Photo above: Donna Reese, left, and Teresa Musselman, right, gather with Sister Elaine Burke in the visiting room at Saint Joseph Villa on Sept. 23, 2026.
Some people fondly remember their elementary school teachers. But not everyone makes a point to visit one after traveling halfway across the country.
That’s what happened on Sept. 23, 2026, when Sister Elaine Burke received a visit from Teresa Musselman and Donna Reese, two of the students she taught in the early 1960s at St. Paul School in Louisville. Musselman now lives in Vancouver, Wash., but while visiting family in Louisville, she decided to come to Maple Mount to visit Sister Elaine.
Sister Elaine taught Musselman the first four grades, and Reese the first seven grades, until St. Paul School closed in 1964.
“All of my family is still in Louisville, so I visit once or twice a year,” Musselman said. She lives in Vancouver to be close to her grandchildren. Musselman is related through marriage to Sister Vivian Bowles and stays in touch with her, which led to the visit with Sister Elaine.
Musselman remembers Sister Elaine as a strict and fair teacher, and very disciplined.
“She played sports with all the grades. She played volleyball with the girls and baseball with the boys,” Musselman said. “She could play better than all the boys.”
“Sister Elaine made an impression on all the neighborhood children,” Reese said. “My husband wasn’t Catholic, but Sister Elaine played baseball with the boys in a big parking lot, and the neighborhood boys would play too.”
Aside from teaching, Sister Elaine was principal, organist and choir director at St. Paul from 1957-64.
“She played a huge pipe organ in church,” Reese said. “We sounded pretty good for a bunch of poor kids from the neighborhood.”
“I taught them Schubert’s Ave Maria,” Sister Elaine said. “They sang it better than anyone.”
Both of the women lived across the street from the school as children.
“I can remember the Sisters sitting on the porch yelling for us to come over and help them, or to send us for ice cream,” Musselman said. “They didn’t drive, so if they needed rides somewhere, the fathers in the neighborhood drove them. I got a lot of ice cream for the Sisters.”
After Reese’s parents divorced, she remembers fondly that Sister Elaine talked with her mother often.
“My mother decided I should come to the Mount for high school,” Reese said. She graduated from Mount Saint Joseph Academy in 1969.
St. Paul School was in a poor and increasingly dangerous part of Louisville on Jackson Street downtown. That was one of the reasons it closed.
“I saw a shooting, I saw a stabbing, and our house was robbed,” Sister Elaine said.
Despite those troubles, Sister Elaine wouldn’t trade her years at St. Paul for anything.
“I loved every bit of it,” she said.
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