Nearly a century of Giants.

St. Gerald School opens on September 9 in the original mission church at 95th and Minnick — three Sisters of St. Francis from Clinton, Iowa teaching the first 134 students across grades 1 through 8. The school comes first; the parish grows up around it.

Buses begin carrying students in from Bridgeview, Burbank, Hickory Hills, Hometown, and across Oak Lawn. A St. Gerald High School opens the same year — twenty-five students in two classes — but the Depression closes it after a single year.

St. Gerald Parish is formally established, with Fr. Loras Welsh as its founding pastor — a permanent home for the community the school had already begun to gather.

Growth upon growth: six new classrooms and a convent in 1949, then ten more by 1957 as Oak Lawn’s population surges. Class sizes reach sixty students, and double sessions become a necessity.

On April 21 at 5:27 p.m., a tornado tears through Oak Lawn, taking more than thirty lives and destroying twelve St. Gerald classrooms. Had it struck an hour earlier, classes would still have been in session. Parishioners form a human chain to carry every salvageable desk and textbook to the church basement — and students are back in class within ten days.

A new school opens on September 9 — thirty-nine years to the day after the first — with twenty-four new classrooms and six renovated ones. Rebuilt, not replaced.

The Jonathan Collins Activity Center is dedicated, named in memory of a parishioner’s grandson and Marine killed in service, and built and funded by the parish’s Holy Name Society. The parish had marked its 50th and 75th anniversaries in 1984 and 2009.

St. Gerald School educates around 300 students from preschool through 8th grade, supported by a devoted network of parish and parent organizations — the very community the Foundation exists to strengthen. In 2029, the school turns 100.