A leadership scholar talks about her time in an Illinois convent, how she defines leadership, and her successes as an educator.
Larraine Matusak
Featured Leadership Topics
Understand Leadership
“For me, leadership is getting good things done with the help of others.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: So, I want to talk to you a little bit about the years that you spent as a Benedictine, and if we could do it to get you to talk about ways in which those experiences helped to shape the rest of your life and as you self-consciously became a leader and that kind of thing. As I understand it, you had both teaching and administrative experience in those 19 years?
MATUSAK: Exactly.
SCARPINO: You assisted with the building of schools, you already mentioned that. Even when you didn’t know how to do it, you figured out how to do it. And you were working in a faith-based and value-based environment.
MATUSAK: Right.
SCARPINO: So, first question: Could you just sort of give us an overview of the various places that you were assigned?
MATUSAK: Whew…
SCARPINO: It doesn’t have to be complete, but just sort of an idea of the kinds of things you did.
MATUSAK: Yeah, well one of the first places I was assigned was a school, Joan of Arc, in Lisle, Illinois. I think that’s where I discovered how much I loved teaching and had a great time there. I was there for three years, I think, and had a great time teaching those kids. A couple of the women are now nuns, became nuns. The men, one of them is a Brother, one is a priest, and they did wonderful things. That was one school. That was a good school.
Then I was in Texas, and the convent we lived in had been an old chicken place and so you had the smell of old chickens.
SCARPINO: By chicken place, do you mean a chicken coop place?
MATUSAK: Yes, it smelled from chicken. You know, you can’t clean that out no matter what. That was a tough experience. That was one of the hardest times of my life because it was hot, Texas is hot, and the environment was not inviting and loving and caring. And we were trying to reach out to the people, to the students, and I had made up my mind, in fact, that I wanted to stay in Texas.
Then I was assigned to another school and I taught for two years in the choir loft of the church because there wasn’t a school to teach in.
SCARPINO: That was also in Texas?
MATUSAK: Mmhmm. I had seventh and eighth grade up on the choir loft and played for masses up there and then had my classes up there. It was very, very different. And I taught some of the servicemen music on the Air Force Base, Carswell Air Force Base, and other experiences. Well, you know all of them, Holy Mount I already mentioned to you and…
SCARPINO: Holy Mount is where?
MATUSAK: Cicero, Illinois. Yeah, that was an interesting experience because we had wonderful kids, wonderful students, and in Berwyn, they were having lots of trouble with their students. When we looked into—why would that be? They’re neighboring suburbs; why the big differences? One thing we found is that the kids at Holy Mount, which was a much more Eastern European ethnicity, when they went home, grandma was there and grandma would see to it that they did their homework and what have you. It was much more family-oriented than they were in Cicero, which was interesting for me. I was learning all of this as a younger nun. When I got to the point of the Academy, we had a very exclusive Academy.
SCARPINO: And the Academy was where?
MATUSAK: At Lisle. I was assigned to teach sciences there, but what came to me was that I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do. I was working with this exclusive bunch of young women who could afford to come to an exclusive academy, and that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Yeah, I taught, and I had great fun, believe me. I made a lot of shock in the community I’m sure because I had a science lab where I believed I should have a lot of living things and one of the girls brought me a dying puppy which we kept alive and brought to life. I named it Sartre after Jean-Paul Sartre. And I had a monkey named Piffer, and I would put the monkey on a leash and the dog on the leash, and we’re not allowed to have dogs in the convent, but the monkey would ride on the dog’s back and we’d go for walks around the huge place. The monkey would catch—well they’re bugs—but catch them and eat them on the back of Sartre and the nuns would all have a fit and go to Chapel and pray for me because I was a sinner.
SCARPINO: For walking around with a dog you rescued with a monkey riding on its back.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And they just were scandalized that I would do such a thing. Anyway, I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do. Then I got this grant to study at the University of Minnesota and I got permission to accept it and I went to Minnesota. Really, that was a big turning point in my life because I realized that, first of all, I was now working with students who were coming from the farms especially. And when you’re a nun, you’re a neuter; you’re not a vetoing parent and you’re not an administrator at the university who’s going to throw them out. So, I found myself with an open door policy in my little studio apartment and I would have kids coming in crying and I was working with these young people who were hitting drugs for the first time in their lives, or being in a big university campus, and my convent wants me to come back and teach in high school. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. And so I just said, “I can’t do it,” and went to talk to a confessor and he said, “You have two alternatives; you can become a bitchy old nun or you can make that horrible decision after 19 years to leave and construct a new life.” And so, you know my decision.
SCARPINO: I understand that when you made that decision that you actually went through a process, you didn’t just walk away.
MATUSAK: Oh, no.
SCARPINO: Laicization, is that the right word?
MATUSAK: Yeah. And the Benedictines are not under bishops, they’re under Rome. So I had to write a letter to Rome to get a dispensation from my vows, which I did receive. And there, too, my dad was dead but I couldn’t rely on my mother; we were poor. And you get $300 and a wave goodbye. You have no clothes, you don’t have a spoon, you don’t have a fork, you don’t have anything.
SCARPINO: So I was going to ask you, when you left, you literally were starting over.
MATUSAK: Oh, absolutely.
SCARPINO: $300, some clothes and a suitcase sort of thing, and that was it.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And clothes you didn’t have because you had habits and so you had nothing, absolutely nothing. But you know what? I never thought about it that way. In fact, what I remember what we did is I was working for Dr. Rassweiler. He was a physicist, an amazing man, and in fact, he and his wife owned this house and I kind of became their daughter that they never had.
SCARPINO: They owned this house that we’re sitting in now?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Because when he was dying, he called and we came, both Connie and I came here to see him; we had come before when he was dying and he begged that we not allow Irene to be put into a nursing home. And we promised and I kept my promise. We were here every three months and we cooked until we dropped so she had food while we were gone and somebody to take care of her. But we did until she died and then it was a shock and a pleasure that she left the house to us. It was a shambles. It was really bad. We were going sell it and after we tore out all of the stinky carpeting and painted and did all this stuff, we said, “Let’s try it.” So we spend our winters here now.
SCARPINO: So, when you were coming down here to cook for her, where were you commuting from?
MATUSAK: From Battle Creek.
SCARPINO: Commute seems a little like the wrong term for that. It’s a long way from Battle Creek.
MATUSAK: Yes, it’s a long way, it’s a long way, but it was from Battle Creek and we did that for I don’t know how many years, but we did it. We promised and we were going to do that.
But anyway, going back to how that happened at the University of Minnesota. So I realized that I had a mission and I wanted to fulfill that mission. I just felt that’s what God wanted me to do and it was a tough time. And yeah, you know it meant that, for example, Merrill Rassweiler saw to it that my classes were put in the morning and then in the afternoon I ran like a madwoman to the bathroom and changed into whites and rushed over to the hospital and worked on the crash team at the hospital until midnight.
SCARPINO: So, by whites, you mean a nurse’s uniform?
MATUSAK: Yeah.
SCARPINO: Were you trained as a nurse?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: So you were volunteering at the hospital?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: Or you were being paid?
MATUSAK: No, I was paid, being paid.
