Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 6 — The Georgia Bulletin, February 15,1990
Sisters Marcella And Roberta - Their Journey Of Love
SAY CHEESE PLEASE — Sister Roberta holds hands with Mrs.
Nealy, a friend to whom she usually brings her favorite type of cheese.
BY RITA McINERNEY
Wearing a red flannel blazer and com
fortable shoes, driving around Atlanta
with the authority of a veteran cab driver,
Sister Roberta Joseph Sutton, CSJ, knows
where she’s going and the shortest route.
After more than half a century, Atlanta
is her city.
On a typical day, her travels, and those
of her colleague, Sister Marcella Meyer,
CSJ, might take them to a modern high-rise
for the elderly like Abernathy Tower in the
West End, to a shabby bungalow in a drug-
ridden, inner city neighborhood, to a
Techwood Homes unit, or to Cabbagetown.
At 80 and 77 years old, respectively,
Sister Marcella and Sister Roberta are
older than about half the people they visit
and befriend. But their zeal has carried
them beyond formal “retirement” at
Catholic Social Services in 1985, on an
unending journey of love to lonely and to
poor elderly people.
They take their friends, some very fee
ble, to Grady Hospital clinics, to doctors
and therapists. They visit the sick at
Grady, Crawford Long, Georgia Baptist,
the Cancer Home.
Wherever they go, their loving hearts
are reflected in their smiles, warm hugs
and kisses. Most of the people they visit
are very much in need of a little love.
This March they will receive an aptly
named award for “exceptional personal
ministry” in this region by the Christian
Council of Metropolitan Atlanta.
Sister Marcella will observe 60 years as
a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondele!. in 1991.
A native Atlantan, she attended St. An
thony’s grade school and Sacred Heart
high school. She knew she wanted to enter
the order while in her teens, but her
mother preferred she experience the
business and dating world first. She
remembers the flapper age of the
Charleston and the Black Bottom with a
grin.
Sister Roberta was born in Green Bay,
Wise., in 1913, but considers herself a
Southerner. She loves the people, her work
and doesn’t have any plans to stop what
she’s doing.
On a typical day, Sister Marcella and
her cousin-companion Helen Tomer arrive
at Abernathy Tower with Mrs. Mattye
Jett, an old friend who is to be interviewed
as a possible tenant.
Mrs. Jett notices the piano in the com
munity room off the entrance and in no
time is playing old hymns she recalls as
favorites of her mother. A retired teacher
and daughter of an AME minister, she
recites poetry as well as she plays the
piano.
Sister Marcella tells her, in her warm
Georgia drawl, how much she can add to
the Abernathy Tower community. She
meets a few old friends and hears from
other tenants that their high rise is a
friendly place. They hope she will join
them.
When Mrs. Jett finishes her interview
with Valerie Harper, the young manager,
she tells Sister Marcella that she wants to
move there.
That same day. Sister Roberta gently
urges Gracie, an elderly woman living in a
shabby twin bungalow on Bass Street in
southwest Atlanta, to think about moving
to Abernathy Tower. Gracie cries when
she tells Sister Roberta of losing her
brother at Christmas time. Now she has no ^
one, except her neighbors next door. g
Her three rooms, crowded with the ac- §
cumulations of a lifetime, are dim. Sister o
Roberta has brought her a small lamp for
the bedside table in the middle of her three
small rooms. It is meant to replace a bare
bulb dangling against the bed frame and
scorching the wood.
This is a fire hazard, especially for a
slight woman whose circulatory problems
have already cost her a leg from the knee
down and toes on the other foot. But the ar
tificial leg and the well-bandaged foot
don’t stop her from sweeping her front
porch and the badly worn linoleum floors
inside.
Gracie tells Sister Roberta she will think
about moving. It’s so bad in her
neighborhood now that she no longer can
sit on the porch “after the sun goes down.”
Her sleep is fearful; the street is full of
noise and drug traffic all night long.
