9/22/23 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Sandwich making for St. Vincent De Paul

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

In contrast with our 42 eighth grade class of 2024, my eighth-grade class of 1970 only contained 16 students.

Our Lady of Victory School sat at the back of the Our Lady of Victory Parish property. On its west side was a small hill leading down to Visintine Field, named for a parish donor. The field in turn sat on the edge of a railroad track. The track was close enough that we could have leapt from the field into an open box car (we didn’t). Just to the south of the school was a large stone convent built from material dug from Marble Cliff Quarry just across the Scioto River.

The school itself was, at one time, an all-girl’s high school, Our Lady of Victory Academy. The school had two floors of classrooms with a gym and a basement cafeteria. The Sisters of Charity out of Nazareth Kentucky were the teaching sisters there. We still had two sisters there when I was in eighth grade, Sister Rita, the principal, and Sister Sarah, who at one time, gave me guitar lessons!

I had only moved from Long Island in the middle of sixth grade and with a weird combination Baltimore Maryland/New York accent, no athletic ability, and very quirky behavior I had a rough couple of years there settling in. But, like a lot of eighth grades I have seen as an educator, my class, much like our present eighth graders, had become close and very accepting of each other.

My family lived at the very edge of the Our Lady of Victory boundary which was Guilford Road in the old section of Upper Arlington. My siblings and I walked to and from school almost every day, a 20-minute journey down Roxbury and Arlington avenues. Just about everyone in my class lived within walking distance of the school with the exception of a couple of kids who lived in San Margarita on the other side of the river and were members of St. Margaret of Cortona Church.

The majority of my classmates had Italian fathers and Irish mothers. The boys were great athletes, and the girls were beautiful. Jon Figliola, Mike Ciccone, Rocky Morrone, Carmelita Cardone were but a few of the students in my class. My first crush was a young lady named Lucy Eichner. We “went steady” for about a week until I got sick with pneumonia, and she moved on. Years later, when I became principal at St. Timothy, it was her mother, Margaret Mooney, whom I succeeded there.

After school and on the weekends we hung out at each other’s homes, or walked down Fifth Ave. to the Wyandotte Pharmacy where there was a lunch counter, or further down to the West Fifth Ave. Movie Theatre which sat just to the west of Northwest Blvd. We also spent many hours hanging out at the Scioto Bowling Alley on Riverside Drive. It sat just behind our school, and we had to cross the railroad tracks at the end of a closed road to get there. I don’t remember that we ever spent much time bowling. We mostly hung out at the snack bar and made a nuisance of ourselves.

Our Lady of Victory School closed down not too many years after I graduated. It combined with St. Christopher School and became Trinity Elementary with the middle school in the Victory building and the younger grades at St. Chris. This didn’t last too long, as most multi-campus mergers don’t, and the middle school all moved over the St. Christopher building shortly thereafter. My parents didn’t choose to send my youngest sister there because it was too far to walk.

Our Lady of Victory School was torn down in 2005 to make way for the parish center which is there today. The hill on which the school sat was somewhat leveled and Visintine Field is now a parking lot.

One of my bike routes takes me past OLV and down Roxbury Ave. where I can name just about every family who lived in the houses there back in the day.

Like many of our OLP middle school students, particularly our eighth graders from St. Anthony, my time at OLV was brie,f but my memories are rich. I must have learned something there because I went to St. Charles and did okay but it not the book learning I remember so much as my time with my classmates and even my teachers. A special shout-out goes to Mr. Joe DeTemple, a young man at the time who was only in education briefly and probably made no more than a few thousand dollars a year. He was our social studies teacher and he let us have real discussions about all that was going on back then including, towards the end of the school year, when the students were killed at Kent State.

I hope that the OLP class of 2024 has a rich experience this year which prepares them not only for high school but for life. I also hope that their growing relationship with God is firmly planted by the time they leave us and continues as long as it has for me.

Jim Silcott