A Vision Realized
It’s the 1920s, and athletics continue to expand, with GFS dominating the soccer season. Tensions with the Meeting grow as the school plans to enlarge both its student body and its campus footprint. New pricing means that tuition for seniors is now $300 and Kindergartners $100 — but they get their own newly-built stand-alone building. And, for the first time, teachers receive pensions.
Stanley Yarnall was still dreaming of expansion and new buildings. In 1919 he asked his teachers to divide into sub-committees to prepare a comprehensive plan “for the school’s physical needs.” It was quite a want list. The plan called for a new gymnasium, larger classrooms for the High School, a new science laboratory, more space in the Primary, a Kindergarten building, a larger collection room, a larger cafeteria, and higher salaries. He presented the list to the School Committee in May 1919. They turned it down.¹
The Committee’s reluctance is understandable. They had spent over $100,000 on construction in the preceding decade. They were worried about rising tuition costs, and, in addition, at the same time Yarnall was badgering them about purchasing the Wistar Brown field. The Committee “was united” in saying no.
Yarnall was irritated. “In the history of the school, as I have observed it, there are appropriate times to accomplish certain things and if these opportunities are embraced their effect is reflected in the teaching force and the student body. Dangers, objections and possible improvements can be brought up in connection with any scheme for building or other growth or extension in any school or business undertaking, and I trust this Committee can take counsel of its hopes rather than of its fears.”²
One Committee member who agreed with Yarnall was the prominent business leader Morris L. Leeds. In 1920, Leeds became clerk of the Committee and together, he and Yarnall would launch the greatest expansion in the school’s history.
GFS was a prosperous place in 1920. Enrollment was 557 and growing, and while this created crowded conditions, it also created annual surpluses of about $10,000 which had paid down the accumulated debt. Budget figures show that income had increased from $44,582 in 1911 to $146,384 ten years later. In 1923 the treasurer, Thomas Potts, reported a surplus of over $16,000. The assessed value of the school property was $507,500. Tuition, contrary to Committee fears, was low and in the bottom quartile of Philadelphia independent schools. In 1920 tuition ranged from $100 for Kindergarten to $300 for seniors. A full twelve-year education would cost a family in 1920 only $2,360. The school’s academic reputation was excellent; its playing fields were the finest in the city; there was a long waiting list for admission. Prospects were good.
There were compelling reasons to expand besides the crowded school rooms. Teacher salaries, especially for women, were low. The highest paid woman teacher in 1920, Edith Knight, earned $1,500, and the average was $1,000 (men still earned twice that). Expansion and higher enrollment ought to afford general salary increases for both men and women, Leeds and Yarnall argued. Yarnall himself was paid $4,500 in 1920. The situation for women teachers had been eased somewhat in 1919 when friends of the school, principally Arthur Leeds, purchased Ivy Lodge, the old mansion on East Penn Street, and converted it into low-rent apartments for ten women teachers. In 1920 its owners deeded Ivy Lodge to the School Committee.
The School Committee was rapidly coming around to Leeds’s and Yarnall’s point of view. An important figure on the Committee was Margaret Cary, the clerk of the Advisory Committee. In a large School Committee of twenty-five, the small Advisory Committee had become a kind of inner circle or executive board which set the agenda for the larger group. Cary supported a plan for expansion.
In 1921 Yarnall resubmitted his comprehensive plan of 1919. He had two points to make. First, the school had to grow; it could not shrink and remain competitive with other private schools in the area. Second, the time to expand was now because overcrowding interfered with education. The gym and lunchroom were both too small, “totally inadequate.” Classes in the Main and Primary Buildings “are always crowded and frequently pupils are obliged to sit on the window sills. At our daily assemblies the older girls have to sit on chairs in a ratio of three to two, and thirty boys either have to stand or sit on the window sills.” He quoted from a report by science teacher Iro Trublood: “The room where Nature Study is now taught has no place where plants will grow, no place for as much as a bowl of goldfish…and about four pupils in a Botany class can get proper light to work if they are using microscopes or making drawings. There is no place where children doing elementary science can try experiments or carry out their own projects.”
He added a personal note. “We cannot, without a real loss to the school, go on more than another year as we are now doing. 1923-1924 will be my twenty- fifth year of service to the school. Perhaps it is only personal ambition, but I think it is a laudable one, to desire earnestly that in that year the Germantown Friends School may perfect plans to enable our teachers to do their work with sufficient space and adequate facilities.” The School Committee was convinced and approved “in principle” the plan.
