School Ties Nearly 30 Years After It Closed, People Still Miss Cda’S First Catholic Academy

Ginny Stockwell doesn’t talk about the day the Academy of the Immaculate Heart of Mary closed and the nuns returned to their Pennsylvania motherhouse.

“We get very upset,” she says, and switches the subject as if the popular Coeur d’Alene school closed last year. Two Stockwell children graduated from the academy. A third was a sophomore when the lights went out permanently.

It was 1971, and the Stockwells weren’t alone in their disappointment.

The academy had offered Catholic education in Coeur d’Alene for 68 years. The school had grown from a shaky wood-frame cabin to a complex of stunning brick buildings, from 64 students in button shoes and crinoline to 700 scrubbed children in uniform navy and white.

IHM graduates went on to military academies and top universities. They became mayors (Jim Fromm), playwrights (Tim Rarick), doctors (Dr. Bob McFarland), math teachers (Gary Haler), historians (Loretta Dunnigan) and local bigwigs (Jerry Jaeger).

The school united Coeur d’Alene’s Catholic community with a passion the churches alone couldn’t match.

“It was a close-knit school,’ says Mary Ann Dunnigan, a 1933 academy graduate. “I feel very thankful I had my education there. I felt good socially and academically and I’ve had a very happy life.”

Coeur d’Alene was a fledgling city in 1901 when Father Thomas Purcell decided it needed a Catholic school. He was so determined that he traveled to Pennsylvania to persuade the nuns of Immaculate Heart of Mary to come West.

No one knows why Father Purcell chose the Immaculate Heart of Mary order. They promised to come, then couldn’t. A community of Belgian nuns offered to start the Coeur d’Alene school, but Father Purcell decided to ask the IHM order again.

In 1903, two IHM nuns in dark blue habits stationed in Tillamook, Ore., arrived by carriage in Coeur d’Alene.

Sisters M. Clement and M. Zita opened St. Cyril’s school in a rectangular wooden building on the north side of Fifth and Indiana. Sixty-four students attended that year.

The school ran out of space two years later, at the same time the government put Fort Sherman’s buildings on the auction block. A man representing the sisters bought the three-story military hospital, then had it moved on rollers through town to a square of land between Ninth and 10th and Coeur d’Alene and Indiana.

The sisters topped the building with a belfry and a gilt cross, leaving no doubt about its new affiliation. By 1905, the sisters also had the fort’s opera house and enough room to open a high school and offer boarding to girls. St. Cyril’s became the Academy of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that year.

The nuns weren’t shy about promotion. A 1908 brochure describes the academy as “charmingly situated among the pine groves in the Scenic City by the unsalted sea.”

The academy offered primary, grammar and college preparatory education. Boarding students paid $180 in 1908 to attend school, and more for instruction in piano or violin and needlework.

Family visitors were allowed the first Saturday of each month. Students stayed at school for Thanksgiving and Easter. The directress read all letters that students wrote or received.

By 1909, 230 students attended the academy. Dunnigan entered the school in 1921, a few years after her older sister, Loretta, enrolled. They began every day with mass. All students took music lessons and Latin. Both Dunnigans became teachers as adults.

“I was very happy while I was there,” Mary Ann Dunnigan says. When the academy closed in 1971, she worked for the Coeur d’Alene School District and smoothed the transition.

About the time Dunnigan graduated, the story of the nun’s infamous spanking machine arose. St. Thomas parish’s official history is frank about the “infernal device that supposedly was installed in the convent basement.”

A nun created the mythical machine to keep her young students in line. The story took on a life of its own. Students were convinced a paddle wheel delivered a dozen swats per revolution. One mention was all it took to restore order in any classroom. The nuns were as renowned for their discipline as for their influence. Until the mid-1950s, at least one Coeur d’Alene girl a year chose to enter the convent.

Sister Mary Rassley graduated from the academy in 1950 and committed her life to God. “We hung around after school, decorated for dances, got to know the sisters better,” she says. She returned to Coeur d’Alene in 1970 to serve as principal of IHM’s St. Thomas School.

The academy developed a good reputation for its sports programs in the 1930s. By the 1950s and 1960s, players wearing the big A dominated 4-A football and basketball.

The academy Panthers won every football game they played from 1965 through 1967 and in 1969.

“I was raised in a little town, so the academy was a big school to me,” says John Hallgreen, a 1961 graduate and former defensive and offensive tackle. “I was very impressed with the athletic program.”

Hallgreen attended his first year at the high school in the old fort building, then moved into the academy’s new school facing Ninth Street in 1957. The new high school opened just seven years after the academy opened its yellow brick St. Thomas grade school.

The academy had its critics. One student remembers leaving St. Thomas School in the 1950s after her mother visited her teacher mid-year. The teacher didn’t know the child’s name.

But Linda Hallgreen, class of 1966, remembers St. Thomas School fondly. “We would bring sleds to school and slide down the hill in the winter, or roller skate,” she says. “There was no traffic then, so seventh- and eighth-graders would play ball in the street.”

Some alumni remember the nuns as unhappy and sour-faced, but most students describe them as no-nonsense. That’s why Ginny Stockwell chose the academy for her three children.

“We liked the discipline and respect,” she says. “The nuns were great.”

Tim Rarick graduated in 1964 and was president of his class. His mother had attended the academy and even gone on to the convent before deciding to marry instead.

“I had a strong enough respect and fear of the nuns that I pretty well toed the line,” Rarick says. “If I stepped out of line, my mother would get a phone call from one of her friends who just happened to be a nun.”

Rarick’s father served on the school’s athletic board. His mother was involved with everything. Such parent activity was typical and magnified the closeness of the school.

IHM announced in January 1971 that its nuns would return to Pennsylvania that summer and the academy schools would close. The nun population was diminishing and Catholic schools were closing all over the nation.

The community was stunned. Parents who had decried the lack of discipline and educational excellence in public schools had nowhere else to send their children.

That fall, the Coeur d’Alene public schools absorbed 700 IHM students. The convent and IHM high school became its administrative offices and Sorensen Elementary School.

Twenty-five years later, many IHM alums helped open a new Catholic school, Holy Family, in the former home of St. Thomas School.

Linda Hallgreen sees the same unifying spirit at Holy Family that she grew up with at the academy, and that keeps her involved in Catholic education. She teaches at St. John Vianney School in the Spokane Valley.

“I felt like this is where I belong,” she says. “Maybe it’s the religion or the discipline or respect. Coming here was like going home.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: REUNION

Academy of Immaculate Heart of Mary will hold an all-school reunion July 28-30.

Activities include individual class reunions, a golf tournament, family picnic, boat ride and dance on Lake Coeur d’Alene, a noon Mass at St. Thomas Church and a catered luncheon.

Organizers hope for school memorabilia to exhibit. For details, call 765-6933.