SCARPINO: Okay, so you got a paying job, a second job, so to speak.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: In the Emergency Room.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: What did you do there?
MATUSAK: Well, what I did primarily was the EKGs and going with the crash team. I ran around the hospital with the crash team.
SCARPINO: The crash team is when people have heart attacks?
MATUSAK: Yeah, code blue. I did that and I enjoyed it, but it was from three until midnight and then at midnight I’d study until about two in the morning and then get up at five and go in and do tutoring for jocks and start my workday of classes and study.
SCARPINO: (Laughing) I did that too.
MATUSAK: Yeah, you know, so we were doing all kinds of jobs to make money to live. And I remember, in fact I said that to Connie—I did chicken pot pies last night because I didn’t feel like cooking—and I said, “You know what? I remembered I had $5 a week for food. That was all that I could afford.” The University of Minnesota does not pay well, and when you’re studying and teaching for them, I believe my highest salary there was $13,000. That’s not a lot of money.
SCARPINO: You were, at that point, a doctoral student, is that right?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: In one of your emails to me when we were corresponding back and forth, you mentioned that you had been a Mother Superior?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Where was that, and what does that entail?
MATUSAK: Texas.
SCARPINO: So, near Dallas?
MATUSAK: Yes, Fort Worth.
SCARPINO: Fort Worth, sorry.
MATUSAK: In White Settlement, you know. Well, it means being responsible for all the Sisters under you and seeing to it to their health, their education, and I had a very different perspective about all that. So, I was opening up doors for these women and then you get threatened because you’re allowing them to be too worldly, you know.
SCARPINO: What were you doing that could have been interpreted as too worldly?
MATUSAK: Sending them off to get education, to institutions in Texas; are you kidding? But I did. I did. And you faced the music for it when you got home. And even myself—and this one’s going to be really bizarre—but when I got the grant…
SCARPINO: To go to the University of Minnesota?
MATUSAK: Yeah, one of the things with that grant then that evolved—everything evolves—was another grant where I was to study Alpine vegetation.
SCARPINO: Not too much of that in Minnesota, is there?
MATUSAK: No, but that was going to come from out in Colorado. I got permission again, and I said, “Well, I can’t,”—he tells us we’re going up into the mountains and I can’t go in the habit. “So, may I please go and purchase some jeans and whatever I need?” They said “no.”
SCARPINO: They wanted you to go up into the mountains wearing a habit?
MATUSAK: That’s right.
SCARPINO: And those black shoes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. And what they did—this is so ridiculous, but you know why my mindset changed—they took a habit, and they sewed it up the middle like pants and that’s what I was supposed to wear.
SCARPINO: So, I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful, but those are like Sister culottes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. But they were long, they’re long. I laughed so hard when they arrived. We were in a dormitory. I went into the hallway and I was dancing down the hallway with them. But I got rid of them and I made myself a pair of culottes, you might say, and took a bleach bottle, emptied it, cut the bleach bottle, cut my veil, took all the face stuff off and had the bleach bottle with the veil and that’s all I put on. Well, somebody got pictures and somebody sent pictures back to the convent.
SCARPINO: Uh-oh.
MATUSAK: Yeah. So all hell broke out when I got there. But worse, and what made me realize I had to leave, was that I was walking down the hallway, dressed in the full garb again, back at the convent, and one of the old nuns met me and she looked at me and she said, “You adulteress,” because she had seen the picture of the way I was dressed.
SCARPINO: Oh my word.
MATUSAK: I thought, I can’t stay here. I cannot stay here.
SCARPINO: So, was part of the reason that you left that at some point it just became too limiting?
MATUSAK: Yes. Yeah, my community was not moving forward. College at St. Ben’s nuns were entirely different. They were very futuristic in their thinking, a very, very different group of Benedictines, and we had somehow stagnated.
SCARPINO: So in the 19 years that you belonged to that convent, they got older…
MATUSAK: They stagnated…
SCARPINO: …and set in their ways…
MATUSAK: Yeah, well the first Reverend Mother was very forward-looking. She was very good, the one who told me I wouldn’t be a diva. She was marvelous, marvelous. And things were growing under her. Then we had a Reverend Mother who was really, really not good and it stagnated, everything just stagnated.
SCARPINO: I understand, and I hope I got this right, that you spent two years in medical school.
MATUSAK: No, no, that’s not right.
SCARPINO: University of Illinois?
MATUSAK: Yeah, I was accepted, but I never was allowed to accept it, to go.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Never was allowed.
SCARPINO: So, whose idea was it that you apply to medical school?
MATUSAK: I was the first woman to take classes at St. John’s University.
SCARPINO: Which is the Catholic college that’s sort of the pair with St. Benedict?
MATUSAK: Yeah, right. Right now, I mean they do everything as hour on the hour, bussing and it’s all coed, but it’s still women and men. They’ve done some very smart things on leadership and I’m going to interject that. They put the women through leadership training for two and a half years as women, and the men the same thing. Then they bring them together for leadership training and it’s an entirely different group because the women have a sense of security about themselves and strength, and it’s wonderful. But, anyway, yeah, where were we?
SCARPINO: I asked you about medical school and you said you took classes at St. John’s.
MATUSAK: Yeah, St. John’s. I was the first woman and they thought… I had embryology, and the priest who did the teaching there said that I was material for medical school. So, being naive—call it what you like, you know—the nuns encouraged me to apply and so I did. And I was accepted. Then my community said, “No, you have to come back and teach.” But that was my life with my community. I was forever being changed in whatever I was doing, always.
SCARPINO: For reasons that were not clear?
MATUSAK: I was a spoke in the wheel, for their use. Whatever they needed, somehow I needed to come home and fix.
SCARPINO: Was that because you had talent?
MATUSAK: I think it was because they thought I had talent, but they never thought about me as a person and how that might affect me.
SCARPINO: When you left, did you carry that lesson with you; remember to think about individuals as people?
MATUSAK: Oh my God, yes, I certainly did. I have no resentment of the community, however. I learned a lot there. And when people ask me why I’m so open to change, I say “19 years.” You went to Chapel on August 15th, after a retreat, and the Reverend Mother would walk down the aisles and hand you a piece of paper, and it said where you were going and what you were going to do. You may have been at Holy Mount for five years, and your piece of paper said, “You’re going to Fort Worth, Texas.” Texas. And you had two hours to pack a suitcase, one suitcase, and go. And you get accustomed to that. So I learned a lot about change. I can take change. I can take change overnight, if you want to say it that way. I also learned how to get along with people because nuns are just like every other people in any other community; there are good ones and there are those who are really downright nasty. And you learn to live with them because it’s God’s will that you’re with them. I learned a lot there, so I have no animosity. I spent 19 years. Maybe I should have only spent 10; no, it’s okay. It all worked out well.
Influences and Impacts
“I’d come home bloody and dirty and crying and tired. My mother and dad would say, ‘You can go to Lindblom High.’ I said, ‘No, I won’t; I’m going to the Catholic high school.’ And I did. I made it through the high school, paid my way the whole way…”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: So, I want to talk to you a little bit about the years that you spent as a Benedictine, and if we could do it to get you to talk about ways in which those experiences helped to shape the rest of your life and as you self-consciously became a leader and that kind of thing. As I understand it, you had both teaching and administrative experience in those 19 years?
