Dr. Kevin Starr
(Attended the Day Home 1945-1947)

A half century and more ago, I would awaken after my nap at the Holy Family Day Home at 16th and Dolores Streets in San Francisco. I would look up to the great windows through which streamed the California sunshine. The windows seemed vast and distant, as if they were the windows of a great cathedral.

I later learned that the famous architect Willis Polk had designed the building; but even then, as a boy of five and six, I recognized that I was spending my days in distinguished surroundings, watched over by kindly women wearing the habit of the Sisters of the Holy Family. I remember the order and dignity of those days — and the serene stability that meant much to a child of divorced parents whose mother worked each day at a nearby bank in the Mission District.

The Sisters of the Holy Family treated us with dignity and respect. I can never remember anything even vaguely approaching punishment, although all of us, boys and girls together, were well behaved. We quite naturally fell into the dignity of our surroundings, and the gracious care of the Sisters seemed to elicit our best behavior….

The simplicity of spirit, the flexibility, the emphasis upon charity and service that characterized those first formative years has remained with the Holy Family Sisters throughout their 125 year existence.

Excerpt from the Introduction of A Legacy of Caring: The Impassioned Mission of Sisters of the Holy Family, by Charolette M. Hall and James Wolfe Hall. Pleasanton, CA, Hall Media Group, 1997.