Sister Peg Hynes S.S.J.
Sister Peg Hynes of The Heart of Camden Housing
March 17, 2001
Hi:
Today is a good day to start a letter about a great person. It's St. Patrick's Day, and sure enough, the faith and tradition that inspire her life were borne all the way from the woods and clearings where that great man preached and prayed more than 15 centuries ago. In those days, wavelengths were nothing more than the mind's play on the immeasurable roll of the sea. Patrick had only the range of his own voice, hoarse and unamplified in the damp air of ancient Ireland. But his word was heard. All over that island from the glens of Antrim in the north to the Macgillcuddy Reeks in the south, from Tara to Connemarra and the wild rock gardens of the western world.
It was here in the stone fenced fields near Gort that Nellie Burke and Tom Hynes grew up a century ago. The evening sun of their young years went down daily behind the curve of the sea in Galway Bay. Toward that setting sun they sailed, both of them, in separate ships and reached morning in America. Mere acquaintances in Galway, they bonded in Philadelphia with vows to God and one another at the altar of St. Columba on Broad Street, June 5, 1929. From there they sailed on together. It would not be plain sailing for them or for many others in 1929 - when the bottom fell out of the nation's sure ship of success.
Tom was a motorman on Trolley 33 (among others) for P.T.C. (now Septa). Thirty-three was a lucky number because in the Depression year of that number, Nellie Burke brought forth the second child of the five she would bear. Margaret Mary, her parents named her in the baptismal book but "Peggy" they called her at cradle, table and everywhere else. Her home on W. Harold Street had many Irish neighbors in a place called Swampoodle in North Philadelphia. Nearby the Phillies baseball team made their home in Shibe Park (Connie Mack Stadium). There, too, the young ones "The Whiz Kids" (Richie Ashburn was one of them) played their baseball and the Hynes girls loved them. The family struggled to make ends meet but the Hynes door had easy hinges from its openings to those in need. There was faith and friendship, hearty laughter and fun as well.
St. Columba Parish was the locus of eight grades of Peg's early schooling and the reception of the first four sacraments of her childhood years. It was the center of her life. Then to high school, an opportunity not available to her parents in the teens of their century back in Galway. Tom Hynes was three when Mary Michon and Father Philip R.McDevitt (the first Bishop McDevitt) established a center for the education of Catholic girls in 1901. Later named after Mary's brother, John W. Hallahan, it was there for Peg when she came in 1947 - the first Catholic High School for girls in the United States. It has graduated more than 37,000 of them in the past 100 years. None any better than Peg Hynes. A star among the stars of its century of educated women is Peg Hynes of Swampoodle. Along the young years of her life, her diligent studies, the basketball court, the softball field, the home where she helped, took up most of her time. When she strode out the door of Hallahan High fifty years ago, this Distinguished Honor Student, this All-Catholic Basketball Player, this President of the Athletic Association, took in tow, together with her high school diploma, the Scholar/Athletic Award in the Class of '51. Not only a bright star of books and hoops and the first base spot in softball, she was a great young woman of genuine goodness in this world.
After graduating she worked at Ford and Kendig on Broad Street, played basketball and softball in several leagues and danced the boards of the Irish Center to sounds well known in the fields of Athenry and the kitchen floors of Claddagh.
Soon God's piper called her away to a hill of chestnut trees where the Sisters of St. Joseph received her into their order for her formation and further education. She received a BA from Chestnut Hill College and an MA from the Jesuits in Boston College. Now she would devote herself to other women's children in the classroom where she taught at St. Stephen's in Philadelphia, Epiphany in Plymouth Meeting, and St. John's in Hillsdale, NJ. A big change from the lithe athletic young woman on the floors and fields of Philadelphia into the nun's long black habit with all but the front of her face incased in a tight white veil; even the lovely light-hearted name, Peg Hynes, hidden in the formal Sister Francis de Sales. But she was happy in her life and good at what she did. Education, thirty years in it, as teacher and then as principal at St. Athanasius, Christ the King, Norwood-Fontbonne Academy in Chestnut Hill (all in Philadelphia) and Holy Trinity in Washington, D.C. before she made a turn in the road in 1986.
Two days have passed since I started this letter. And today is March 19th, the Feast of St. Joseph, that generous conscientious provider in whose example Peg Hynes has modeled her life. She came to Sacred Heart fourteen years ago (the long black habit gone, and the Salesian name as well) to take on the leadership of the Heart of Camden Housing which had been established by this church two years before. Surely the most difficult housing assignment in America, Camden is America's poorest city when one measures by children. No longer getting a school and staff ready for the children to come to…now she would strive that there would be a good house for the children to go home to. In her heart she heard the cry expressed so well in Padraic Colum's poem, An Old Woman of the Roads,
O to have a little house
To own a hearth and stool and all
It ends with the prayer:
I am praying to God on high
For a little house, a house of my own
Out of the winds and rains way.
Sr. Peg with Rosa Linares
For fourteen years she has worked at it, often seven days a week, begging, praying, striving to get abandoned houses rebuilt and owned by people who have no other place to live. No place but this neighborhood wedged between Camden County's huge sewer plant and trash burner and countless other industrial enemies of human lungs and lives. She battles on for her neighborhood housing. This past year she battled breast cancer as well. Here in South Camden the hoops are higher for her and more jagged. The floorboards are broken and uneven. The softball isn't soft and the pitch of things is underhanded in ways that hurt terribly. It's a night game without lights but she is a star.
We will salute Sister Peg Hynes at a dinner dance in her honor on May 11th at Auletto's in Almonnesson, NJ. She has come to another turn in the road. She will step up to the plate of fundraising and public relations and the massive inspiration of others to her cause. "O to have a little house…" Peg Hynes asks for nothing for herself. I ask you to donate to the cause to which she gives her life.
To honor Sister Peg Hynes please give a donation to the Heart of Camden Housing.*
This is a salute to all she has done, a hand of help to all she wants to do. It takes a lot of money to renovate an abandoned house in South Camden. Along with the school, this is another great work of Sacred Heart church. May God help us to accomplish it.
One week before we honor her at Auletto's on May 11th, Sister Peg Hynes will be among the first inductees into the Hallahan Hall of Fame. Not for the baskets she hit in the big gyms of Philadelphia but "the three pointers" of heroic generosity that she has hit so often, especially in Camden.
Sincerely,
Michael Doyle