"The Nun's Beach" (formerly "the Eurana Schwab Home" and later "St. Joseph by the Sea" was actually the former summer home of Charles Schwab (Eurana was his wife).
From: "Johannah Turner" > Early one morning in August 1963, an 8-foot shark that washed up on the
> Annadale beach was discovered by two 5-year-old boys.
>
> One of the boys was *Buddy Martinez of Spanish Camp. *The other was my
> youngest brother, John Hughes, who lived in the second bungalow on Barat
> Lane (Zephyr Avenue).
>
> The Staten Island Advance published one shark photo with a caption that was
> wildly incorrect in several respects (e.g., referring to Spanish Camp as the
> Spanish Village). I can't reproduce that particular photo because I have a
> deeply yellowed frail copy that's stuck to a large board and I can't get it
> off for scanning without ruining it.
>
> But the Advance reporter gave my mother prints of the other pictures they
> took, and attached is a really good one showing both of the boys by the
> shark with St. Joseph's by the Sea in the background.
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Subject: Re: Shark on the Annadale Beach
Date: 1/10/2008 10:55:31 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
One more thing i remember about the shark was they tried to cut it open with a saw and got nowhere. Then they tried a machete and it bounced off of the skin...and you all know how sharp our grandfathers kept their machetes.
Someone finally came down with a chainsaw I know one guy took the whole jaw. It was lucky that he gave me a tooth.
Love,
Sissy
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RE St. Joseph by the Sea from Wikipedia...
"...The land upon which the school sits was once one of the estates of Charles M. Schwab, the steel magnate and benefactor of Catholic institutions. A large tract that originally included a broad beach area on Raritan Bay in what was then a very rural section of Staten Island, it sat near a number of Catholic facilities, including Camp St. Edward (a summer camp for African American children served by the Handmaids of Mary) and the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin at Mt. Loretto (a vast orphanage and farm for boys and girls started by Fr. John C. Drumgoole in post-Civil War New York).
Schwab's property passed into the hands of the Sisters of Charity of New York early in the 20th Century, and was used as a summer "villa" for children from the New York Foundling Hospital and St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, both of which were run by the sisters. It was also the site of a summer school for the sisters themselves: as almost all of the Sisters of Charity at that time were either teachers or nurses in various schools and hospitals throughout the archdiocese, young sisters were sent to St. Joseph by the Sea to complete their degrees during the summer months under the auspices of the College of Mount Saint Vincent, an institution of higher learning originally located in Manhattan, then moved to The Bronx, and also run by the sisters.
In 1963, as Staten Islanders braced for a population boom that came with the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Brooklyn, the Sisters of Charity transformed the land into a girls' high school. Financial problems almost forced the school to close in the mid-1970s, but under the direction of Cardinal Terence Cooke, then archbishop of New York, and his designee as the first priest to serve as principal, Msgr. Thomas Gaffney, the school sold off a part of the beachfront area, expanded its facilities and went co-educational, doubling in size and eventually achieving financial solvency in the process. Msgr. Thomas Gaffney eventually became the pastor of St. Charles Church in Oakwood. Msgr. Joseph Ansaldi became principal. Msgr. Ansaldi is a weekend associate at St. Charles...."