MATUSAK: Exactly.
SCARPINO: You assisted with the building of schools, you already mentioned that. Even when you didn’t know how to do it, you figured out how to do it. And you were working in a faith-based and value-based environment.
MATUSAK: Right.
SCARPINO: So, first question: Could you just sort of give us an overview of the various places that you were assigned?
MATUSAK: Whew…
SCARPINO: It doesn’t have to be complete, but just sort of an idea of the kinds of things you did.
MATUSAK: Yeah, well one of the first places I was assigned was a school, Joan of Arc, in Lisle, Illinois. I think that’s where I discovered how much I loved teaching and had a great time there. I was there for three years, I think, and had a great time teaching those kids. A couple of the women are now nuns, became nuns. The men, one of them is a Brother, one is a priest, and they did wonderful things. That was one school. That was a good school.
Then I was in Texas, and the convent we lived in had been an old chicken place and so you had the smell of old chickens.
SCARPINO: By chicken place, do you mean a chicken coop place?
MATUSAK: Yes, it smelled from chicken. You know, you can’t clean that out no matter what. That was a tough experience. That was one of the hardest times of my life because it was hot, Texas is hot, and the environment was not inviting and loving and caring. And we were trying to reach out to the people, to the students, and I had made up my mind, in fact, that I wanted to stay in Texas.
Then I was assigned to another school and I taught for two years in the choir loft of the church because there wasn’t a school to teach in.
SCARPINO: That was also in Texas?
MATUSAK: Mmhmm. I had seventh and eighth grade up on the choir loft and played for masses up there and then had my classes up there. It was very, very different. And I taught some of the servicemen music on the Air Force Base, Carswell Air Force Base, and other experiences. Well, you know all of them, Holy Mount I already mentioned to you and…
SCARPINO: Holy Mount is where?
MATUSAK: Cicero, Illinois. Yeah, that was an interesting experience because we had wonderful kids, wonderful students, and in Berwyn, they were having lots of trouble with their students. When we looked into—why would that be? They’re neighboring suburbs; why the big differences? One thing we found is that the kids at Holy Mount, which was a much more Eastern European ethnicity, when they went home, grandma was there and grandma would see to it that they did their homework and what have you. It was much more family-oriented than they were in Cicero, which was interesting for me. I was learning all of this as a younger nun. When I got to the point of the Academy, we had a very exclusive Academy.
SCARPINO: And the Academy was where?
MATUSAK: At Lisle. I was assigned to teach sciences there, but what came to me was that I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do. I was working with this exclusive bunch of young women who could afford to come to an exclusive academy, and that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Yeah, I taught, and I had great fun, believe me. I made a lot of shock in the community I’m sure because I had a science lab where I believed I should have a lot of living things and one of the girls brought me a dying puppy which we kept alive and brought to life. I named it Sartre after Jean-Paul Sartre. And I had a monkey named Piffer, and I would put the monkey on a leash and the dog on the leash, and we’re not allowed to have dogs in the convent, but the monkey would ride on the dog’s back and we’d go for walks around the huge place. The monkey would catch—well they’re bugs—but catch them and eat them on the back of Sartre and the nuns would all have a fit and go to Chapel and pray for me because I was a sinner.
SCARPINO: For walking around with a dog you rescued with a monkey riding on its back.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And they just were scandalized that I would do such a thing. Anyway, I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do. Then I got this grant to study at the University of Minnesota and I got permission to accept it and I went to Minnesota. Really, that was a big turning point in my life because I realized that, first of all, I was now working with students who were coming from the farms especially. And when you’re a nun, you’re a neuter; you’re not a vetoing parent and you’re not an administrator at the university who’s going to throw them out. So, I found myself with an open door policy in my little studio apartment and I would have kids coming in crying and I was working with these young people who were hitting drugs for the first time in their lives, or being in a big university campus, and my convent wants me to come back and teach in high school. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. And so I just said, “I can’t do it,” and went to talk to a confessor and he said, “You have two alternatives; you can become a bitchy old nun or you can make that horrible decision after 19 years to leave and construct a new life.” And so, you know my decision.
SCARPINO: I understand that when you made that decision that you actually went through a process, you didn’t just walk away.
MATUSAK: Oh, no.
SCARPINO: Laicization, is that the right word?
MATUSAK: Yeah. And the Benedictines are not under bishops, they’re under Rome. So I had to write a letter to Rome to get a dispensation from my vows, which I did receive. And there, too, my dad was dead but I couldn’t rely on my mother; we were poor. And you get $300 and a wave goodbye. You have no clothes, you don’t have a spoon, you don’t have a fork, you don’t have anything.
SCARPINO: So I was going to ask you, when you left, you literally were starting over.
MATUSAK: Oh, absolutely.
SCARPINO: $300, some clothes and a suitcase sort of thing, and that was it.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And clothes you didn’t have because you had habits and so you had nothing, absolutely nothing. But you know what? I never thought about it that way. In fact, what I remember what we did is I was working for Dr. Rassweiler. He was a physicist, an amazing man, and in fact, he and his wife owned this house and I kind of became their daughter that they never had.
SCARPINO: They owned this house that we’re sitting in now?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Because when he was dying, he called and we came, both Connie and I came here to see him; we had come before when he was dying and he begged that we not allow Irene to be put into a nursing home. And we promised and I kept my promise. We were here every three months and we cooked until we dropped so she had food while we were gone and somebody to take care of her. But we did until she died and then it was a shock and a pleasure that she left the house to us. It was a shambles. It was really bad. We were going sell it and after we tore out all of the stinky carpeting and painted and did all this stuff, we said, “Let’s try it.” So we spend our winters here now.
SCARPINO: So, when you were coming down here to cook for her, where were you commuting from?
MATUSAK: From Battle Creek.
SCARPINO: Commute seems a little like the wrong term for that. It’s a long way from Battle Creek.
MATUSAK: Yes, it’s a long way, it’s a long way, but it was from Battle Creek and we did that for I don’t know how many years, but we did it. We promised and we were going to do that.
But anyway, going back to how that happened at the University of Minnesota. So I realized that I had a mission and I wanted to fulfill that mission. I just felt that’s what God wanted me to do and it was a tough time. And yeah, you know it meant that, for example, Merrill Rassweiler saw to it that my classes were put in the morning and then in the afternoon I ran like a madwoman to the bathroom and changed into whites and rushed over to the hospital and worked on the crash team at the hospital until midnight.
SCARPINO: So, by whites, you mean a nurse’s uniform?
MATUSAK: Yeah.
SCARPINO: Were you trained as a nurse?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: So you were volunteering at the hospital?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: Or you were being paid?
MATUSAK: No, I was paid, being paid.
SCARPINO: Okay, so you got a paying job, a second job, so to speak.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: In the Emergency Room.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: What did you do there?
MATUSAK: Well, what I did primarily was the EKGs and going with the crash team. I ran around the hospital with the crash team.
SCARPINO: The crash team is when people have heart attacks?
MATUSAK: Yeah, code blue. I did that and I enjoyed it, but it was from three until midnight and then at midnight I’d study until about two in the morning and then get up at five and go in and do tutoring for jocks and start my workday of classes and study.
