Evolution of the University of St. Francis

Transcript of video (dated June, 2005):

Sr. Kathleen Kirk

Good morning, I am Sr. Kathleen Kirk. I came from the Windy City of Chicago, St. Pascal’s Parish.

I was a Sodality Girl under Sr. Rosella.
One day she happened to say, would you consider going to the convent? And I thought, go to the convent? So just for fun when I got home, or just out of curiosity, when I did return home I said to my mother "Mother, if I would like to go to the convent in September, would you let me?"

She didn’t even get a chance to answer me, and my sister Mary came running in from the other room. She said "Say, I want to go too."

So that my mother was shocked, I was shocked that my sister wanted to go. We were all in this state of shock.

But anyway, my mother said well nothing would ever prevent us from going ahead. However, my sister Mary, later Sr. Vincent, decided she wanted to go to the Milwaukee Franciscans.
I wanted to go to the Joliet Franciscans. We had the Milwaukee Franciscans in high school and my mother said, "Well now listen, remember if one of you goes to the one place and the other to the other convent, how will we ever get to visit you, you know."

So Mary prayed very hard, a novena or something, and she decided well I think I’ll go to Joliet too. So, it so happened that we both got ready for the convent and arrived at 520 Plainfield.

Of course, there were about 20 some of us that joined at that time. However, not all of them have persevered.

When I first entered the convent, I was interested in Music so I did make it known. We did take some music, piano lessons and so on, and organ lessons.

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Finally, when it came time to go to College, I requested that I could continue with the music you know. Well, they said we need some Bachelor of Arts first, you’d better get that. The College wanted me to pursue that first and then go on with the music. So that’s what happened. Then I finally received, or worked for, a Master of Music in organ. One of my crowning achievements was my recital at DePaul University in organ. I was, everybody was rather pleased with it, so I was pleased with it also.

Then of course my sister was interested in Science. So she went on in Science and she became the professor at the University of St. Francis, St. Francis College at that time. She was always into plants and going out on hikes and so on. She’d come home when we were at my Grandmother’s house, she’d come home with all kinds of stickers on her clothing from all the prairies that she went into. But that was her hobby, so she liked the plants.

When we were given our assignments, well we thought we were going out to teach. Well, when we finally got our first assignments, we were told to stay home and finish our schooling. So, which was a good thing, you know because otherwise we’d have to wait for summer, after summer, to continue. So we stayed home and we lived down at the Prep, the Prep was on Buell and Center. We had a lot of fun; of course there were a lot of us young sisters. Many happy memories of our work and also the fun we had down there. The aspirants were down there, so they always kept us entertained, you know, with a lot of plays and fun.

After we finished our studies, we were sent out to for music and I was a music teacher in a number of schools in Ohio and also in Illinois. The one thing that was a very pleasing to me was I was requested to go to the Philippine Islands to teach music. So this priest friend of mine, he was a classmate of mine from grammar school, was out there. So I did go out to teach in the University of San Carlos, in the high school, and also in the University. That was one highlight in my career.

I was always very proud of my sister. She had different interests. She was into nature and all kinds of biological studies. She did persevere and was a teacher at the Academy at first in Biology. Finally, they sent her to the College and she became the Head of the Science department. She had many different outside interests. She was at Argonne Laboratories helping out there. She went on many scientific trips that I was never really interested in the trips exactly, but I was glad for her because she was doing what she wanted to do.

So, anyway, the two of us persevered.