The Advisory Committee recommended, and the full Committee agreed, to a two-part program. Two smaller projects would come first—the construction of a separate Kindergarten behind the Meetinghouse and a locker room at Wistar Brown Field. Both would be financed by using a surplus of funds in the treasury as collateral, and both new buildings were completed and opened for use in 1923. The second, and grander, part of the program was a capital campaign to solve all of the school’s other physical needs in one stroke. They would build a large T-shaped addition to the front of the Main Building and a new, large, up-to-date gymnasium. The gymnasium construction would necessitate the purchase of a back portion of the property belonging to the Pennsbury Home and the destruction of the horse sheds behind the Meetinghouse. All this would not only end the crowding, but permit even greater numbers to enroll. The Committee thought 630 about right.
The Committee began immediately to make plans to raise the estimated $200,000 needed for all the improvements. It would be the first capital drive for the school since Alfred Cope’s in 1869, and the theme would be the celebration of Master Stanley’s twenty-five years. Yarnall must have been pleased, and probably surprised, by the sweep of the plans. After years of persuasion, argument, and pleading he finally had a School Committee that thought the way he did.
Almost, it would appear, as an afterthought, the Committee notified the Monthly Meeting of its plans and asked its approval. Unexpectedly, Monthly Meeting said no.
Monthly Meeting was growing wary of the school. It was already bigger than the Meeting, with a bigger budget, more buildings, more people. Already it had taken over much of the space at Germantown and Coulter and torn up grass and cut down ancient trees. Now it proposed to enlarge again? Many Meeting members were not pleased by the idea. Was this not a classic case of the tail wagging the dog? The Meeting told the School Committee to stop its plans. The Meeting would have to study this.
The School Committee was shocked. They had, presumably, expected the same kind of approval they had been given in 1915—do what thee thinks is right. The Committee braced itself for an argument. Stanley Yarnall must have been stunned. To come so close to his dream, and then be blocked by an unexpected obstacle, was a blow. Had he pushed too hard, too fast? Did some members of the Meeting regard this plan as evidence of personal ambition? He never admitted to either of these thoughts. For the record, all he expressed was his “deep concern” with the Meeting’s “problem.”
A special committee (Quakers love committees) of the Monthly Meeting was formed to study the proposed expansion. Chaired by Alfred Scattergood, it met once a week for nine weeks in the winter of 1923-24 trying to find consensus “of more or less divergent views.” In its report, some of the Meeting’s worries were spelled out.
“The School has now become so large an enterprise and involves such heavy financial and administrative responsibilities that it raises the serious question whether it may at some time overtax the material and spiritual resources of the Meeting.”
“The erection of further buildings on the Meeting’s grounds is not welcomed by this committee nor probably by anyone…”
“Another objection that has been raised is that we are not justified in spending as much as $200,000 or more on our own school, which already has many advantages, when there are so many urgent needs calling for our help in the country and abroad.”
In January 1924, Edward Evans, for the special committee, sent the School Committee a series of Queries to answer. The first Query reveals another, and more important, objection. Why should the Meeting spend money to enlarge the school when only 25% of the students are Friends? It is a question that would come up again, later, in GFS history.
The School Committee’s answer to this and the other queries is one of the finest testaments in GFS history. It was passionate, eloquent, and, at times, angry.
Why should the Meeting fund a school where only 25% [actually 21%] of the students were Quakers? Because Quaker children should experience eco- education; because Quaker children should know diverse views; and co- education and diverse views require a larger school.
Yarnall had no obvious hand in the Committee’s responses. Evidently, and wisely, he chose to lie low. He must have been proud of the School Committee’s answers, however. It was the doctrine he had been preaching for years. In this, not in buildings, lies his greatest triumph. “The pupils who pass through our school become familiar with the view and spirit of the Society of Friends and towards the end of their course are harmonious and sympathetic in their attitudes toward Quakerism. We are not, therefore, throughout our school dealing with aliens or strangers to our views. Some members of the Meeting may feel that the children who are not Friends are a dangerous and antagonistic element with whom our children are thrown and who have to be guarded against. This is not the belief of the committee. We feel rather that the Meeting has a great opportunity in providing a school so developed that our children receive a rounded education, physical, intellectual, and spiritual… where at the same time a large number of earnest children of our community, their families and their friends, come under the same influence, and learn to value, respect, and often love, the fundamental things for which Quakerism stands for.