SCARPINO: (Laughing) I did that too.
MATUSAK: Yeah, you know, so we were doing all kinds of jobs to make money to live. And I remember, in fact I said that to Connie—I did chicken pot pies last night because I didn’t feel like cooking—and I said, “You know what? I remembered I had $5 a week for food. That was all that I could afford.” The University of Minnesota does not pay well, and when you’re studying and teaching for them, I believe my highest salary there was $13,000. That’s not a lot of money.
SCARPINO: You were, at that point, a doctoral student, is that right?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: In one of your emails to me when we were corresponding back and forth, you mentioned that you had been a Mother Superior?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Where was that, and what does that entail?
MATUSAK: Texas.
SCARPINO: So, near Dallas?
MATUSAK: Yes, Fort Worth.
SCARPINO: Fort Worth, sorry.
MATUSAK: In White Settlement, you know. Well, it means being responsible for all the Sisters under you and seeing to it to their health, their education, and I had a very different perspective about all that. So, I was opening up doors for these women and then you get threatened because you’re allowing them to be too worldly, you know.
SCARPINO: What were you doing that could have been interpreted as too worldly?
MATUSAK: Sending them off to get education, to institutions in Texas; are you kidding? But I did. I did. And you faced the music for it when you got home. And even myself—and this one’s going to be really bizarre—but when I got the grant…
SCARPINO: To go to the University of Minnesota?
MATUSAK: Yeah, one of the things with that grant then that evolved—everything evolves—was another grant where I was to study Alpine vegetation.
SCARPINO: Not too much of that in Minnesota, is there?
MATUSAK: No, but that was going to come from out in Colorado. I got permission again, and I said, “Well, I can’t,”—he tells us we’re going up into the mountains and I can’t go in the habit. “So, may I please go and purchase some jeans and whatever I need?” They said “no.”
SCARPINO: They wanted you to go up into the mountains wearing a habit?
MATUSAK: That’s right.
SCARPINO: And those black shoes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. And what they did—this is so ridiculous, but you know why my mindset changed—they took a habit, and they sewed it up the middle like pants and that’s what I was supposed to wear.
SCARPINO: So, I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful, but those are like Sister culottes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. But they were long, they’re long. I laughed so hard when they arrived. We were in a dormitory. I went into the hallway and I was dancing down the hallway with them. But I got rid of them and I made myself a pair of culottes, you might say, and took a bleach bottle, emptied it, cut the bleach bottle, cut my veil, took all the face stuff off and had the bleach bottle with the veil and that’s all I put on. Well, somebody got pictures and somebody sent pictures back to the convent.
SCARPINO: Uh-oh.
MATUSAK: Yeah. So all hell broke out when I got there. But worse, and what made me realize I had to leave, was that I was walking down the hallway, dressed in the full garb again, back at the convent, and one of the old nuns met me and she looked at me and she said, “You adulteress,” because she had seen the picture of the way I was dressed.
SCARPINO: Oh my word.
MATUSAK: I thought, I can’t stay here. I cannot stay here.
SCARPINO: So, was part of the reason that you left that at some point it just became too limiting?
MATUSAK: Yes. Yeah, my community was not moving forward. College at St. Ben’s nuns were entirely different. They were very futuristic in their thinking, a very, very different group of Benedictines, and we had somehow stagnated.
SCARPINO: So in the 19 years that you belonged to that convent, they got older…
MATUSAK: They stagnated…
SCARPINO: …and set in their ways…
MATUSAK: Yeah, well the first Reverend Mother was very forward-looking. She was very good, the one who told me I wouldn’t be a diva. She was marvelous, marvelous. And things were growing under her. Then we had a Reverend Mother who was really, really not good and it stagnated, everything just stagnated.
SCARPINO: I understand, and I hope I got this right, that you spent two years in medical school.
MATUSAK: No, no, that’s not right.
SCARPINO: University of Illinois?
MATUSAK: Yeah, I was accepted, but I never was allowed to accept it, to go.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Never was allowed.
SCARPINO: So, whose idea was it that you apply to medical school?
MATUSAK: I was the first woman to take classes at St. John’s University.
SCARPINO: Which is the Catholic college that’s sort of the pair with St. Benedict?
MATUSAK: Yeah, right. Right now, I mean they do everything as hour on the hour, bussing and it’s all coed, but it’s still women and men. They’ve done some very smart things on leadership and I’m going to interject that. They put the women through leadership training for two and a half years as women, and the men the same thing. Then they bring them together for leadership training and it’s an entirely different group because the women have a sense of security about themselves and strength, and it’s wonderful. But, anyway, yeah, where were we?
SCARPINO: I asked you about medical school and you said you took classes at St. John’s.
MATUSAK: Yeah, St. John’s. I was the first woman and they thought… I had embryology, and the priest who did the teaching there said that I was material for medical school. So, being naive—call it what you like, you know—the nuns encouraged me to apply and so I did. And I was accepted. Then my community said, “No, you have to come back and teach.” But that was my life with my community. I was forever being changed in whatever I was doing, always.
SCARPINO: For reasons that were not clear?
MATUSAK: I was a spoke in the wheel, for their use. Whatever they needed, somehow I needed to come home and fix.
SCARPINO: Was that because you had talent?
MATUSAK: I think it was because they thought I had talent, but they never thought about me as a person and how that might affect me.
SCARPINO: When you left, did you carry that lesson with you; remember to think about individuals as people?
MATUSAK: Oh my God, yes, I certainly did. I have no resentment of the community, however. I learned a lot there. And when people ask me why I’m so open to change, I say “19 years.” You went to Chapel on August 15th, after a retreat, and the Reverend Mother would walk down the aisles and hand you a piece of paper, and it said where you were going and what you were going to do. You may have been at Holy Mount for five years, and your piece of paper said, “You’re going to Fort Worth, Texas.” Texas. And you had two hours to pack a suitcase, one suitcase, and go. And you get accustomed to that. So I learned a lot about change. I can take change. I can take change overnight, if you want to say it that way. I also learned how to get along with people because nuns are just like every other people in any other community; there are good ones and there are those who are really downright nasty. And you learn to live with them because it’s God’s will that you’re with them. I learned a lot there, so I have no animosity. I spent 19 years. Maybe I should have only spent 10; no, it’s okay. It all worked out well.
Navigate Change
“I think that a person who is in the leadership position needs to recognize what my mother said way back when, that everybody has a gift, and try to find what that gift is.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: So, I want to talk to you a little bit about the years that you spent as a Benedictine, and if we could do it to get you to talk about ways in which those experiences helped to shape the rest of your life and as you self-consciously became a leader and that kind of thing. As I understand it, you had both teaching and administrative experience in those 19 years?
MATUSAK: Exactly.
SCARPINO: You assisted with the building of schools, you already mentioned that. Even when you didn’t know how to do it, you figured out how to do it. And you were working in a faith-based and value-based environment.
MATUSAK: Right.
SCARPINO: So, first question: Could you just sort of give us an overview of the various places that you were assigned?
MATUSAK: Whew…
SCARPINO: It doesn’t have to be complete, but just sort of an idea of the kinds of things you did.