She wishes Sister Roberta didn’t have to
leave. It helps to know that tomorrow,
Sister Mary Jacobs, CSJ, a home health
nurse, will come by to change the dressing
on her foot. She looks forward to her visit
three times each week.
At Abernathy Tower, Sister Marcella
looks in on two deaf people who share a
first-floor apartment. Their visitors “talk”
to them with notepad and pen. Susie
replies in very limited speech. John can
only smile.
Every month, the pair gives cash to
Sister Marcella and she writes a check for
their rent. But the sisters help them in
other ways; taking them to clinics, seeing
that they keep their apartment clean with
a wall chart reminding them what
household chores need to be done each
day.
Another tenant, Dorothy Moss, is an old
friend. Getting about now on a walker, she
laughs and jokes with them and other
tenants. A big woman, she cooked for the
Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart at Im
maculate Heart of Mary convent for 18
years and still is in touch with some of the
sisters.
The next day, Sister Marcella plans to
drive to Fairburn to take another old
friend, Lizzie Easter, to her doctor. The
Easters, she reports, are now being
assisted by a cousin who lives in the extra
bedroom Deacon Winston Leverett built
onto their bungalow.
Tom and Lizzie Easter’s once ram
shackle 'country bungalow was made
usable for the frail couple in 1985 through
the work of Sisters Marcella and Roberta,
with their great friend, Deacon Leverett
and volunteers from several parishes.
Winston and Dorothy Leverett are “part
of the family,” Helen Tomer says, two in
valuable helpers in the small but faithful
circle around the two sisters. Another
volunteer who’s been helping Sister Rober
ta over the years is Thelma McGaskey of
Mableton.
Both admit they couldn’t do their work
a without help from a few parishes. Sister
h Marcella is grateful for the aid that comes
§ regularly from All Saints, St. Jude’s and
«< Corpus Christi.
“Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get the
gas and oil for my car,” she says. It also
helps provide medicine and other
emergency needs for her friends “when
they run out of money at the end of the
month.”
Their religious community supplies both
with cars. Sister Roberta gets monthly
help from Sacred Heart parish and from
Immaculate Heart of Mary. “We couldn’t
make it if we didn’t have them,” she says
of the parish help.
But “once in a while we do have to dip in
to our own expenses,” she admits.
Sacred Heart is Sister Roberta’s “first
love. It will always be.” She taught there
right after the novitiate, first grade from
1937 to 1939, again in 1943 and in 1951 to
1957. St. Anthony’s children knew her from
1957 to 1965. She also served in Augusta,
Brunswick and Valdosta. With the excep
tion of one year in Denver, her entire
religious life has been spent in Georgia.
Sister Marcella started teaching first
graders in Augusta in 1933. Later she
taught in Savannah and Brunswick before
coming to Sacred Heart in the 1950s to
teach fourth grade for two years. Then she
taught in Washington, Ga., for six years.
When her order sent her to Kansas City
for one year, she “couldn’t wait to get
back,” she recalls.
There was a teaching stint in Valdosta
before returning to the eighth grade at St.
Anthony’s. She taught fifth grade at Bless
ed Sacrament before going to the Village
of Saint Joseph as teacher and house
mother.
Father Jacob Bollmer, then executive
director, asked her to come to Catholic
Social Services.
The friends joined forces in 1977 as
outreach workers to the elderly for
Catholic Social Services. They were a
dynamic team from the start.
People needing their help have never
been hard to spot. Mrs. Nealy, a woman
who lives alone in Techwood Homes, didn’t
have a ride home from Grady clinic one
day. They took her and they’ve been
visiting since. Sister Roberta tries to
remember to bring her favorite cheese.
Mrs. Nealy says she isn’t afraid living in
her small corner unit “now that the police
are driving around all the time. I‘m
thankful,” she says of the crackdown on
the drug pushers.
A Cabbagetown woman came to their at
tention through someone else they visited.
Crippled by arthritis, it’s difficult for her
to get to a therapist. When Sister Roberta
(Continued on page 7)
COMMUNICATING — Sister Marcella leans close to Susie, a
hearing-impaired resident of Abernathy Tower.