“Interruption at this time with the plan which the School Committee has so carefully considered, and believe to be right, will inevitably mar and thwart this great work. If such action is taken, the burden and proof rests not on the School Committee, but on the Meeting. Can the Meeting provide a substitute that will be as influential or far reaching in building Quakerism in our children or in extending the message of Quakerism beyond our borders?”
Some of the answers to the queries had a decided edge. Query: Are there not more important things to spend our money on? “Is the Meeting so busy sending workers and money to the great populations of Germany, Russia, and France that it minimizes the opportunity of intensive work among its immediate neighbors?” Query: Cannot the school continue as it is? “It is unworthy of our Meeting to tolerate inferior standards and low ideals of educational service, even if there are present indications that we can ‘get by with it’ financially.” In a specific reference to the “only 25% Friends” argument, the Committee noted “there are those who fear that the letting down of bars along lines of dancing, movies, theaters, etc. on the part of some parents of Friends children has been brought about by the pressures of the world ideals of the 75%.” The Committee thought that theory was nonsense.
Reluctantly, and with reservations, the Monthly Meeting finally approved the expansion plans in April. “Still, the school is excellent and deserves our support. Should we not all feel that something vital and inspiring had passed out of the life of the Meeting” if the school disappeared?
It had been a titanic struggle, however civilized the record appears. The forces in favor of a guarded education had been defeated, finally and forever. The Class of 1924, Tyson Stokes’s class, back from their frolic at Exton, had commissioned artist Violet Oakley to design a new school seal with the lines from Ecclesiastes “Behold, I set before Thee an Open Door.” It was exquisite timing, and if in 1924 the school still wasn’t open, expansion made possible greater diversity in the next decade.
The Meeting demanded several assurances before approving the capital drive. They wanted an end to the “creeping enrollment increases” that had characterized all of Yarnall’s years and an absolute cap on enrollment of 630. The plans called for solicitation of non-Friends, and this bothered Edward Evans, in particular. He demanded that it be made clear that while Friends welcomed their money, non-Friends should not think they would have any influence in running the school. Additionally, there should be no construction begun until all the money had been raised or pledged. There must be absolutely no more debt incurred.
Finally, the Meeting’s approval was contingent on changes in the architect’s design for the new T-shaped addition. The proposed front appeared to some members as pretentious and un-Quakerly. They demanded it be changed to fit with the style of the Meetinghouse.
Because of the delay in gaining Meeting approval, Yarnall missed celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary in the new buildings. Not until November 1924 was enough money on hand to let a construction contract, and the Main addition and gymnasium were not completed until 1925. Members of the Meeting contributed over half of the funds raised.
The new buildings in 1925 completed the creation of the modern school. There would be much rearrangement of walls and partitions over the coming years, but the GFS almost every alumnus/a who reads this remembers was essentially in place from that year. The Main Building was now fifty-five feet closer to Coulter Street than it had been. The elegant, rounded, pillared portico was replaced by the current, and more severe, two-story porch. The collection room (renamed “assembly room” in 1927 and today’s Poley Auditorium) was complete; the front hall was almost the same as today, including the front hall table that has been the exclusive domain of seniors in recent years. The 1925 gymnasium (today’s A.A. Smith Gym) is almost entirely unchanged.
Yarnall reported the teachers well satisfied with the new buildings. Not only was there now enough space to work in, the quality of the school life seemed improved. There was less “rush and hurry” in the school day. Yarnall, too, was satisfied. This marked the end of his building epoch; in the remaining sixteen years he served as principal, there would be no new major construction.
