Esther Heffernan, O.P. (Video Interview and Transcript)

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Edgewood College Library Digital Collections
Esther Heffernan, O.P. Interview
Link to video: https://vimeo.com/146672340/deb8846452
Interviewee: Esther Heffernan, O.P.
Interviewer: John Elliott, Oscar Rennebohm Library - Edgewood College
Date: October 24, 2012
Location: Esther Heffernan’s home, Madison, Wisconsin
JE: Esther, where did you grow up?
EH: Well, that’s a difficult question to answer. I was born in Seattle, Washington, several months before the Great Depression. My father’s grain export business went to pieces, so as far as I can remember, I started in Seattle. We moved to San Diego. My father went into a Veteran’s Hospital in Prescott, Arizona, and there was what was called a Hooverville that grew up outside the hospital. My mother lived in a tent and I had a wonderful time, and many of the people there were the famous Okies, the people from Oklahoma, who were veterans. Then the democrats swept the election. My father became the assistant superintendent of schools. He was a lawyer. But then he became ill and he was in a Veteran’s Hospital in California, and my mother and I were visiting him and he had fallen and died of a brain fracture. So my mother brought, the funeral was in Williston, North Dakota. Then my mother went back to the family farm. So the next place after Prescott was a farm outside Rosalia, Washington, and we stayed there a year. They mortgaged the farm so that my mother could think about what she could do with the money, so we went back to Seattle. Then we went to Walla Walla, Washington. And then my mother was looking for a town where there would be a university, so she could be absolutely sure that I had a college education, because my mother had left Rosalia, gone to the University of Washington and had had a wonderful liberated life as a school teacher. And she had gone to Japan and China and so forth, so she was in her thirties when she met my father and they were married in her thirties. And it turned out that she and Franz as a lark had gone to a fortune teller who had predicted she would meet a man named Jack, or that Jack was going to be an important name. Well, my mother realized that Jack was the name of her horse. And, so this was the beginning of the romance and as I said, I had been born in April the Depression came.
JE: What was your family like?
EH: Well, basically for most of my memory, I mean I have some memory of my father, very positive, but my memory really is, was of mother and myself.
JE: Did you have any aunts, uncles, cousins important in your family?
EH: Only indirectly, and probably more my mother’s cousins in the farm, of course. But the other family, my father’s family was also very important. My grandfather was still living in 2
Williston and that was a big family. And then that family, in turn, spread out all over. At this point my cousins that live in Rhode Island I’m very close to.
JE: What schools did you go to?
EH: Well, you can imagine. I went to school in Prescott. When my father was ill, I went for a while to Williston. Then I went to a Cathedral school in Phoenix. And then my mother went to get a new teacher’s license and I was in that little school for a while, a demonstration school. Then to Rosalia, then to Walla Walla, and then to Seattle, and finally settled in Eugene and went to a junior high, oh and parochial school then junior high, and high school, where I didn’t graduate because I went off to the University of Chicago. So the schools, I think my maximum number of schools in one year was three.
JE: Really. Did you graduate from the University of Chicago?
EH: I did. I took my Bachelor’s degree there and my Master’s degree.
JE: What were your intellectual interests when you were a youngster and whose thought influenced you?
EH: Well, I was thinking back and one of the readings that I remember when I was in high school was Black Boy, Richard Wright, and I had always, you realize, given the kind of background I had, all these different places, I was very much aware of poverty, inequality.
Eugene was pretty heavily middle class in a sense with the university. I worked in a cannery. I met the Okies who were doing the harvest of the beans and so forth. So, that reading played a critical role. Then I’m thinking in terms of the University, now of course we did lots of reading, Liberal Arts and then my master’s was a Divisional Social Science, so with Econ, Political Science, History, Sociology, and Anthropology, so, but I think that was when I joined the Third Order at University of Chicago. And as I was looking back, and this seems strange, probably the two readings sort of outside of the curriculum, or one went in with my masters studies, was St. Thomas and Marx. The interesting thing with St. Thomas that I appreciated was his Summa, was his style of argumentation. You know he would raise a question. Then he would have a whole series of very logical reasons why the answer should be one way. And then he would say, “on the contrary” with another statement, and then a statement specifically analyzing the original ones. So I was attracted by the openness of his thought and the highly rational. And of course Marx was because my Master’s was on the presentation of communism in social science text books. This was the beginning of the Cold War.