MATUSAK: Yeah, well one of the first places I was assigned was a school, Joan of Arc, in Lisle, Illinois. I think that’s where I discovered how much I loved teaching and had a great time there. I was there for three years, I think, and had a great time teaching those kids. A couple of the women are now nuns, became nuns. The men, one of them is a Brother, one is a priest, and they did wonderful things. That was one school. That was a good school.
Then I was in Texas, and the convent we lived in had been an old chicken place and so you had the smell of old chickens.
SCARPINO: By chicken place, do you mean a chicken coop place?
MATUSAK: Yes, it smelled from chicken. You know, you can’t clean that out no matter what. That was a tough experience. That was one of the hardest times of my life because it was hot, Texas is hot, and the environment was not inviting and loving and caring. And we were trying to reach out to the people, to the students, and I had made up my mind, in fact, that I wanted to stay in Texas.
Then I was assigned to another school and I taught for two years in the choir loft of the church because there wasn’t a school to teach in.
SCARPINO: That was also in Texas?
MATUSAK: Mmhmm. I had seventh and eighth grade up on the choir loft and played for masses up there and then had my classes up there. It was very, very different. And I taught some of the servicemen music on the Air Force Base, Carswell Air Force Base, and other experiences. Well, you know all of them, Holy Mount I already mentioned to you and…
SCARPINO: Holy Mount is where?
MATUSAK: Cicero, Illinois. Yeah, that was an interesting experience because we had wonderful kids, wonderful students, and in Berwyn, they were having lots of trouble with their students. When we looked into—why would that be? They’re neighboring suburbs; why the big differences? One thing we found is that the kids at Holy Mount, which was a much more Eastern European ethnicity, when they went home, grandma was there and grandma would see to it that they did their homework and what have you. It was much more family-oriented than they were in Cicero, which was interesting for me. I was learning all of this as a younger nun. When I got to the point of the Academy, we had a very exclusive Academy.
SCARPINO: And the Academy was where?
MATUSAK: At Lisle. I was assigned to teach sciences there, but what came to me was that I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do. I was working with this exclusive bunch of young women who could afford to come to an exclusive academy, and that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Yeah, I taught, and I had great fun, believe me. I made a lot of shock in the community I’m sure because I had a science lab where I believed I should have a lot of living things and one of the girls brought me a dying puppy which we kept alive and brought to life. I named it Sartre after Jean-Paul Sartre. And I had a monkey named Piffer, and I would put the monkey on a leash and the dog on the leash, and we’re not allowed to have dogs in the convent, but the monkey would ride on the dog’s back and we’d go for walks around the huge place. The monkey would catch—well they’re bugs—but catch them and eat them on the back of Sartre and the nuns would all have a fit and go to Chapel and pray for me because I was a sinner.
SCARPINO: For walking around with a dog you rescued with a monkey riding on its back.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And they just were scandalized that I would do such a thing. Anyway, I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do. Then I got this grant to study at the University of Minnesota and I got permission to accept it and I went to Minnesota. Really, that was a big turning point in my life because I realized that, first of all, I was now working with students who were coming from the farms especially. And when you’re a nun, you’re a neuter; you’re not a vetoing parent and you’re not an administrator at the university who’s going to throw them out. So, I found myself with an open door policy in my little studio apartment and I would have kids coming in crying and I was working with these young people who were hitting drugs for the first time in their lives, or being in a big university campus, and my convent wants me to come back and teach in high school. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. And so I just said, “I can’t do it,” and went to talk to a confessor and he said, “You have two alternatives; you can become a bitchy old nun or you can make that horrible decision after 19 years to leave and construct a new life.” And so, you know my decision.
SCARPINO: I understand that when you made that decision that you actually went through a process, you didn’t just walk away.
MATUSAK: Oh, no.
SCARPINO: Laicization, is that the right word?
MATUSAK: Yeah. And the Benedictines are not under bishops, they’re under Rome. So I had to write a letter to Rome to get a dispensation from my vows, which I did receive. And there, too, my dad was dead but I couldn’t rely on my mother; we were poor. And you get $300 and a wave goodbye. You have no clothes, you don’t have a spoon, you don’t have a fork, you don’t have anything.
SCARPINO: So I was going to ask you, when you left, you literally were starting over.
MATUSAK: Oh, absolutely.
SCARPINO: $300, some clothes and a suitcase sort of thing, and that was it.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And clothes you didn’t have because you had habits and so you had nothing, absolutely nothing. But you know what? I never thought about it that way. In fact, what I remember what we did is I was working for Dr. Rassweiler. He was a physicist, an amazing man, and in fact, he and his wife owned this house and I kind of became their daughter that they never had.
SCARPINO: They owned this house that we’re sitting in now?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Because when he was dying, he called and we came, both Connie and I came here to see him; we had come before when he was dying and he begged that we not allow Irene to be put into a nursing home. And we promised and I kept my promise. We were here every three months and we cooked until we dropped so she had food while we were gone and somebody to take care of her. But we did until she died and then it was a shock and a pleasure that she left the house to us. It was a shambles. It was really bad. We were going sell it and after we tore out all of the stinky carpeting and painted and did all this stuff, we said, “Let’s try it.” So we spend our winters here now.
SCARPINO: So, when you were coming down here to cook for her, where were you commuting from?
MATUSAK: From Battle Creek.
SCARPINO: Commute seems a little like the wrong term for that. It’s a long way from Battle Creek.
MATUSAK: Yes, it’s a long way, it’s a long way, but it was from Battle Creek and we did that for I don’t know how many years, but we did it. We promised and we were going to do that.
But anyway, going back to how that happened at the University of Minnesota. So I realized that I had a mission and I wanted to fulfill that mission. I just felt that’s what God wanted me to do and it was a tough time. And yeah, you know it meant that, for example, Merrill Rassweiler saw to it that my classes were put in the morning and then in the afternoon I ran like a madwoman to the bathroom and changed into whites and rushed over to the hospital and worked on the crash team at the hospital until midnight.
SCARPINO: So, by whites, you mean a nurse’s uniform?
MATUSAK: Yeah.
SCARPINO: Were you trained as a nurse?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: So you were volunteering at the hospital?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: Or you were being paid?
MATUSAK: No, I was paid, being paid.
SCARPINO: Okay, so you got a paying job, a second job, so to speak.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: In the Emergency Room.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: What did you do there?
MATUSAK: Well, what I did primarily was the EKGs and going with the crash team. I ran around the hospital with the crash team.
SCARPINO: The crash team is when people have heart attacks?
MATUSAK: Yeah, code blue. I did that and I enjoyed it, but it was from three until midnight and then at midnight I’d study until about two in the morning and then get up at five and go in and do tutoring for jocks and start my workday of classes and study.
SCARPINO: (Laughing) I did that too.
MATUSAK: Yeah, you know, so we were doing all kinds of jobs to make money to live. And I remember, in fact I said that to Connie—I did chicken pot pies last night because I didn’t feel like cooking—and I said, “You know what? I remembered I had $5 a week for food. That was all that I could afford.” The University of Minnesota does not pay well, and when you’re studying and teaching for them, I believe my highest salary there was $13,000. That’s not a lot of money.