While the twenties brought great changes in the physical appearance of the school, the schooling itself changed little. Every year, every eighth grader studied A Midsummer Night’s Dream, American history and civics, and the life of Christ, and he or she know, inevitably, that the next year would bring Julius Caesar, “English Constitutional History,” and “The beginnings of Christianity, based on The Acts, with especial reference to the life of Paul.” A child in third grade know that he or she would be reading Muzzey’s An American History textbook as a senior. Course descriptions in the school catalogues are the same, virtually word for word, from 1920–1929.³
The same situation was true for the Primary. The curriculum was frozen, and much of the classwork was based on memorization and repetition. Students sat at their desks and recited. To cite just one example, in third grade students used the Horace Mann Readers: Book III, a spelling workbook, a grammar workbook, a geography workbook, and an arithmetic textbook (multiplication and long division). Progressive educators like Irvin Poley were unhappy with this curriculum. He considered much of it “dry as dust drudgery.” Poley had been director of the Intermediate School and was now vice principal. He thought the Primary could do a great deal more to prepare students for the upper grades by exciting and enlivening the curriculum. “There is truth as well as beauty in Masefield’s line, ‘The days that make us happy make us wise.’” He later wrote that “most of us do drudgery — and we are the better for doing some of it — only when it is necessary for success in reaching a goal. In a modern school…surely competence, let alone distinction, depends on more than bored, unhappy, but doggedly persistent study.”⁴ In the Primary as well as the upper grades, students received marks of A, B, C, etc. There were no comments on their strengths or weaknesses. There were no parent conferences, no individual student projects, and almost no art; there was only one period of music a week, and no special science class. There was just Sloyd for boys and sewing for girls.
In 1927 Poley was granted a leave of absence to study the “newest and most progressive educational ideas” at the University of Chicago. His return in 1928 sparked the first changes in the curriculum and were directed at the Primary School.
The principal of the Primary was Elizabeth T. Roberts, who had been at GFS since 1900 and principal since 1914. Poley and Yarnall were convinced she was not going to change. “While she understands some of the aims and ideals of the newer education, she has not been able to put those ideals into action.” They persuaded the School Committee to force her retirement after one more year. In the meanwhile, Poley would experiment with curriculum changes and report the strengths and weaknesses of the Primary program.
Poley’s impact is immediately evident. In a 1928 report, one Primary class “is assembling properties and costumes to dramatize Hansel and Gretel;” and others are reported as building a Mexican village and visiting the zoo. The next year the first grade built a small town. “Thought, observation and planning, and cooperation are needed on the part of the workers to turn cartons into houses, garages, schools, yellow American stores, etc.” In another classroom there were “pictures of engines, paper trains, wooden trains, sentences on the board about trains. A visit to Broad Street Station, and an unexpected tour through the new green train which had just brought the Cubs from Chicago to play baseball was one of the thrills of this study.”
Elizabeth Roberts’s retirement raised a serious issue for the school, and not for the first time. There was no pension plan for retired teachers, and Miss Roberts had no money. As a stop-gap measure, a part-time job as Primary School librarian was created for her. Earlier teachers who had retired without means and had received special grants of charity from the School Committee. Roberts’s predecessor as Primary principal, Elizabeth Forsythe, for example, had been the object of a charitable appeal (“she is going blind, her brother is already blind”), and the funds had been raised for a small private annuity. The same thing had been done for “Teacher Jennie” (Jane S. Jones) and Jane Raley. Roberts’s forced retirement, along with that of Edith Knight (to be described below), forced the school to face reality. A case-by-case charity system was just not adequate, not to mention demeaning to the teachers. After years of study and delay, GFS finally joined the TIAA pension annuity program in 1930.
The Primary school was headed in a progressive direction after 1928. That was assured, and the pace of change would accelerate, with the appointment of Marjorie Hardy as the new Primary principal in April 1930. A graduate of the University of Chicago, with eleven years of experience in the laboratory school there, Hardy was a nationally known progressive educator. She was the author of numerous journal articles and the Child’s Own Way series of elementary readers. Her acceptance of the GFS post is evidence of the school’s growing reputation.
The Intermediate and High School curricula changed little in the twenties, in part because GFS had become a mainly college prep school, and college admissions required a conservative approach. Each year Yarnall reported a higher number of graduates and a higher percentage of them going to college. He admitted to the School Committee in 1923 that “Our work in High School must more and more be determined by college entrance requirements.”
There were some progressive teachers in the upper grades. There was Poley, of course. His classroom techniques will be described in chapter five. Iro Trueblood was a progressive. “Our children too much get the idea that they can only learn through books, that they cannot really get first-hand knowledge from things. Most of the situations they must deal with later in life have nothing to do with books. I should like to do much of my teaching by having children deal more with the environment and less with books.”
But most of the High School teachers were traditionalists. Domincovich and Burgess taught by lecture and by line explication of texts. Bennett and Herman Breininger appointed in 1920, in science and math were also educational conservatives. It is worth noting, however, that GFS students scored their highest marks on standardized tests and college boards in the conservative departments of English, science, and math. Even Irvin Poley admitted that progressive education was not the only approach to learning.
