They also appreciated her sense of humor and she recalls when she had to get dentures, returning from the oral surgery to find a beautifully wrapped present from the students on her desk. Inside it was a set of fake teeth — and she got as big a kick out of the joke as her students! “I’m a clown — everybody knows that,” she says laughing.

A number of Sister Jo’s former students are CCVIs today and she is proud of the leadership positions many of them have attained. This includes two superior generals of the congregation, one being current Superior General Sister Helena Monahan, CCVI.

    Throughout her school years she enjoyed acting in theatrical productions and, as a teacher, she got to direct them. This included musicals on the high school level (with memorable productions of Oklahoma and Brigadoon) and other plays during her years at IWC, from 1953 to 1969. Her favorite pastime, however, was always dancing.

    “I think I was dancing when I was three years old,” she recalls, “showing off out in the front yard on the sidewalk.” Her specialty was tap dancing, and she notes, “I danced all the time, whenever we had any celebration in the convent.” She has special memories of dancing at the mother house here in San Antonio, where her accompanist was a “marvelous musician,” Sister Maria Goretti Zehr. She fondly remembers their last performance together, just weeks before Sister Maria Goretti’s unexpected death.

    Her talent as an artist did not emerge until after she entered the convent and was in her mid-20s. She decided to visit the school art teacher’s studio to “just try things out” and wound up enrolling in an off-campus art class. The instructor was non-too-happy when her new student brought with her an already-completed sketch of a New Orleans riverfront scene on a large canvas and promptly set about painting it. Walking around the room to check the students’ work, the teacher remarked that there was no giving directions to her new student. “You’re going to do it the way you want to,” observed the teacher, and let her, which sat well with the budding artist. “And since then I’ve been doing it the way I want to!” says Sister Jo emphatically.

    Starting with oils and later working in water colors, her paintings hang in numerous convents today. She remembers one of her first works, a mystical abstract-like oil painting in which the shape of a monk became apparent. An art critic in the convent was so impressed with its spirituality that the mother superior later chose it to be sent to a priest in Chicago, where it hangs today.

    An occasional painting of hers still portrays a somber tone, expressing a feeling or mood she says she is not aware of on the conscious level — stark trees without leaves or the unintentionally sorrowful face of a slender, blue Madonna. The majority of her works, though, are as vibrant and as full of joy as Sister Jo herself, depicting colorful flowers, birds and butterflies.

    All of her paintings for the past few years, however, have another distinction — one the viewer would not be aware of, admiring the art displayed on the walls of her cheerful room at the Incarnate Word Retirement Center. Those painted within the last few years were executed with the artist’s left hand — a necessity when Sister Jo lost the use of her right hand to a stroke nearly three years ago.

    She vividly recalls that fateful morning she was unable to get out of bed. “I couldn’t even crawl; I had to pull myself,” she remembers. “I knew something was wrong, so I pulled myself to the phone and I called my next door neighbor, Sister Margaret.” The night before, exhausted from the CCVI assembly she had helped organize and where her art had been featured at a booth, she had noticed a strange numbness in her leg, but chalked it up to being overly tired. “I didn’t know the possible signs of a stroke,” she said.

    But it was a stroke, as the nurse friend called by Sister Margaret instantly recognized, and Sister Jo was rushed to the emergency room at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa, where she shortly suffered a second stroke. Fortunately, neither affected her brain, though her right side was paralyzed and she could not speak at first.
“I’m right-handed; I can’t use this at all,” Sister Jo says, nodding towards her right hand. “Maybe to hold something,” she adds. “It’s like a claw.” Her therapist at the hospital encouraged her to take up art again, but Sister Jo would have none of it, at first. Then one day she decided to just see what was going on in the arts room. A table was set with pencils, paper and water colors and, as she looked out the window, the lines and colors of El Mercado across the street caught her eye and she began attempting to capture that in water colors.

    She hung the resulting picture in her room, where it attracted many compliments and she wound up giving it to one of its admirers and painting another. She eventually painted seven versions of that scene, giving away to fans of her painting all but the one that now hangs in her room. And she hasn’t stopped painting since, her medium now being exclusively water colors.

    Since the stroke, her right foot must be fitted daily with a brace, worn in an over-size athletic shoe, in order for her to walk, and she gets around quite well, making use of a walker as a cane with her left hand when necessary. Originally coming to the extended care wing of the retirement center, she had become so self-sufficient that a year and a half ago she was able to move to her present assisted living quarters there.

    While she no longer works as an assistant in the sisters’ financial aide office, a job she performed following her retirement from teaching five years ago, Sister Jo, now 84, does not consider herself retired. “Semi-retired,” she puts it. After all, she was recently asked to handle the introduction at a CCVI Connections program that was a homecoming of sorts for those who left the convent in past years.

    She opened that event, decked out in top hat and one shiny black tap shoe, proceeding to wow the audience with a one-foot tap dance routine — a replay of which (sans tap shoe) she promptly re-enacted for this reporter to the strains of “The Chicken Dance!”

    Looking around the room at her paintings, some displayed, others still in their sketch books, Sister Jo smiles and says, “You don’t know how happy it makes me to do this. I just love to do it.” She may have had to hang up one dancing shoe and her more active roles of years past, but she is philosophical about this, seeing her later developed gift of painting as a blessing in disguise.

    “I think the Lord gave it to me,” she says with a nod to her now limited right side, “getting me ready for this.”