Illustration · An imagined front room in the Gavins’ home in Cleveland, about 1910, where Della Gavin gave piano lessons, with the family’s steamer trunk under the window. Not drawn from a photograph.

County Mayo and Cleveland · 1889–1914

Lessons at home

She grew up poor in Ireland and Cleveland, with a mother who taught her to pray for drunks, a piano her family could barely afford, and fifty pupils by the time she was nineteen.

“My beloved departed mother, God rest her dear soul, taught me as a child never to say that anyone was drunk …”

Sister Ignatia, in her recorded interview with Bill W., 1954 · Mary C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1992

A dollar a lesson

Sister Ignatia was born Della Gavin in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, in January 1889. Darrah, who gives no source for her pages on the family’s life in Ireland, says her parents, Patrick and Barbara, worked a small farm. For months at a time her father went to England to work on the farms there, and the family lived mostly on potatoes and buttermilk, in a cottage whose dirt floor was strewn with straw. Barbara had three children; two lived, Della and her brother, Patrick.

Darrah writes that drunks in the village frightened her, and that her mother taught her to pray for them. The other lesson, quoted above, is in Sister Ignatia’s own words, and it stayed with her: in 1954 she said she still rarely used the word. When Barbara fell ill, Patrick decided the surgeons in America were better, and in January 1896 the family sailed, taking the cheaper route by way of Newfoundland. Della had just turned seven. (Bill W. made her six; see Ballyhane or Shanvilly?) In one story, the ship’s captain gave her a prize for being first to spot land. By April they were in Cleveland, on Mason Street, in Immaculate Conception parish.

Barbara wanted a safe living for her daughter, close to home, and music was the answer. The whole family put in what it could. Della practiced at her teacher’s house until they could buy a piano of their own. “I wonder how my poor mother and father could even get a piano in those days,” she said later; her mother, she added, saw music as a way to keep her near. She trained at the Wolfram College of Music downtown, and by nineteen she had fifty pupils a week, at a dollar a lesson, taught in her parents’ parlor. In 1909 she put her name in the city directory as a music teacher, one of 560 in Cleveland.

She was a strict teacher and a careless collector. A pupil remembered her as “very exacting and efficient. You toed the mark with her.” After the lesson came cookies and tea, and she often forgot the fee; her mother kept finding money tucked under the tablecloths and doilies.

From girlhood she wanted to be a nun, and dreamed of joining the Poor Clares, the cloistered sisters she heard singing, unseen, at the Shrine of St. Paul. Her mother told her a real vocation would last. It did, Darrah writes, through a courtship with a businessman she agreed to marry and then turned down. Her confessor, Darrah writes, steered her to an order that nursed the sick and cared for orphans, so she could stay near her parents, and on March 25, 1914, at twenty-five, she entered the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine. That June she took the habit and a new name. What people called her lists that one and the others.

Listen Lessons at home About 1 minute

Six names

What people called her

She answered to a good many names in her life, from a baptismal name that turns up only once in her biography to the ones the newspapers gave her. Here they are in the order they came.

Mostly from Mary C. Darrah’s biography (1992), which draws on her recorded interview with Bill W. in 1954 and on the people Darrah interviewed in the 1980s; the slang names come from Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980). Quotations are short excerpts.

Della Gavin

At home, to 1914

Her full baptismal name, Darrah found, was Bridget Della Mary Gavin. At home she was Della.

Darrah, chapter 2.

Sister Ignatia

Her order, June 1914

Given when she took the habit. Darrah writes that the Mother Superior chose it to honor Sister Ignatius, one of the order’s pioneers, who had died in 1912; in another chapter she says the name came from St. Ignatius Loyola. In books she signed herself Sister M. Ignatia, the M. for Mary.

Darrah, chapters 1 and 2.

Sister

Dr. Bob, on the telephone

“Sister, may I have a bed?”

To him she was simply Sister, and she called him Doctor.

Her recollections, recorded in the 1950s. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), chapter IV.

Ig

Dr. Bob’s family

Dr. Bob had a nickname for nearly everyone. His son, Smitty, said hers was Ig, but he doubted his father ever dared call her that to her face.

Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), chapter IV.

A little angel

Bill V., 1954

“Sister Ignatia was a little angel who helped us in this angle of the work.”

One of the drunks the police brought into St. Thomas in the 1930s, in his recorded interview with Bill W.

Quoted in Darrah, chapter 1.

Angel of AA

The newspapers, by 1949

By December 1949, when she accepted the Poverello Medal on AA’s behalf, the press was calling her the Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Darrah took it for her book’s title. When she left Akron in 1952, the Akron Beacon Journal called her the “Little Sister of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Darrah, chapter 4.

Please pray for me

The name she signed asked for something. When people wanted her autograph, a Cleveland broadcaster said after her death, she wrote “Please pray for me. Sister Ignatia.” In the books she gave patients when they left the ward, she wrote much the same: “Please say a little prayer for me.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Where she was born, a parish priest who handed out the pledge, and what she took with her to the convent.

Ballyhane or Shanvilly?

The accounts don’t agree on where she was born, or how old she was when she left. Bill W., in his 1966 memorial, put her birth at Shanvilly, County Mayo, and had her parents emigrate when she was six. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History also says Shanvilly, and six, and gives her birthday as January 2, 1889.

Darrah gives the same birthday but a different village, Ballyhane. In her telling, Shanvilly, near Castlebar, was the town with a school, which farm children like Della had no time to attend. By her dates the family sailed in January 1896, just after Della turned seven, and reached Cleveland that April. Darrah gives no note for her paragraphs on the family’s life in Ireland, Ballyhane included. Her account of the crossing rests on Sister Ignatia’s 1954 interview, a 1986 interview with a Jesuit, John C. Ford, and Father Thomas C.’s notes; the first Cleveland address comes from the 1896 city directory.

The Mac

Cleveland’s Irish parishes took drink seriously. Several had total abstinence societies, and a Father Mathew temperance society met in Newburgh on the first Sunday of every month. At Immaculate Conception, which the Irish called the Mac, Father J. J. Quinn ran a firm parish. Sister Ignatia remembered two parish boys carrying his bags home for him. “Do you boys drink?” he asked them, and then: “Come in right now, and I’ll give you the Pledge.”

Her own schooling began with a detour. The Catholic school lay across the railroad tracks, and her relatives were afraid of the trains, so for the last month of that spring term she went to Waring, the public school nearby. It had a German first grade and an English one; her mother told her to take the German. Then, Darrah writes, Father Quinn told her father there would be no absolution for him until his children were in the parish school. They started there the next Monday, and Patrick Gavin’s penance was to serve as an usher at Sunday Mass.

Two black dresses

The community’s 1909 rule book, which Darrah follows, listed what a new postulant was to bring: a pair of black dresses, cap, veil, a cape for warmth and sheets for her own bed. Della, Darrah writes, fitted it all into one small bag. A friend remembered seeing Della the night before she left, in “a pretty blue summer dress, her cheeks like roses.” Her parents delivered her to the convent with her dowry, and went home to the big piano in their parlor.

Darrah tells of the suitor she gave up: a prosperous Irish businessman, who sent his brother, a priest, to talk her out of the convent. The priest made fun of her choice. It made no difference. Before she went, she promised to look after her parents in their old age, and by 1939 she had kept that promise for twenty-five years; May I have a bed? tells how they followed her to Akron.

Sources

Mary C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous. Loyola University Press, 1992. Chapter 1, “The Legend” (her mother and the word “drunk,” from her 1954 recorded interview with Bill W., now in AA’s archives; Bill V.; the autograph, from a Cleveland radio tribute on the day of her funeral; the inscribed books), chapter 2, “The Beginnings of History” (Ireland, the crossing, Cleveland, Father Quinn, her music and pupils, the convent), and chapter 4, “Akron’s Magic Blend” (the Poverello Medal and the newspapers’ names for her). Quotations are from the scanned text, checked against the page images.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter IV, “The physician as co-workers see him” (“Sister, may I have a bed?”, the nickname Ig).
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “For Sister Ignatia” (August 1966), first printed in the AA Grapevine.
“Ignatia, Sister Mary, CSA,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University.