SCARPINO: You were, at that point, a doctoral student, is that right?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: In one of your emails to me when we were corresponding back and forth, you mentioned that you had been a Mother Superior?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Where was that, and what does that entail?
MATUSAK: Texas.
SCARPINO: So, near Dallas?
MATUSAK: Yes, Fort Worth.
SCARPINO: Fort Worth, sorry.
MATUSAK: In White Settlement, you know. Well, it means being responsible for all the Sisters under you and seeing to it to their health, their education, and I had a very different perspective about all that. So, I was opening up doors for these women and then you get threatened because you’re allowing them to be too worldly, you know.
SCARPINO: What were you doing that could have been interpreted as too worldly?
MATUSAK: Sending them off to get education, to institutions in Texas; are you kidding? But I did. I did. And you faced the music for it when you got home. And even myself—and this one’s going to be really bizarre—but when I got the grant…
SCARPINO: To go to the University of Minnesota?
MATUSAK: Yeah, one of the things with that grant then that evolved—everything evolves—was another grant where I was to study Alpine vegetation.
SCARPINO: Not too much of that in Minnesota, is there?
MATUSAK: No, but that was going to come from out in Colorado. I got permission again, and I said, “Well, I can’t,”—he tells us we’re going up into the mountains and I can’t go in the habit. “So, may I please go and purchase some jeans and whatever I need?” They said “no.”
SCARPINO: They wanted you to go up into the mountains wearing a habit?
MATUSAK: That’s right.
SCARPINO: And those black shoes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. And what they did—this is so ridiculous, but you know why my mindset changed—they took a habit, and they sewed it up the middle like pants and that’s what I was supposed to wear.
SCARPINO: So, I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful, but those are like Sister culottes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. But they were long, they’re long. I laughed so hard when they arrived. We were in a dormitory. I went into the hallway and I was dancing down the hallway with them. But I got rid of them and I made myself a pair of culottes, you might say, and took a bleach bottle, emptied it, cut the bleach bottle, cut my veil, took all the face stuff off and had the bleach bottle with the veil and that’s all I put on. Well, somebody got pictures and somebody sent pictures back to the convent.
SCARPINO: Uh-oh.
MATUSAK: Yeah. So all hell broke out when I got there. But worse, and what made me realize I had to leave, was that I was walking down the hallway, dressed in the full garb again, back at the convent, and one of the old nuns met me and she looked at me and she said, “You adulteress,” because she had seen the picture of the way I was dressed.
SCARPINO: Oh my word.
MATUSAK: I thought, I can’t stay here. I cannot stay here.
SCARPINO: So, was part of the reason that you left that at some point it just became too limiting?
MATUSAK: Yes. Yeah, my community was not moving forward. College at St. Ben’s nuns were entirely different. They were very futuristic in their thinking, a very, very different group of Benedictines, and we had somehow stagnated.
SCARPINO: So in the 19 years that you belonged to that convent, they got older…
MATUSAK: They stagnated…
SCARPINO: …and set in their ways…
MATUSAK: Yeah, well the first Reverend Mother was very forward-looking. She was very good, the one who told me I wouldn’t be a diva. She was marvelous, marvelous. And things were growing under her. Then we had a Reverend Mother who was really, really not good and it stagnated, everything just stagnated.
SCARPINO: I understand, and I hope I got this right, that you spent two years in medical school.
MATUSAK: No, no, that’s not right.
SCARPINO: University of Illinois?
MATUSAK: Yeah, I was accepted, but I never was allowed to accept it, to go.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Never was allowed.
SCARPINO: So, whose idea was it that you apply to medical school?
MATUSAK: I was the first woman to take classes at St. John’s University.
SCARPINO: Which is the Catholic college that’s sort of the pair with St. Benedict?
MATUSAK: Yeah, right. Right now, I mean they do everything as hour on the hour, bussing and it’s all coed, but it’s still women and men. They’ve done some very smart things on leadership and I’m going to interject that. They put the women through leadership training for two and a half years as women, and the men the same thing. Then they bring them together for leadership training and it’s an entirely different group because the women have a sense of security about themselves and strength, and it’s wonderful. But, anyway, yeah, where were we?
SCARPINO: I asked you about medical school and you said you took classes at St. John’s.
MATUSAK: Yeah, St. John’s. I was the first woman and they thought… I had embryology, and the priest who did the teaching there said that I was material for medical school. So, being naive—call it what you like, you know—the nuns encouraged me to apply and so I did. And I was accepted. Then my community said, “No, you have to come back and teach.” But that was my life with my community. I was forever being changed in whatever I was doing, always.
SCARPINO: For reasons that were not clear?
MATUSAK: I was a spoke in the wheel, for their use. Whatever they needed, somehow I needed to come home and fix.
SCARPINO: Was that because you had talent?
MATUSAK: I think it was because they thought I had talent, but they never thought about me as a person and how that might affect me.
SCARPINO: When you left, did you carry that lesson with you; remember to think about individuals as people?
MATUSAK: Oh my God, yes, I certainly did. I have no resentment of the community, however. I learned a lot there. And when people ask me why I’m so open to change, I say “19 years.” You went to Chapel on August 15th, after a retreat, and the Reverend Mother would walk down the aisles and hand you a piece of paper, and it said where you were going and what you were going to do. You may have been at Holy Mount for five years, and your piece of paper said, “You’re going to Fort Worth, Texas.” Texas. And you had two hours to pack a suitcase, one suitcase, and go. And you get accustomed to that. So I learned a lot about change. I can take change. I can take change overnight, if you want to say it that way. I also learned how to get along with people because nuns are just like every other people in any other community; there are good ones and there are those who are really downright nasty. And you learn to live with them because it’s God’s will that you’re with them. I learned a lot there, so I have no animosity. I spent 19 years. Maybe I should have only spent 10; no, it’s okay. It all worked out well.
Storytelling
“When people ask me why I’m so open to change, I say ‘19 years.’ You went to Chapel on August 15th, after a retreat, and the Reverend Mother would walk down the aisles and hand you a piece of paper, and it said where you were going and what you were going to do.”
Description of the video:
SCARPINO: So, I want to talk to you a little bit about the years that you spent as a Benedictine, and if we could do it to get you to talk about ways in which those experiences helped to shape the rest of your life and as you self-consciously became a leader and that kind of thing. As I understand it, you had both teaching and administrative experience in those 19 years?
MATUSAK: Exactly.
SCARPINO: You assisted with the building of schools, you already mentioned that. Even when you didn’t know how to do it, you figured out how to do it. And you were working in a faith-based and value-based environment.
MATUSAK: Right.
SCARPINO: So, first question: Could you just sort of give us an overview of the various places that you were assigned?
MATUSAK: Whew…
SCARPINO: It doesn’t have to be complete, but just sort of an idea of the kinds of things you did.
MATUSAK: Yeah, well one of the first places I was assigned was a school, Joan of Arc, in Lisle, Illinois. I think that’s where I discovered how much I loved teaching and had a great time there. I was there for three years, I think, and had a great time teaching those kids. A couple of the women are now nuns, became nuns. The men, one of them is a Brother, one is a priest, and they did wonderful things. That was one school. That was a good school.
