Incarnate Word grads are still gathering for lunch, every month for 65 years
Gretchen Schulte laughed as she recalled the time one of her classmates pulled a legendary prank at their all-girls Catholic school in the late 1950s.
One of the students stuck popcorn kernels in the library light fixtures at Incarnate Word Academy in Normandy. By the end of the day, the kernels started popping, and the nun running the library was beside herself.
"We disappeared when it started to happen," Schulte, now 83, said. The woman responsible for the shenanigans overheard Schulte telling the story to a reporter at a restaurant table where more than a dozen classmates gathered for their monthly get-together. She warned Schulte not to snitch.
"Don't put her name in there," Schulte said to the reporter.
The loyalties run deep among the IWA class of 1959. They've stuck together for 65 years — through raising families, becoming grandmothers and great-grandmothers and losing spouses.
A few years after graduating high school, a small group began meeting monthly in one another's homes. Over time, others from their class joined the club. The total now stands at 17 out of the 108 who graduated. Several of the alumna have left their original North County neighborhoods and moved westward to St. Charles or west St. Louis counties. As the decades passed, it became harder to host the meetups at home, so they now take turns picking a different restaurant each month.
"Sometimes the weather is bad; sometimes our health is bad," said Mary Pat Cuddihee, 83, of Chesterfield. "But there's a bond that keeps us together."
This bond of more than six decades defies the odds of most friendships and flies in the face of the well-documented loneliness epidemic in America.
Part of that connection is due to the parish and shared religious background of the group. They grew up in close proximity to one another, when people hung out in neighborhoods they had lived in for generations. (One of the women at the recent lunch remarked that she had friendships that went back five generations in their respective families.) Some of the women have known each other since kindergarten. A few sent their daughters to the same school and even have granddaughters attending it now.
Dee Polocii, of Normandy, said a lot of young women didn't attend college back then. It made their ties to their high school even stronger. Many of them continue to go back for the alumni events.
Making it a priority to see one another in person on a monthly basis kept them involved in one another's lives.
"It took someone to organize it," Polocii said. "But we wanted to see each other."
They also take advantage of an old-fashioned form of communication.
"You have to get on the phone and call people," Polocii said.
Imagine planning a monthly meet up with 17 people — some of whom do not text or even use email. Sounds like a logistical nightmare, but for this group, it's worth picking up the phone to make sure everyone stays in touch.
They have a pact that no one is allowed to complain about the restaurant that a member gets to pick that month — even if it means driving out to Herculaneum, where one of them now lives.
Cuddihee, who no longer drives, relies on her daughter or husband to bring her to the lunches. Two of her closest friends are now in nursing homes. She cherishes the time she can spend with her high school crowd. They've taken ladies-only cruises and vacations together. Nine of the women who showed up for this lunch are widows now. It's made their relationships feel even more vital.
"Age has certainly changed us, but we're still holding on," she said.
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