College of Mount St Vincent - Parapet Yearbook (Bronx, NY)

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CLASS PHUPHEIIY It was more than coincidence that the opening night for Dorothy DaParma's newest play should be just ten years from the very day that the Class of 1946 was graduated from the Mount, for an enclosed card told me that the opening was to be the occasion for a class reunion. Proceeds were to be used to establish bus service on campus to the college cafeteria. I had been looking forward to seeing Tweet Dreams or All This and Davidson, Too, based on the life of the famous motion picture comedienne, and now I would have the added thrill of meeting my ex-classmates at the performance. I scarcely had time to lookthrough the latest edition of Gerry Farrell's fashion magazine, Senorita, and select a chic Marie Murphy gown to run up on my atomic energy sewing machine, when it was time to leave my angora rabbit farm in the Aleutians and catch the next helicopter for New' York. When stewardess Norma Curran had punched my commutation ticket, I examined the program for the opening night. Mount alumnae were well represented. Margaret Webster's protegee, Fran Pegnam, was directing' the production, Marion Resta and Colleen Welch had the singing leads, Jo Bernhardt Dove was playing the ingenue, while prima ballerina Aileen Lallyowitch was to dance in the ballet sequence. Just then our helicopter was taking on passengers at Sun Valley and I noticed a pair of familiar skis advancing down the aisle closely followed by the famous ski-instructress, Eleanor Curran. Flo Schweitzer, who had been practising at Sun Valley prior to her opening in the Garden Ice Follies, joined our little party, also. Being hardenedcommuters, we soon turned our attention to that morning's edition of The Carey Clarion Csuccessor to the Herald Tribune which Mary Carey had bought after years of selling the Trib to indifferent college womenj to read about our classmates. The science section of the paper was devoted to a story about Nobel Science Award Winner Betty Jane Rock's newly inaugurated lecturc series on thc chemical composition of the moon with accompanying films and exhibitions prepared by her colleagues, Fran Schug, June Saal, and Joan Gardner. The series was being sponsored by millionaire Marge Phillips, atomic energy industrialist. Senoritas Nilda Arroyo, Carolina Morales, and Antonita Rigau smiled up at me from the society page and I wasn't surprised to read that the picture was taken as they landed at La Guardia to attend the opening of the play. On the same page I noticed that Corinne Pike had been re-elected president of the Bronx section of the Navy Wives' League of America. I read in Nlargaret Scoop Grady's syndicated column, The Foreign Exchange, that Ruth Sweet's consulship in Mexico City was receiving high praise from the State Department, especially Under-Secretary Anna Doyle. A corner of the front page featured a story on UNRRA's work in central Europe with a picture of director Audrey Gallon passing out canned food with the help of her secretarry, Dorothy Koepplin. I made a mental note to send notices of the play to them and to Georgette Dircks and Irene Walsh who were attend- ing a Scholasticism conference at Rome. I had just started an article on the Anne Shalvoy Settlement House's fifth anniversary when Eleanor Mulligan, chaperoning a group of her aspiring math students, Anne Marie Connellan bearing a package of her latest NFCCS pamphlets for distribution, and Terry Steele, with a portfolio of stenography papers to correct, boarded the helicopter. After perfunctory greetings, I continued the story to discover that social workers, Ginny Costigan and Marie Perini had recently joined the staff of the Shalvoy House. Before I folded up my paper and passed it on to the conductor, I wept a little over Mary Shea's advice to the lovelorn column called So You're In Love Again, made a few notes for my teen-age friends from Ruth Caviston's fiftieth article in the series How to Be Date-Bait in Twelve Hundred Easy Lessons, and clipped a book review of Joan Lee Johnson's and Mary Jane Mason's history text Past Ages. 109

