True to their school, 70 plus years later
It evolved out of many small but meaningful stepping stones that, come high school, began to run together to form a path. A long and sturdy path, as it has turned out, that they’re still on to this day.
Childhood friends chipping in to buy the latest edition of Calling All Girls magazine; a transplant from Harlem, NYC, adapting to a new country in Grade 4, helped along by classmates who made the transition easy; a pact among teenagers to visit each other’s houses on Tuesdays.
That’s how the Club began to form, more than 70 years ago. What kept them together, all that time? Again, as with the beginning, so many things. But friendship above all. Friendship, first and foremost. Friendship of the highest proof, the rare and abiding kind that has the power to join people through births and marriages, jobs and job losses, hardship, good fortune, death, triumph and all the weather life brings.
Friendship, yes. But simply going to Delta Secondary School together and sharing memories of it over the course of a lifetime has been a key ingredient in the cohesion of a seven-decade bond. And the five women I met with, surviving members of this unchaptered sorority of sorts, which began in earnest in Grade 9 — they could never have dreamt back then, in Grade 9, that their little high school tradition would not only survive their graduation from Delta. It would actually outlast the school itself.
Delta will soon be no more. But Irene (Snelling) Green, Jean (Armstrong) McKenzie-Ward, Denise (Parker) Saunders Somers, Dorothea (Kologriv) Sharp and Bernice (Stevenson) Simpson are still meeting, every second Tuesday, when they can, as was the custom as they entered their adulthoods. There used to be 14 of them, but time has claimed a few. Now it’s the five, and Irene doesn’t always make it out because she lives in Huntsville.
But Irene, with Denise, was at the very root of what would become this band of sisters, this happy few. Irene and Denise have known each other since kindergarten. And a few grades later, at Prince of Wales School, they were inseparably three when Jean moved to Hamilton from Manhattan (the street she grew up on is now part of Harlem) to live with her aunt after her mother and then her grandmother died. They followed each other to Delta where they met others, Dorothea, Bernice ... the Club grew. Denise’s son, Brian Saunders, wrote me a while back: “Over the years I have read stories you have written about long time groups of friends and always felt they paled when compared to my Mother’s ‘Club.’”
“When we were in school, we’d get together for pop and potato chips and play games,” says Irene. “We’d each put in a dime so we could buy Calling All Girls magazine.”
Once they started getting together on Tuesdays during the Delta years, the Club expanded, with each girl bringing friends and then those friends in turn bringing friends. Soon Dorothea and Bernice were part of the group, many others as well. Then they started going to the Olivet Sunday night club on the Mountain and it grew some more.
Dorothea was on Weir Street, just east of Delta (high school) and, as they got older, Dorothea and her husband would have Denise and her husband over. As the Club members got married, they’d attend each other’s weddings, and as they started having children and as the children grew, those kids would end up thinking of their mothers’ Club friends as aunts or even their “other moms.”
“On Tuesday nights, we kids would get excited,” says Brian, Denise’s son. “We could hardly wait to get our hands on all the food.”
“We all had a sweet tooth,” Jean remembers, “and we all liked to cook,” and there’d always be lots of dips, pastries, chips and other goodies.
When the Club met back then, and when they meet today, they would and still do talk and snack and share, commiserate and celebrate together. They remember school stories and teachers.
“Miss Wilson scared the wits out of us,” says Bernice. And the places they worked — Firestone, Rheims and such.
“We always supported each other,” says Denise. Through ups and downs, fights with husbands, issues with kids, the whole thing. “We used to say we didn’t need a psychiatrist. We have each other.”
They still do. Group therapy, free, on the “couch” of each other’s homes, and the hour — even 70 plus years later — is never up. Now that’s value(s), and who knew it came with a lifetime guarantee?