Henry Scattergood recalled that the classes he took in the twenties were very conservative. “They were recitations, not discussions. The teacher would ask a question and you would answer it. Then the teacher would ask another question. There was definite homework every night—so many lines to translate, factual questions to answer…” Students had no free time. “You were either in class or in study hall. We were scheduled. We didn’t know how to use free time because we weren’t given any,” Scattergood remembers. He believes this was the greatest weakness in the education he received at GFS. “We didn’t learn how to use free time.”⁵
The curriculum in the upper grades was “lock step,” Scattergood remembers. If, for example, you wanted to take Latin and French, you couldn’t take biology or European history. Choices were determined by the schedule.
The weakest GFS departments in the 1920s, judged by the scores on college boards, were history and French. “Uncle Joe” Price, head of the history department, was a “character” fondly remembered by alumni and indulged by Yarnall. The principal repeatedly explained students’ low scores in history as “not Mr. Price’s fault.” Howard Platt, like Price, a long-term teacher, was added to the history faculty to teach social studies in 1926.
French was another matter. Edith Knight, the head of the language department, was sixty-two years old and in poor health. She had been a faculty member since 1907, and she did not want to retire. Yarnall and Advisory Committee chair Margaret Cary forced her out anyway. Cary described it as “one of the most unhappy months your Principal and I have had in either of our lives” and hoped “that time will heal the wounds.” The Knight case painfully pointed out the need for a pension plan.⁶ Lucille Hiatt was given charge of the French department.
The most important change in the Intermediate and High School program was the slow but steady advance of music and drama. Yarnall remained hesitant about music. He wrote in 1923 “I am not sure we want to launch into an elaborate program of musical education in the Germantown Friends School, but doubtless we do want to make some improvement within conservative limits.”
Pressure from parents had forced him to permit a Girls’ Glee Club in the High School beginning in 1920. He later recalled that “A few parents musically inclined insisted. Long and incredulous deliberations. Reluctant consent. Judicious purchase of a piano and the mischief was done and the camel’s nose was under the tent flap.”⁷
Alumni who remember the Gilbert and Sullivan productions of the 1930s or the explosion of music that followed the arrival of the incredible Mary Brewer in 1942 would not be impressed with the music program of the twenties — but it was an important transition period.
The Glee Club gave one concert a year under the direction of Elizabeth McCloskey. There were no music classes in the higher grades, and McCloskey’s part-time teaching was confined to the Primary one hour a week. The Glee Club was a voluntary, after-school activity, and, judging from Yarnall’s reports, its annual program was not of very high quality. Evidently frustrated by her part-time status, and none too popular with students anyway (“that name McCloskey strikes a feeling of terror in memory,” Eric Johnson recalled), she resigned in 1926.⁸
A GFS graduate, Margaret Eaton (“Peg”) Shane ’18, who had been teaching music at Baldwin, was hired as the first full-time music teacher in 1927. Upper School music really started with her appointment.
The only music for boys prior to Shane’s appointment was a mandolin club organized in 1917–1917 by Richard Janney ’18. It, too, gave an annual concert that Yarnall found painful — and who could blame him. The club was usually about twenty boys, eighteen mandolins, one saxophone, and a piano. They hired their own director, and played “light airs.” Shane changed all this. It was at her urging that the school hired a part-time instrumental teacher “to wean the boys to different stringed instruments and higher standards.” In 1927 a boys’ orchestra was begun, directed by a young Swarthmore graduate named Isaac Battin. It would be many years, and many part-time directors later, before the orchestra was on a solid footing, however.
Additional music became available after 1926 when two teachers from the Curtis Institute primary school, which had closed, were given permission to give private lessons to GFS students in a house on Coulter Street opposite the Meetinghouse. In return, Lotta Greenup (violin) and Marjorie Paddock (piano) gave recitals once or twice a year in morning assemblies.
Music became more regularly interwoven into school life. A grand piano was purchased for the assembly room. Shane organized a Junior Glee Club for Intermediate girls, and music became a regular feature of holiday celebrations and school festivals. Often individual students performed in morning assemblies, and there were sometimes guest artists. For example, in 1929 the promising young violinist Emanuele Santi gave a morning concert that prompted Yarnall to write “The fact that we are now able to have such programs with real satisfaction to our student body indicates a growing sense of appreciation for music among us. A few years ago we would have hesitated to arrange such a program, fearing that the boys and girls would not be attentive and that the occasion would let us down as a school. We can now safely predict good order on the part of practically all and true appreciation on the part of nearly all whenever we have a musical program.”
