Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [17]
Unlike St. Vincent’s, Sacred Heart was coeducational, evenly divided between about two hundred boys and two hundred girls, taught by nine Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. “They were strict,” says Margaret Persse, who attended Sacred Heart with her cousin. “They were always rapping the boys over the knuckles with a ruler.” Like the rest of the girls, Mary Flannery dressed in the unofficial uniform of white blouse, skirt, and bobby socks, though instead of oxford loafers she wore heavier, brown, laced shoes. Yet something about her overall demeanor struck Sister Jude Walsh as “prissy. You definitely got the impression that she was an introvert and lived a relatively sheltered existence.” Like all of the other girls, O’Connor spent hours learning, by rote, the Latin words to intricate masses, such as the “Mass of the Angels.” Her academic record among this order of nuns, whom she came to think of as “genteel Victorian ladies,” remained unexceptional. At Sacred Heart, she never received higher than a B in Composition.
Seven years into the Great Depression, the daily lives of the students at parochial schools such as Sacred Heart were even more touched by national politics and economics. In the fall of 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his landslide victory over Alf Landon for a second term. Roosevelt’s presence had always loomed large in Savannah, and many of its citizens kept time by the plot points of his presidency. Of the Bank Holiday of March 1933, Regina O’Connor remembered, decades later, “Mary Flannery was at dancing when President Roosevelt closed the banks.” That November, he toured Savannah for its bicentennial and was entertained by Mayor Thomas Gamble. As the president kept a home in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he was treated for polio in the heated waters, his itinerary was closely followed. Though resisted at first out of civic pride, his New Deal was soon grudgingly, and then eagerly, welcomed for the vital jobs created by programs such as the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
In his second inaugural address, on January 20, 1937, President Roosevelt optimistically promised, “Our progress out of the depression is obvious.” Among those receptive to its message, tuned in to by a nationwide radio audience, was forty-one-year-old Ed O’Connor, whose business losses during Roosevelt’s first term had amounted to a free fall. After his Dixie Realty folded, O’Connor was listed in the Savannah City Directory, beginning in 1934, as operating a series of short-lived companies. In 1934, he was manager of the C. F. Fulton Real Estate Company and, in 1936, its president. In 1937, the Fulton Company disappeared, succeeded by O’Connor and Company, advertised as dealing in “real estate, loans, and general insurance.” Among the failed real estate interests O’Connor was said to have “jumped around” were the Tondee Apartments at 37th and Bull streets, and the “Venetian Terrace” on Tybee Island. He wound up in the 1937 Savannah City Directory once again listed as a salesman for his father’s wholesale grocery company, his financial failures having sent him back to square one.
As fewer business prospects presented themselves, Ed O’Connor sought personal satisfaction by becoming more active in the American Legion, where his good-natured personality helped him flourish. The failing real estate agent possessed an entire checklist of traits for a successful salesman, and in another economic climate might have done well. As a parishioner who saw him at church in Milledgeville with his wife and young daughter recalled, “He was so tall and so handsome. He always smiled.” Regina O’Connor never approved of her husband’s redirecting his energies to the Legionnaires, or of his new Legion friends. Yet he was not swayed. His quick ascent in the Legion