(1941-2018)

I was not the best little girl. Whenever I got caught doing something like smoking in sixth grade my father would say, “Believe me, when my ship comes in you are going to go to a boarding school.” And I thought, “I don’t need to worry about that. We [are] poor; our ship is never coming in.”

… So I was going into eighth grade and every Sunday we would go to a church that had a school to find out if I could go to that school. We went to Precious Blood … and we met this sister, and I wish I knew who it was because she was an Adrian Dominican and she said to my father, “Have you ever thought about maybe sending your daughter away to a school?” I wanted to kick her.

This anecdote from Sister Mary Diane McMeekin’s life story, told in 2017 via an interview with Sister Donna Baker, explains exactly how it was that Sister Diane came to be a St. Joseph Academy student. As the story continues, her father went on to tell the Sister at Precious Blood that the family could not afford boarding school … only to have the Sister inform him that all he needed to do was go to Adrian and meet with the principal, Sister Mary Angeline Steele, and she would work something out with him.

“We got in the car right then and there and drove to Adrian,” she told Sister Donna.

Read more about Sister Mary Diane (PDF)