Sometime in the early fifties, when I was eight or nine, Louise Rocke, a seventeen-year-old girl on our block, decided to hold Bible School meetings open to all the neighborhood kids, where we would learn Bible verses, sing songs, and talk about religion.

 

          Louise’s family were Baptists.  Most of the kids on the block were from Irish Catholic families, with some from various Protestant denominations.  Add to the mix a few kids from mixed Jewish/Christian backgrounds, and the group was complete.

 

          Once a week, we would gather for an hour after school in the Rockes’ living room in their home on 47th Street.  We’d recite the bible verses we’d memorized, listen to bible stories, be treated to a few magic tricks performed by Louise and her boyfriend, Ricky, and eat cookies made by Louise and her mother.

 

          The following summer, my brother David and I, and our next-door neighbors, Ginny and Billy Friganza, attended a Bible day camp program held at the Rocke family’s church in Manhattan.  This is amazing to me because my family was not at all religious.  My father always said that he had attended church enough as a child to last until he was one hundred years old, and my mother, though her family had been flooded with ministers since 1799, was an I-go-to-church-once-a-year-on-Christmas-Eve-because-I-love-the-carols kind of Christian.  The camp was a two-week session that culminated in an evening event where we shared the craft projects we’d made with our families, and gave a concert of the songs we’d learned.  Seventy-plus years later, I still remember the song my group sang:  Daniel Was a Man of Prayer.  

 

          A year later, Louise and Ricky were married; she was then eighteen and he, twenty-one.  One of the Bible School alumni, Patsy Aspinall, was asked to be the flower girl and had to get special permission from the priest at Queen of Angels to participate.

 

          Ecumenism was alive and well in Sunnyside long before 1962.