During her junior year, Sister Marian decided she wanted to join the Ursulines, and she entered in the fall of 1951, a few months after graduating from the Academy. Of the 18 who took the habit the following year, she is one of six who remain from that novice class, the others being Sisters Ruth Gehres, Eva Boone, Helen Leo Ebelhar, Michael Ann Monaghan, and Mary Diane Taylor.
“I never looked back, I knew this is what I wanted,” Sister Marian said.
This photo taken in 1977 features members of Sister Marian’s novice class celebrating 25 years, as well as some older sisters. From left are Sister Marian, Sister Helen Leo Ebelhar, Sister Eva Boone, Sister Ruth Gehres, Sister Frances Miriam Spalding, the late Sister Lucita Greenwell, the late Sister Joseph Therese Thompson, Sister Mary Diane Taylor, and kneeling with the dog, former Sister Vincent Mary Pryor.
“I always admired her devotion to her family (then and still),” Sister Ruth said. “I loved to visit her because her house sat on a bluff right over the Ohio River at Cloverport … a really beautiful place.
“Marian is a generous person, especially with those in need,” Sister Ruth said. “Wherever she has ministered, she’s been known as someone who visits the sick and elderly and who will help them in whatever way she can.”
A mission to teach
Sister Marian began her teaching ministry in 1954 just a few miles from the Mount at St. Martin School. “I felt prepared, but I was scared to death,” she said. She taught fifth and sixth grades.
In 1957, she went to St. Francis Xavier School in Raywick, Ky., a public school, for a year. The school and the sister’s house burned prior to her arrival, so the sisters taught in various buildings. Sister Marian taught in a school once used for African-American students during the segregation days. “We had a pot-bellied stove and no running water,” she said.
“On the first day of school, a first-grader named Rodney was crying, he said he didn’t have anything to eat at lunch, so I gave him part of mine,” Sister Marian said. “I told his mother later that day to make sure to pack him a sandwich, and his mother said she gave him four sandwiches that day. He ate them all at recess.”
Sister Marian was teaching fourth-graders about Kentucky at St. Raphael School around 1960.
After a year, she moved to St. Raphael School not far from the Mount, where she stayed until 1962. She taught about 20 students in grades 1 through 4, all in the same room.
“We had copperhead snakes in the house,” she said. “We cleared everything off the bed and checked under it every night before we went to sleep.”
The water was salty there and unfit to drink, so Sister Marian came to the Mount each Saturday to fill the water jugs for the week. Sister Rose Jean was a student at the Academy in those days, and the two would visit during that time.
Sister Rose Jean said she didn’t really get to know Sister Marian until they both were adults.
“She babysat me,” Sister Rose Jean said. “By the time I was old enough to realize things, she was already at the Mount attending the Academy.”
The only time the two ministered together was teaching vacation bible school in the summers at St. John the Evangelist in the tiny community of Sunfish, near Leitchfield, Ky. Their late brother was a priest in Bowling Green, and Sunfish was a mission church, so he asked them to teach each summer.
“One summer, the priest hadn’t lived in the house for a few months, and that night we turned on the stove and a bad odor started coming from the kitchen,” Sister Rose Jean said. “Then it got worse. We decided we weren’t staying there that night.” A family of mice had built a nest in the oven and met their demise that night.
The sisters ministered four of five summers together in Sunfish.