JE: How was that received?
EH: I mean, in terms of the University, there was absolutely no problem and I was an honor student. So, I mean there was no, I had gone on a full scholarship to the University of Chicago. Never, we would never been able to afford it so that included tuition, some support and then I worked at the University. So, the whole issue of poverty and class, I used to walk the streets of Chicago where ordinarily a young white woman wasn’t even supposed to wander in. I began to be involved with Friendship House, which was an inter-relation house. So when you were 3
asking about in a sense influences, intellectual influences, and books that deeply influenced my life it would be...
JE: Back to the University of Chicago, as a woman, did you find it a welcoming place?
EH: Well, the thing is, it depended how you looked at it. This was right after the Second World War. You had the GI Bill, so the ratio was 5 to 1, 5 men to 1. So at one level, it was a dream in terms of dating And I had much more of a social life that I never…I had been a nerd, really, in high school, and so that was wonderful. Chicago was welcoming, it really fit the nerd. Most of us had been nerds in high school, and so the college was intellectually a dream, so it was welcoming. The only sense in which it probably wasn’t welcoming, but there was a home for me there, was being of an Irish Catholic background. I mean, the University of Chicago from the viewpoint of the diocese was, as one Cardinal had said, there are no Catholics at the University.
JE: Really.
EH: Yes, but in turn the University was in a way, almost a caricature of the secular world, even though it had been a Baptist founded. So, but they had a wonderful counter club which would have been is the Newman Club. And so that became a very critical part of my life, and that’s where I became a Third Order Dominican.
JE: I was going to ask you, what did you mean by Third Order?
EH: Third Order, where you weren’t a religious but you took promises, you prayed. We used to meet monthly and we would have prayers, we’d have a discussion often of St. Thomas. And then we’d go down to a marvelous bar on 55th Street and have a great, a great time.
JE: Wonderful. What led you to the Dominican Order?
EH: I had been in a Third Order member. Of course, the Dominicans were the kind of intellectual background. I mean the search for truth and so forth. And the Third Order was a very active one, small but active, which included both Catholic faculty members and primarily graduate students, so it provided a whole psychological support and we used to go to daily mass and then walk over to the cafeteria all joyful and most of the people would be like this, and they looked like they’d want to kill us, compounding it. So, I hadn’t really thought about being a religious. I mean the Third Order, Third Order secular. But I went to Confession down at the local church and at the end of it he said, “And what do you plan to do?” I heard myself say, “I want to be a Religious.” I heard myself say. And so he knew the Sisters at Rosary. So then he made the connection, or rather actually the head of the Third Order at Chicago made the connection, not the priest that had elicited my response.
JE: Fascinating! How old were you when you entered the Dominican Order?
EH: Twenty-three.4
JE: Twenty-three. Did this happen in Chicago?
EH: Well, the thing is I went home so actually, I got on the train. I met my very closest friend, who lived in southern California. We had a wonderful farewell to the world for me in San Francisco and I took the train back. And then, Sister Gretchen, who was the Sister I had contact with, thought it might be good to come early. So I woke up in the dorm and hot, I mean I had never been in a Midwestern summer. And I sat up and said “What in the world…? What the hell am I doing here?”
JE: Oh, funny. Before you came to Edgewood, what were you doing?
EH: Well, the first three years I taught high school in Omaha, Nebraska. But I had already been at Edgewood for a month. Sister Cajetan, the historian got sick, so they sent me to replace her, so I taught in the high school and the college. And at that point the entire college was in the old academy building and in the high school. There we no college buildings.
JE: I was going to ask you with these old buildings, what was Edgewood like when you got here?
EH: The first one would be like Edgewood One, Edgewood Two because this first one was just a month. And when I was there, Sister Nona was already planning the Campus School. So I remember we all trotted down to basically old farmland that had pretty much been deserted, and she had found an oil barrel down there that she figured was just about where the cornerstone of the campus school would be.
JE: Funny. What year was that?
EH: That was ’52. April, May of ’52.
JE: So the high school was here, right?
EH: Oh, yes. They built the high school right before the Depression. So they were faced with a mortgage.
JE: Where did you live then and what was it like?