Then I was in Texas, and the convent we lived in had been an old chicken place and so you had the smell of old chickens.
SCARPINO: By chicken place, do you mean a chicken coop place?
MATUSAK: Yes, it smelled from chicken. You know, you can’t clean that out no matter what. That was a tough experience. That was one of the hardest times of my life because it was hot, Texas is hot, and the environment was not inviting and loving and caring. And we were trying to reach out to the people, to the students, and I had made up my mind, in fact, that I wanted to stay in Texas.
Then I was assigned to another school and I taught for two years in the choir loft of the church because there wasn’t a school to teach in.
SCARPINO: That was also in Texas?
MATUSAK: Mmhmm. I had seventh and eighth grade up on the choir loft and played for masses up there and then had my classes up there. It was very, very different. And I taught some of the servicemen music on the Air Force Base, Carswell Air Force Base, and other experiences. Well, you know all of them, Holy Mount I already mentioned to you and…
SCARPINO: Holy Mount is where?
MATUSAK: Cicero, Illinois. Yeah, that was an interesting experience because we had wonderful kids, wonderful students, and in Berwyn, they were having lots of trouble with their students. When we looked into—why would that be? They’re neighboring suburbs; why the big differences? One thing we found is that the kids at Holy Mount, which was a much more Eastern European ethnicity, when they went home, grandma was there and grandma would see to it that they did their homework and what have you. It was much more family-oriented than they were in Cicero, which was interesting for me. I was learning all of this as a younger nun. When I got to the point of the Academy, we had a very exclusive Academy.
SCARPINO: And the Academy was where?
MATUSAK: At Lisle. I was assigned to teach sciences there, but what came to me was that I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do. I was working with this exclusive bunch of young women who could afford to come to an exclusive academy, and that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Yeah, I taught, and I had great fun, believe me. I made a lot of shock in the community I’m sure because I had a science lab where I believed I should have a lot of living things and one of the girls brought me a dying puppy which we kept alive and brought to life. I named it Sartre after Jean-Paul Sartre. And I had a monkey named Piffer, and I would put the monkey on a leash and the dog on the leash, and we’re not allowed to have dogs in the convent, but the monkey would ride on the dog’s back and we’d go for walks around the huge place. The monkey would catch—well they’re bugs—but catch them and eat them on the back of Sartre and the nuns would all have a fit and go to Chapel and pray for me because I was a sinner.
SCARPINO: For walking around with a dog you rescued with a monkey riding on its back.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And they just were scandalized that I would do such a thing. Anyway, I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do. Then I got this grant to study at the University of Minnesota and I got permission to accept it and I went to Minnesota. Really, that was a big turning point in my life because I realized that, first of all, I was now working with students who were coming from the farms especially. And when you’re a nun, you’re a neuter; you’re not a vetoing parent and you’re not an administrator at the university who’s going to throw them out. So, I found myself with an open door policy in my little studio apartment and I would have kids coming in crying and I was working with these young people who were hitting drugs for the first time in their lives, or being in a big university campus, and my convent wants me to come back and teach in high school. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. And so I just said, “I can’t do it,” and went to talk to a confessor and he said, “You have two alternatives; you can become a bitchy old nun or you can make that horrible decision after 19 years to leave and construct a new life.” And so, you know my decision.
SCARPINO: I understand that when you made that decision that you actually went through a process, you didn’t just walk away.
MATUSAK: Oh, no.
SCARPINO: Laicization, is that the right word?
MATUSAK: Yeah. And the Benedictines are not under bishops, they’re under Rome. So I had to write a letter to Rome to get a dispensation from my vows, which I did receive. And there, too, my dad was dead but I couldn’t rely on my mother; we were poor. And you get $300 and a wave goodbye. You have no clothes, you don’t have a spoon, you don’t have a fork, you don’t have anything.
SCARPINO: So I was going to ask you, when you left, you literally were starting over.
MATUSAK: Oh, absolutely.
SCARPINO: $300, some clothes and a suitcase sort of thing, and that was it.
MATUSAK: That’s right, that’s right. And clothes you didn’t have because you had habits and so you had nothing, absolutely nothing. But you know what? I never thought about it that way. In fact, what I remember what we did is I was working for Dr. Rassweiler. He was a physicist, an amazing man, and in fact, he and his wife owned this house and I kind of became their daughter that they never had.
SCARPINO: They owned this house that we’re sitting in now?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Because when he was dying, he called and we came, both Connie and I came here to see him; we had come before when he was dying and he begged that we not allow Irene to be put into a nursing home. And we promised and I kept my promise. We were here every three months and we cooked until we dropped so she had food while we were gone and somebody to take care of her. But we did until she died and then it was a shock and a pleasure that she left the house to us. It was a shambles. It was really bad. We were going sell it and after we tore out all of the stinky carpeting and painted and did all this stuff, we said, “Let’s try it.” So we spend our winters here now.
SCARPINO: So, when you were coming down here to cook for her, where were you commuting from?
MATUSAK: From Battle Creek.
SCARPINO: Commute seems a little like the wrong term for that. It’s a long way from Battle Creek.
MATUSAK: Yes, it’s a long way, it’s a long way, but it was from Battle Creek and we did that for I don’t know how many years, but we did it. We promised and we were going to do that.
But anyway, going back to how that happened at the University of Minnesota. So I realized that I had a mission and I wanted to fulfill that mission. I just felt that’s what God wanted me to do and it was a tough time. And yeah, you know it meant that, for example, Merrill Rassweiler saw to it that my classes were put in the morning and then in the afternoon I ran like a madwoman to the bathroom and changed into whites and rushed over to the hospital and worked on the crash team at the hospital until midnight.
SCARPINO: So, by whites, you mean a nurse’s uniform?
MATUSAK: Yeah.
SCARPINO: Were you trained as a nurse?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: So you were volunteering at the hospital?
MATUSAK: No.
SCARPINO: Or you were being paid?
MATUSAK: No, I was paid, being paid.
SCARPINO: Okay, so you got a paying job, a second job, so to speak.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: In the Emergency Room.
MATUSAK: Right, right.
SCARPINO: What did you do there?
MATUSAK: Well, what I did primarily was the EKGs and going with the crash team. I ran around the hospital with the crash team.
SCARPINO: The crash team is when people have heart attacks?
MATUSAK: Yeah, code blue. I did that and I enjoyed it, but it was from three until midnight and then at midnight I’d study until about two in the morning and then get up at five and go in and do tutoring for jocks and start my workday of classes and study.
SCARPINO: (Laughing) I did that too.
MATUSAK: Yeah, you know, so we were doing all kinds of jobs to make money to live. And I remember, in fact I said that to Connie—I did chicken pot pies last night because I didn’t feel like cooking—and I said, “You know what? I remembered I had $5 a week for food. That was all that I could afford.” The University of Minnesota does not pay well, and when you’re studying and teaching for them, I believe my highest salary there was $13,000. That’s not a lot of money.
SCARPINO: You were, at that point, a doctoral student, is that right?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: In one of your emails to me when we were corresponding back and forth, you mentioned that you had been a Mother Superior?
MATUSAK: Yes.
