Of all the stories of life lived on the St. Catherine’s campus, that of Virginia “Cissy” Klein Peters '55 may be the most unique. In this two-part series, she recalls with fondness the influence St. Catherine’s has had in her life. 

Part 1

My father was a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy who was awarded the Navy Cross for actions in August 1943. Two months later, the ship he was commanding (USS Buck) was sunk by a German U-616 off the coast of Salerno, Italy, and he perished.  

After the Buck was sunk, my mother, age 33, my sister Kay [Klein Brigham ’53], age 7, brother Mike, age 1, and I, age 5, moved from my father’s home port of Boston to my mother’s hometown of Richmond. Mother was invited by my father’s cousin to come to his home in Round Hill, Va. She loved the area and the foothills of the Blue Ridge and bought a home that very weekend. We lived there from 1943-1948.  

By God’s grace, it was my grandmother in Richmond, concerned about our living in such a rural area, who paved our way to leave Loudoun and go to St C. My grandmother had a friend who knew Mrs. Woolfolk, Assistant to Headmistress Susannah Turner, and the friend spoke to Mrs. Woolfolk about my 38 year-old widowed mother and her three children, now 12, 10 and 5. At Mrs. Woolfolk’s urging, Miss Turner, who had served in the war as a member of the Women’s Army Corps, invited Mother to come to St. Catherine’s as a switchboard operator, receptionist and later bookkeeper. Mother would live in the back of Miss Jennie’s house with my brother Mike; Kay and I would go to the dorms, which at the time included Jeffrey Hall (now home to the Junior Kindergarten), where I lived. I was 10 years old and in the 6th grade. 

Mrs. Hay was our housemother. She would read us a story at bedtime sitting in a chair at the end of the hall. We would lie on the floor at our doorways, listening intently. By day we would play jacks on those floors, and we would, at the insistence of Georginia ‘Gigi’ Spencer Wright ’54 play “horses.” The big boxwoods at the music building (Guigon Hall) would be the stables. There were also real stables with horses in an area by the dining room. Brother Mike’s first job was to polish the girls’ riding boots. The stables were dismantled shortly after we came, and his next job was to go through the dorm halls selling popcorn. Mike ate in the dining room with 150 boarders and walked to school at St. Christopher’s.  

As a boarder in Jeffrey Hall, my designated bath times were Tuesdays and Thursdays, and everyone bathed on Saturdays. I learned to play tennis on the three courts at St. C, and my first summer job was as a helper of four-year-olds at the St. C swimming pool, for which I received $5 a week. The first word I learned from our French teacher was l’oiseau (meaning bird). Most of the sixth grade had taken French in the 5th grade, so I had to work hard to keep up.  

One of the few privileges for boarders at that time was weekends away. A fellow boarder, Joanna Richardson Kolhepp ’54, invited me to her home on the Rappahannock River for a weekend. There I was introduced to artichokes at dinner and saw a patched-up hole in a brick wall of the house where a Civil War cannonball had landed! That was the beginning of seven years of being invited by day students to come to their homes and join in their activities.                                                                                                                 

Stay tuned for Part 2 in the Fall 2025 St. Catherine's Now magazine!