She was born as the evening Angelus bell rang in Marie Celine nursing home Ormonde Road, Kilkenny, and christened at St. Patrick’s two days later. She was very tiny – not more than 5 pounds – and when she was six months old her father saw a little doll the image of her auctioned off as a local fete, so she was called Dolly from that time forward.
She was easy to rear. She walked at 10 months, without creeping first. Her big ambition for the next few years was to be able to put her chin on the kitchen table: then, she thought, she’d be a grown-up girl.
Her sister Joan was born 15 months after her and the two were very close. Alice looked on Joan as her property. They had their fights but Joan relied on her a lot and looked up to her. Sometimes Dolly would steal Joan’s bottle and take a swig out of it, but she stopped that at about 2 ½. She wasn’t an outdoor child compared to Joan who would go off after school with a hurl while Dolly would do her knitting and sewing and homework before she started to do anything else. Their mother used to help the two of them with their sums when they were young, with the aid of matches. Alice got on well at school: Mrs Eustace the teacher always thought she had a brain. She never wanted to be different to the other children at school: if no one else had a ribbon on she wouldn’t wear one. She wasn’t a great reader, but she did enjoy the comics.
She was always very neat (one frock would do her a week!) and took a pride in her appearance and whatever she did. She was fond of gardening: both she and Joan had plots and liked to grow flowers. For a small child she had an understanding that was very mature. She would try to have the hens fed when her mother would come in from the fields, the vessels washed and the sticks cut, or whatever jobs needed to be done. This would happen even as early as seven and eight years. She was very attached to her parents.
At nine, Dolly was confirmed, and she was so small that the teacher told her to say to the Bishop if he asked, “I’ll be 10 this year my Lord.”
She was just twelve when she came to board at the Convent of Mercy Carrick-on-Suir. She stayed there till her Leaving Certificate at seventeen, and entered there the following September. Even when she was a Postulant it is hard to break the habit of calling her Dolly, and she was an tSuir Bábóg to many! Her religious name was Sister Mary Berchmans, but she dropped it and resumed her baptismal name when it became acceptable for Sisters to do so.
She taught at Scoil Muire and St. Anne’s as a postulant, spent a year in the general novitiate in Waterford, and came back to Carrick to work as a second-year Novice. After her Profession in 1962 she taught there for one more year, and then was told, on the feast of the Good Shepherd 1963, that she was chosen to go to America.
It was a big break from home; she was closely attached to her Mammy, Daddy, and Joan, but she accepted the call and spent the last 12 years of her life in El Cerrito and Los Altos. There she taught Second, Fourth and Fifth Grades. She did her BA at College of Notre Dame, Belmont, majoring in Biology with a minor in Chemistry.
Her interest in nature followed her beyond college. She loved all created things, and shared their life in a strange way. Her school classroom was full of animals, plants, leaves, rocks, shells and bugs – as was her bedroom in the convent, which became known to the rest of the house as “Boulder Creek.”
She was loved by children, parents, and her fellow teachers. She was very good with the problem children and spend any amount of time talking with the parents and child and thinking up schemes and ways to do things differently so they could change their behavior patterns, or providing testing and extra help for them in weak areas of study. “Love and affection” was her watchword, and it was how she dealt with children individually; in a classroom situation she could let an almighty scream out of her when roused! Besides her work with the intermediate grades, Alice had Eighth Grade Science and could be seen setting up their lab work for them twice a week in the early hours.
Outside of school she participated in many parish activities. She taught CCD for six years and helped plan and direct parents’ workshops for both parochial and CCD students for the sacraments of Eucharist and Penance each year.
She was a friend of many of the older people in the Parish whom she visited in their homes. Cecelia and Teresa Petar, aged 91 and 93 respectively, kept vigil for her all day in St. Nicholas Church when her body was brought there on Thursday, January 29th.
In her family tradition Alice was a lover of sports and athletics. She enjoyed open-air activities like a hike, or game of volleyball, or a trip to the beach, even in winter. She became a keen badminton player in Los Altos and in 1975 made it to the semi-finals of the mixed singles tournament in Foothill College. No school game went by, whether basketball, volleyball or baseball, but Alice was cheering on our team either in spirit or from the stands. She never missed the broadcasts of hurling and football games over the radio from Ireland.
In her community in Los Altos, Alice was the very heart. She was kind and thoughtful always, whether you were sick, well, or under the weather, and was a good person to talk to if you were worried or upset. She worked very hard at her duties in the house, from cleaning the car to doing the books. When her week came around to prepare the morning Mass she put a lot of thought and prayer into it, and her community would sing every morning Alice was on the liturgy! She was a good person to pray with, to share thoughts on the Psalms, or her questions about life.
Her presence to the community and to each of us is very much missed. Thank God for her. 1942 – 1976.
Los Altos Community
US Region
