Mount St. Mary’s and Her Sister Magdalen

When I was a student at Mount St. Mary’s on Chalon Road, the nuns told us to remember Estelle Doheny in our prayers. We blessed her for building the road up to the Mount, a tortuous, narrow strip of blacktop leading clear to the top. On a rainy day, with a wild wind blowing in from the ocean, it even gave an almost dauntless 16-year-old girl driving an old Cadillac a turn or two. It could be a scary road, but not as much when you knew it like we did, every rut and outcropping, every curve where the edge was sliding down into the canyon a little bit.

Now the road to the Mount is a safe and proper road, but it still employs the grading and excavation that Mrs. Doheny bought for us.

I thought of this when I attended the recent dinner and the evening at the Doheny Mansion on Chester Place in honor of Sister Magdalen Coughlin, who was putting her final imprimatur on 13 years as president of Mount St. Mary’s College, which crowns a mountain in West Los Angeles.

Actually there are two campuses, the almost 70-year-old, four-year liberal arts college on Chalon Road and the two-year college known as the Doheny Campus on Chester Place near downtown Los Angeles. Since 1958, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet have directed the latter as a second campus of Mount St. Mary’s. On the Chester Place campus, seven magnificent old homes rich with detail and architectural fillips are now classrooms, administrative offices and dormitories for the school.

At the party, about 500 people walked between the beautiful rooms of the Doheny mansion. Mrs. Doheny’s generosity in giving the residence into the guardianship of the St. Joseph of Carondolet sisters has proven a good choice. They have preserved and protected and enhanced the magnificence of her residence. The Pompeian Room is named for the grandeur of the ancient city, which is its model. The floor and marble pillars are from Italy, Spain and Africa. I love to be there and, lucky me, I have been several times for elegant occasions. I always feel like one of the Medici ladies--the short-waisted one without the poison in her ring.

I have rejoiced in the friendship of Sister Magdalen for about 10 years. She is a remarkable lady. She is a member of so many boards and committees, it’s silly to name them. And the important thing is that the other members of these bodies each think that Sister devotes her time unstintingly to that one. She does. She seems to have found some marvelous, bottomless sea of time and energy so that everything she turns her hand to gets her complete attention.

At the Mount and at Doheny, the young women are given a boundless feeling of self-worth and a feeling that they can do anything they set their minds to. This is a mirror image of Sister Magdalen. She has done so many things while she has been college president that seemed impossible.

When I was a student at the college, we were mostly Irish--Pat O’Connor, Lee Fitzgerald, Helene Breen, Genevieve Regan and the Borchard and McGrath girls from Oxnard. And Virginia and Dor Meyer from Chicago whose mother’s name was Connor. Now, the MSM ethnic balance almost matches that of Southern California. The young women are 42% Anglo, 34% Latino, 13% Asian and 10% black.

Three-quarters of the students who start the two-year program at Doheny finish and three-quarters of those finish with a four-year degree from the Chalon campus.

They do it because they receive such reinforcement from Sister Magdalen and all of the faculty.

All of the St. Joseph sisters have had that ability to make you think you could do it when you knew you couldn’t. It must come with their vows. We were Depression kids and we thought there was no way we could all hang in and get through school. We did, though. And even a couple of the nuns in our day who never had a kind word at least put iron in our spines for the road ahead.

Sister Magdalen left for Rome the morning after the dinner as a member of a group of 18 educators who would meet with Pope John Paul II concerning education in the United States. It is a signal honor and she will distinguish the group.

You will be glad to know that the great pair of stone lions on the entrance steps into the Doheny mansion are napping as peacefully as ever. Someone must have told them Sister Magdalen will still be around, keeping it all together.