SCARPINO: Where was that, and what does that entail?
MATUSAK: Texas.
SCARPINO: So, near Dallas?
MATUSAK: Yes, Fort Worth.
SCARPINO: Fort Worth, sorry.
MATUSAK: In White Settlement, you know. Well, it means being responsible for all the Sisters under you and seeing to it to their health, their education, and I had a very different perspective about all that. So, I was opening up doors for these women and then you get threatened because you’re allowing them to be too worldly, you know.
SCARPINO: What were you doing that could have been interpreted as too worldly?
MATUSAK: Sending them off to get education, to institutions in Texas; are you kidding? But I did. I did. And you faced the music for it when you got home. And even myself—and this one’s going to be really bizarre—but when I got the grant…
SCARPINO: To go to the University of Minnesota?
MATUSAK: Yeah, one of the things with that grant then that evolved—everything evolves—was another grant where I was to study Alpine vegetation.
SCARPINO: Not too much of that in Minnesota, is there?
MATUSAK: No, but that was going to come from out in Colorado. I got permission again, and I said, “Well, I can’t,”—he tells us we’re going up into the mountains and I can’t go in the habit. “So, may I please go and purchase some jeans and whatever I need?” They said “no.”
SCARPINO: They wanted you to go up into the mountains wearing a habit?
MATUSAK: That’s right.
SCARPINO: And those black shoes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. And what they did—this is so ridiculous, but you know why my mindset changed—they took a habit, and they sewed it up the middle like pants and that’s what I was supposed to wear.
SCARPINO: So, I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful, but those are like Sister culottes.
MATUSAK: That’s right. But they were long, they’re long. I laughed so hard when they arrived. We were in a dormitory. I went into the hallway and I was dancing down the hallway with them. But I got rid of them and I made myself a pair of culottes, you might say, and took a bleach bottle, emptied it, cut the bleach bottle, cut my veil, took all the face stuff off and had the bleach bottle with the veil and that’s all I put on. Well, somebody got pictures and somebody sent pictures back to the convent.
SCARPINO: Uh-oh.
MATUSAK: Yeah. So all hell broke out when I got there. But worse, and what made me realize I had to leave, was that I was walking down the hallway, dressed in the full garb again, back at the convent, and one of the old nuns met me and she looked at me and she said, “You adulteress,” because she had seen the picture of the way I was dressed.
SCARPINO: Oh my word.
MATUSAK: I thought, I can’t stay here. I cannot stay here.
SCARPINO: So, was part of the reason that you left that at some point it just became too limiting?
MATUSAK: Yes. Yeah, my community was not moving forward. College at St. Ben’s nuns were entirely different. They were very futuristic in their thinking, a very, very different group of Benedictines, and we had somehow stagnated.
SCARPINO: So in the 19 years that you belonged to that convent, they got older…
MATUSAK: They stagnated…
SCARPINO: …and set in their ways…
MATUSAK: Yeah, well the first Reverend Mother was very forward-looking. She was very good, the one who told me I wouldn’t be a diva. She was marvelous, marvelous. And things were growing under her. Then we had a Reverend Mother who was really, really not good and it stagnated, everything just stagnated.
SCARPINO: I understand, and I hope I got this right, that you spent two years in medical school.
MATUSAK: No, no, that’s not right.
SCARPINO: University of Illinois?
MATUSAK: Yeah, I was accepted, but I never was allowed to accept it, to go.
SCARPINO: Okay.
MATUSAK: Never was allowed.
SCARPINO: So, whose idea was it that you apply to medical school?
MATUSAK: I was the first woman to take classes at St. John’s University.
SCARPINO: Which is the Catholic college that’s sort of the pair with St. Benedict?
MATUSAK: Yeah, right. Right now, I mean they do everything as hour on the hour, bussing and it’s all coed, but it’s still women and men. They’ve done some very smart things on leadership and I’m going to interject that. They put the women through leadership training for two and a half years as women, and the men the same thing. Then they bring them together for leadership training and it’s an entirely different group because the women have a sense of security about themselves and strength, and it’s wonderful. But, anyway, yeah, where were we?
SCARPINO: I asked you about medical school and you said you took classes at St. John’s.
MATUSAK: Yeah, St. John’s. I was the first woman and they thought… I had embryology, and the priest who did the teaching there said that I was material for medical school. So, being naive—call it what you like, you know—the nuns encouraged me to apply and so I did. And I was accepted. Then my community said, “No, you have to come back and teach.” But that was my life with my community. I was forever being changed in whatever I was doing, always.
SCARPINO: For reasons that were not clear?
MATUSAK: I was a spoke in the wheel, for their use. Whatever they needed, somehow I needed to come home and fix.
SCARPINO: Was that because you had talent?
MATUSAK: I think it was because they thought I had talent, but they never thought about me as a person and how that might affect me.
SCARPINO: When you left, did you carry that lesson with you; remember to think about individuals as people?
MATUSAK: Oh my God, yes, I certainly did. I have no resentment of the community, however. I learned a lot there. And when people ask me why I’m so open to change, I say “19 years.” You went to Chapel on August 15th, after a retreat, and the Reverend Mother would walk down the aisles and hand you a piece of paper, and it said where you were going and what you were going to do. You may have been at Holy Mount for five years, and your piece of paper said, “You’re going to Fort Worth, Texas.” Texas. And you had two hours to pack a suitcase, one suitcase, and go. And you get accustomed to that. So I learned a lot about change. I can take change. I can take change overnight, if you want to say it that way. I also learned how to get along with people because nuns are just like every other people in any other community; there are good ones and there are those who are really downright nasty. And you learn to live with them because it’s God’s will that you’re with them. I learned a lot there, so I have no animosity. I spent 19 years. Maybe I should have only spent 10; no, it’s okay. It all worked out well.
About Larraine Matusak
Larraine Matusak received her Ph.D. in higher education administration from the Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara, California, in 1975. Prior to earning her Ph.D., she spent several years as a Benedictine Sister. Larraine Matusak has had a distinguished career as a practitioner, promoter, funder, and scholar of leadership. An important component of her career consisted of a series of positions that allowed her to break new ground in higher education:
- Taught natural sciences and developed the Adult Alternative Baccalaureate Degree Program to address the needs of underserved students at the University of Minnesota (1968–74)
- Served as first dean and founder of the College of Alternative Programs, which focused on adult learning and continuing education at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana (1974–79)
- Served as second president of Thomas A. Edison State College of New Jersey, an innovative institution dedicated to serving mid-career adults (1979–82)
In 1982, Matusak was recruited by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she remained until 1996, serving as a program officer and leadership scholar. She directed and augmented the Kellogg National Fellowship Program, was responsible for all grantmaking in the area of leadership, and she served as the foundation’s first leadership scholar.
Matusak was one of the original board members of the Council for Adult Experiential Learning (CAEL), which was founded in 1974. She authored or edited several publications, including Finding Your Voice: Learning to Lead . . . Anywhere You Want to Make a Difference (1996). Matusak is a recipient of the International Leadership Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Explore the complete oral history of Larraine MatusakBorn or Made?
“‘[Y]ou’re either a leader or you’re not.’ I really disagree violently with that.”