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By that time the plane was hovering over La Guardia. On the ground, we boarded a Comiskey Comfy Cab and headed for Mount Manor, exclusively for Mount patronage occupying the site of a once famous New York weekend rendezvous for Mount boarders. At the hotel we were greeted by one of the owners, Eleanor McNerney, who told us that her partners, Nancy Wortman and Sally Dougherty, Qthey began buying stock in their college daysj, were overseeing preparations for an after-theatre party. Navy wife Betty Coggins Kelley was already registering at the desk with B. Altman exec Pat Reynolds. I rode up in the elevator with matron Peg Dennehy and several smaller editions of the Dennehy red-hair and freckles. Across the hall from my room, Rita Cuddy was trying to sell a pair of her newly designed invisible convex lenses to Peg Feeney, who was washing her hands with twelve different kinds of perfume to rid them of the formaldehyde odor of her biology lab work. I delivered a suspiciously odiferous package of dissection material to bio professor Dot Cancro, who pounced on it eagerly and promised her compatriot Eleanor Keane half, Over in a corner Ruth 0'Brien sat absorbed in Culbertson's latest Tactics for the Bridge Fiend. While we were chatting, gag-writer Maureen O'Brien strolled in to test some of her newest Irish jokes for the Can You Top This? radio program. When our hilarity had subsided, it was time to dress for dinner, and the theatre. My dinner companions were the brilliant mathematician Kay Daly and Fordham Math professors Dr. Catherine Martin and Dr. Nan Herklotz, who were mumbling together about the cosine of Z2-14xy and scrawling unintelligible formulae on the table cloth. I was about to break in upon their calculations when they rushed off exultantly, saying something about calling Einstein. I left a few minutes later to walk to the theatre. I went around a few times in the revolving door with Eileen O'Rourke, who was clutching her model's hat box and wearing one of the creations she has made famous. In search of a little fresh air, I hired one of the hansom cabs of Kay McTague's concession in Central Park. After a relaxing drive, I continued my pedestrian way to the theatre. Almost immediately I found myself in the midst of a picket line of striking secretaries led by enthusiastic Anne Rowan, who left her soapbox long ,enough to point out Therese McMorrow, Theresa Moran, and Jeanne Piazza, bearing placards denouncing employers who dictated more than sixty words a minute. A Leaving them, I stepped into Dot Hanrahan's Everything for Juniornshop where Gemma Boccia was trying to buy a size one sweater with Fordham, Class of '76, on it. Irene Leonard, buyer for the Foundling Hospital, waved hello from over a pile of infant unmen- tionables. Just across the street I noticed Maria Pennisi's famous bookshop and went in to browse around. A large crowd had gathered there to admire a current exhibition of the watercolors of Betty Fitzgerald and Regina Vogt. A second exhibition consisted of a collec- tion of fantastic cloth animals, complete with neon noses, luminous teeth, rolling eyeballs and false hair labelled with the distinctive trademark of Charlie Newell's Nonsense Novelties Company. In one corner, city librarian Agnes Martin was ordering best-sellers for her readers. In another, I bumped into Mil Engels and Mary Niewenhous who had stopped in on their way from their A.A.A. gymnasium for women where back-stroke, breast-stroke, and free style co-champions Monica Scherzinger and Marion Kane had just given an exhibition. We had begun to discuss Rhoda Leary's fifth book on William Make- peace Thackeray entitled My Ten Years With W.M.T. when we realized that curtain time was drawing near. We left together and made our way to the theatre. The brilliantly lighted lobby was a gay and hectic crush of evening gowns and tuxedoes. In the box office I could see C.P.A. Alice Canapary standing behind the ticket-seller, mentally calculating ticket returns. She stopped between 82,568 and 82,569 long enough to explain that she was filling in for an exhausted adding machine. Ogling with the all too evident air of the cornfed farmer, I stumbled into a' jungle-jim of tripods and flash cameras from amid which Jane Skehan and Colleen O'Brien explained that they were covering the opening night for the picture magazine Flash, Colleen as lay-out editor, and Jane as one of the mag's crack photogs. At the moment their cameras were trained upon a phenomenally 110