EH: Then, well I was thinking when I was there the first time I lived in a dormitory. Just a plain dormitory which was similar to what it was they had at the Mound. The housing range, sometimes it was a mail room, sometimes it was a small dorm. Then later on we lived in the mobile homes. We had four mobile homes.
JE: Where were they?
EH: They were down sort of what would be behind Predolin and partly where the linkage into the high school that area, there were four of them in a square and you had two small bedrooms, 5
and a medium bedroom what might be considered the master bedroom, which would be about as big as the corner over there. The two little ones, I was exactly the same length as the mattress.
JE: Oh no. Do you have any good Edgewood stories that you would like to share?
EH: Well, I was thinking there are lots of them. But I think an interesting one would be one of the crucial things was that Sister Nona McGreal was determined that this was to be a liberal arts education, which was to do two things. One is we had the academy for young women; we had our Sisters who were teaching in the elementary school. We had Rosary and Rosary was a liberal arts college, and also our sisters who were going to be teaching at the high school. Our other sisters were going to Normal school, and sort of grabbing their education on the run. So she was determined to have a liberal arts school, which would be for young women but also for our Sisters who would be teaching in grade school. So the curriculum would be liberal arts with the preparation for teaching. Now, the thing was when we had the first North Central that was going to be in a sense her vision. Regina had been built but not quite finished. And the North Central people were going to be visiting. Well we developed down in Regina what you might call a Potemkin village. The Administration was moved down, and in a sense though, when North Central came we had a college building, see the dormitory so forth and a campus school that had already been built. So that’s one of my stories.
JE: Oh, fun.
EH: There are lots of stories of Stevie but I think you have a sense of Sister Nona’s drive. She had a vision of Edgewood.
JE: She really was the prime mover behind the Edgewood that we know today.
EH: Absolutely.
JE: Do you have any Sister Stevie stories?
EH: Well, one Sister Stevie story was she loved to go fishing. And the thing is, she went down one day to where she had been fishing and here was a boat, and she was just ecstatic. Well, the thing is I realized the boat had been stolen from the boat area down at the Wingra Park. Well, I was torn between we really should call the police, and Marie Stephens absolute delight that here was this boat from which she could fish from the boat. Now that was, of course, the beginning later where we were building DeRicci was Stevie’s commandeering the workers to bring down boards and sand to build a pier, and that was where the boat had, I mean reluctantly, the boat was given up.
JE: What are you doing currently?
EH: Well, currently, I’m still an emerita, that’s actually not good Latin, but anyway. In the department I have an office and one of the things I am supposed to do is to write an early history of the department, you know because initially the only major was education. I mean the whole purpose of the college. But Social Science became, I think, the two, Med Tech and Social 6
Science became majors. So to just do the history, the early history particularly of the Department of Social Science, which used to have History in it.
JE: What is your vision for the Edgewood College of the future?
EH: Well, of course you can tell that I was deeply influenced by Nona’s vision of the college. And one important thing is the college is, I think, her vision was that it would provide the very best in education. But that education was not to be an elite liberal arts college. We were always to be serving in many cases, first students where they were the first people in their family to go to school. So she had this image of, and in the early catalogs, have this marvelous circle of all of the Liberal Arts; the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Sciences, Philosophy and Theology, but then combined with the image of it being professional. So that what she had dreamed of was not to have that split between specialized profession and the liberal arts. And it was in the context that a teacher had to be a whole person, and in turn teaching a whole person and thinking there of elementary school. You know teachers teach everything so that being specifically for education majors, no, but that you have a whole person who then also has the image of serving wholeness.
JE: I have a final question. Of the Five Core Values, which speaks to you the most?
EH: Justice. I mean Nona’s vision of what they used to call the Green Bible were the books, Guiding Growth in Christian Social Living, which were the whole social teachings of the church.
And so, but the values, I mean for example, Compassion is that response to the whole person, you’re relating to the person. But Justice is that sense of the relationship always being aware of striving for equality. So whether it is racial justice, economic justice. I remember in high school we were giving talks for the candidates and I talked for the Socialist Party. So I think that was kind of vision shaped early, partly by my experience of being both in and out of the kind of standard growing up and being very much aware of poverty.
JE: Well, I want to thank you very much.