or three years of training under
Sister Joseph and her Assistant, Sister Anne, in Indianapolis, she was
confidant I would be able to take on my own assignment as an Assistant Director
of Discipline at one of the Order’s other reformatories. As I left her office, a
confidant 21-year-old excited about the adventure of my first assignment,
Mother Superior presented me with a light hearted departing gift; a narrow
hardwood paddle with the seal of our religious order on it.
Sister Joseph was
a stout 57-year-old, rather serious woman of Irish parentage who had thick arms
and always spoke with an air of authority, regardless of whether she were
addressing a teenage boy, a parent, or a fellow sister. Under her habit she wore
her stiff, graying hair in a tight bun rather than cutting it short as most of
the other sisters did. A thick, compact woman, of about five foot three, Sister
Joseph wore the same dark-gray, floor length habit that all the sisters wore,
but hers, due to her thickness, seemed more fitted, causing her large bosoms to
visibly jiggle when she stroked away at a boy’s bottom.
Sister Joe, as
we called her behind her back, had a very direct, matter of fact manner about
her, and her personality seemed to exuded a silent dominance over a room
whenever she entered. She was a natural disciplinarian. She had entered the
convent as a girl of eighteen in the early, developing years of the order, just
before the turn of the century, rising over the years to a position of
authority. She sincerely seemed to
relish that authority. I later learned
that three years earlier Sister Joseph had turned down an appointment to the
honored position of Mother Superior of the order’s Cleveland convent in order
to keep her position as Director of Discipline in Indianapolis.
At times I felt
that, even for a nun in charge of discipline, Sister Joseph could be quite
strict. She firmly believed that sparing the rod would spoil the child, a verse
which she often quoted to a boy as she took down his trousers. She totally savored in breaking a boy’s will,
often waiting until he broke down and cried, pleading “please, please stop, I
can’t take any more sister!” before applying her firmest, fastest strokes. She definitely loved hearing a bad boy cry,
and if they were sent to her office, they did.
Sister Joseph
took special zeal in punishing a boy in front of several other females, such as
a small gathering of fellow nuns, or, such as on the infrequent occasion when a
boy might be remanded to the reformatory by possibly not only his mother, but
an accompanying aunt, grandmother, or other matronly family member.
“Mature women,”
she once said in her slight Irish brogue, “are more inclined to appreciate the
fine maternal art of discipline and control.”
She once told me a story about a reformatory boy she’d caught masturbating
with a stolen dirty magazine in a linen storage room. She proudly boasted that she waited until
visiting day, and then, in her office, severely paddled the boy in front of his
visiting mother, aunt, grandmother, and older teenage sister.
“Making that
boy drop his trousers in front four females gave him a temporary lesson in
humility, but making him squeal in front of them as I reddened his bottom
helped keep him in line for years” she said, adding with a rare smile “Sister
Vincent, I may have well saved him from prison.”
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Coming soon in Chapter Two of Jill Crokett’s Reform School: Memoir of a Nun
things heat up as disciplinarian-in-training Sr. Vincent sits
in on several of Sr. Joseph’s severe punishments, witnesses a circumcision
without anesthesia, and is coerced by Sr. Joseph to undergo the required annual
medical examination by the school’s visiting doctor. In the meantime please enjoy
one of Ms. Crokett’s other popular stories on this site, including:
Execution of the Terrorist Housewives one of
the Top 25 Overall Most Popular stories on this site
Diary of a Nazi Rape
Squad hugely popular new story with regular updates posted
Or, read another story
about female domination of young males in Jill Crokett’s Sex Secrets Men Never Hear
For the complete selection
of Jill Crokett’s stories simply click the back button on your browser, then double
click on the author’s name next to this story’s title
You can write Ms.
Crokett at jcrokett@yahoo.com
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