After 52 years, St. John’s principal plans to retire from the Costa Mesa school

At one time, tumbleweeds blew down Baker Street in Costa Mesa and South Coast Plaza was no more than a gleam in Henry Segerstrom’s eye.

Sister Mary Vianney remembers crossing empty fields to reach the Santa Ana Army Air Base, now the home of Orange Coast College and the Orange County fairgrounds.

Vianney has been with St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Costa Mesa for 52 years, 40 as its principal. When she retires at the end of the school year in June, she’ll leave behind a place that looks nothing like the raw openness she encountered in 1962 as a 21-year-old nun.

She plans to return to her native Ireland, where she will live in a retirement convent about 30 minutes from her large extended family.

“I’ve grown up with Costa Mesa,” Vianney, 73, said in an interview Thursday. “When I came, it was wide open; now we’re closed in. But it was fun watching it.”

She has witnessed transformation of family life during her time with the school. She remembers an era when most mothers stayed home and school tuition was $5 a month.

“It was school and home, school and home. It was a unit, a family unit, and we were part of it,” she recalled, her Irish brogue still evident. “There were not the distractions then that we have today. No computers, nothing like that. Very few people had television.”

Now “it’s go, go, go with the children.”

Vianney was born in Ballinabrackey, south of Dublin, the fourth of eight children. Her given name was Mary Nuala. In 1959, the 100th anniversary of the death of St. John Vianney, she became Sister John Vianney at the Mercy Convent in Tullamore. She was 21.

She had known since age 11 that God was her calling. “It was the grace of God,” she said.

Vianney had never flown on an airplane when she made her first trip from Dublin to Los Angeles. The city appeared like a glowing metropolis.

“The lights mesmerized me,” Vianney recalled. “It made the first impression to me of massive lights.”

Vianney was the eighth nun to arrive at the fledgling Costa Mesa school, which had opened three years earlier. The nuns started with about 300 students — there are 580 now. For the first 10 years, Vianney taught second grade.

Mary Ann McAdams was one of her students. She remembers Vianney’s unflagging enthusiasm and patience, including a time when her second-grade class practiced for its first communion.

“We’d line up day and night sticking out our tongues until we got it right,” said McAdams, who was Vianney’s student in 1964. McAdams said she counts Vianney as one of her closest friends.

“It’s impossible to count the lives she has touched,” said McAdams, 55.

Vianney later taught religion before becoming principal in 1975.

Kenny Keup, a physical-education teacher at the school for 30 years, attended classes there between 1969 and 1975. He was no angel, he recalled.

“I was suspended three times from the school and she still hired me on,” he said jokingly, referring to Vianney. “She believes there’s good in everyone. Her whole philosophy was [that] a Catholic school education was for anyone — any race and religion, any family, any money.”

He said her acceptance of everyone sometimes made teaching a challenge. Some private schools, he believes, would have kicked out troublemakers. “But she believes it’s right, so we do it,” Keup said.

Vianney said her body is telling her to slow down, and she looks forward to making her own schedule.

“Right now I live with the watch and the phone,” she said, sitting behind a tidy desk in her office.

Vianney will return home to four sisters and a brother, 29 nieces and nephews and 47 grandnieces and grandnephews.

The St. John the Baptist parish, where she has lived since she arrived in Costa Mesa, is planning a going-away Mass and dinner for her June 19, she said.

When she goes, she’ll leave behind the 580 students — and generations of former ones.

But for now, her thoughts are somewhere between the past and the future.

“I’ll miss my American family and the children,” she said. “But when I go back to Ireland, I’ll have all the time I want to pray.”