By William Knipfing, Miller Place, NY
I have had the blessing of being influenced by the School Sisters of Notre Dame for 70 years. My early education was with the SSNDs at St. Joseph School in Garden City, Long Island, New York. It was many years later that I learned to appreciate the very basic but so important skills of reading, writing and arithmetic that they taught me.
My Aunt Elizabeth, Sister M. Antoine Daniel Knipfing, was a School Sister of Notre Dame in the Baltimore/Wilton Province. She was born on November 11, 1911 and entered the School Sisters of Notre Dame from St. Brigid’s Parish in Westbury, Long Island in August 1929. We celebrated her 100th birthday on November 11, 2011 and her 80th Jubilee in May 2012. She died a month later on June 15, 2012.
Because of my aunt, I have had many opportunities to reconnect with the Sisters who taught me in elementary school. Aunt Elizabeth had a great influence on me and our entire family. Her love for her faith, her Church, and her religious community was always evident to us. She told us that the first time she saw a School Sister of Notre Dame in her classroom at St. Brigid’s it was “love at first sight.”
