Source:  The Record, Monday, April 10, 1972

Holy Name Hospital Honors Pioneer Leader

By Time Noble, Staff Writer

How do you keep a perceptive, strong-minded woman in the dark about a dinner in her honor when you know she'd boycott it if she knew?

When she's Sister M. St. Jude, C.S.J., director of the auxiliary at Holy Name Hospital, Teaneck, for 44 years, you:

• Let her supervise "all arrangements for the events, including seating, and make her think the only purpose is to honor  past auxiliary presidents.

• Lure her to the dais on the big night to assist in honoring the post presidents.

• Then and only then, you pass out the programs filled with tributes and let the speeches begin.

that was the scenario Saturday night before 200 patrons at the annual dinner-dance of the hospital's Central Auxiliary.

And it worked.

"I was just about speechless," says Sister S. Jude.  "I'm very keen. I don't know how they did it."

The auxiliary has grown from five chapters and 70 members in 1928--when Sister St. Jude came to the then three-year-old hospital as a novice of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace--to 27 chapters and 1,500 volunteer women today.  Its efforts have provided the hospital with more than $835,000 and nearly four million folded bandages since 1960.

For the past two years, all auxiliary proceeds have gone into the hospital's building fund. "we've got to build," says Sister St. Jude who has seen Holy Name grow from one building to five, plus additions.

Sister St. Jude was born Louise Scholl in Newark "over 60 years ago," as she puts it. Her age is the subject of much conjectural banter between auxiliary members and herself, but one member says 74 has been certified by reliable sources.

Sister St. Jude is proud of her women, and her success with them apparently is part inspiration, part therapy, and part carrot-and-stick.  Her cohorts call her tireless and indefatigable, and--since St. Jude is the patron of lost causes--they consider her well names.

"She's demanding," says Mrs. Thomas K. Biggar of River Edge, another past president.  "She scolds us.  You can get angry at her, but you'll always go back to her.  We'll do anything the world for her."

And she for them, apparently.  There is a story that when auxiliary members' cars were ticketed some years back for parking in the wrong area behind the hospital's Marian Hall, Sister St. Jude marched out and tore up each ticket.  Last night, chuckling, she denied it ever happed but allow that she probably would have done just that.

Back to Holy Name Hospital home page

Back to Teaneck Virtual Village