Shane also brought boys and girls together in singing ensembles, another GFS first. One student from the twenties, Deborah Smith Lutman, remembered that achievement in particular. “Peggy Shane — sharp-tongued and iron-willed had the boys as well as the girls sing in a Christmas assembly… and tears still rush to my eyes remembering that moment. Who were the boys, Rhoads Murphy, Harrie Price — what a surge of beauty she opened to us, and to the music that was followed from her visionary beginnings.” In 1929 for the first time the Glee Club and Orchestra gave a joint concert; and in 1930 a boys chorus was added to the Glee Club.⁹
Drama, too, continued a steady growth in all divisions of the school.
Primary classes frequently performed plays based on Bible stories and folk tales. Poley continued to direct scenes from plays such as Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar and She Stoops to Conquer as part of the seventh- and eighth- grade English course. There continued to be dramatic pageants that echoed the Shakespeare Tercentenary. For example, in 1926, to celebrate the nation’s sesquicentennial, the Primary classes presented “Early Days in Pennsylvania,” which featured music, dance, and dramatic scenes in “Indian Life,” “William Penn’s Arrival,” “Francis Daniel Pastorius,” etc.
A Poley innovation of the twenties was “Intermediate Day,” a festival usually held in Awbury Arboretum. In 1926 it was especially elaborate. To produce “Old Philadelphia Days,” Intermediate School students researched history, wrote dialogue, and borrowed costumes from old Quaker families to present six historical scenes, among them “Social Life: A Minuet at Peggy Shippen’s Home, July 4, 1776,“ and “Home Life: Anti-Slavery Society Holds a Quilting Bee at the Mott’s Race Street Home.” Yarnall decided this was a bit too much. He told the School Committee that the celebrations had been worthwhile, but took too much time and energy, and promised there would be nothing so elaborate staged “for some years to come.”
Better evidence of the growing importance of drama in school life was the formation of two student groups who produced their own plays. The “T.O.C.” (Thirty-One Club) was composed of seventeen girls from the Class of 1931. Coached by Ruth Poley (and rehearsing at the Poley home), they produced three short plays in 1929: The Maker of Dreams by Oliphant Dawn, Rehearsal by Christopher Morley, and Neighbors by Zoar Gale. Not to be outdone, boys from the Class of 1933 organized “The Salamander Club,” and performed a play written by classmate Joseph Roland based on Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, also in 1929. The Salamander Club invited girls to join in 1931 when it staged The Admirable Crichton.¹⁰
The decade of the twenties was transitional, as has been stated. What Stanley Yarnall later called “the unfortunate older days of inhibitions and limitations” in the arts slowly gave way to an appreciation of the central role culture could play in Quaker education. Despite some misgiving of his own, Yarnall backed the changes.
This decade was the coming of age for GFS sports, in large measure because of the successes of Alfred A. Smith. In his first half dozen years, Smith coached all the boys’ varsity teams. “I coached so much,” he said, “that I didn’t have time to sweat.” In 1920, Herman Breininger was hired to teach math and to coach football and baseball, leaving Smith with soccer, basketball, and track. It was as a soccer coach that Smith became a legend. GFS had joined the “old” Inter-Academic league (sometimes called the Private School League) in 1916. Competing against Penn Charter, Haverford School, Friends Select, and Wilmington Friends, Smith’s teams captured the League title seven straight years from 1917 to 1924. That streak included five undefeated seasons, forty- seven victories in a row, 108 goals scored, and only fifteen goals given up. It was the longest win streak of any GFS team in any sport ever, and included matches with public schools and club teams.¹¹
Smith is remembered as much for his sportsmanship as for his coaching success. “He was a sweetheart,” is how one alumna recalls him. He would not tolerate rough play, bad language, or unsportsmanlike behavior. “If any of his players tried anything like that, he would just yank them off the field.”¹²
In 1928, GFS reluctantly joined the modern Inter-Academic League. Doing so was “a necessary evil,” in Yarnall’s opinion. Friends Select and Friends’ Central were planning to join, and Smith was worried about scheduling games if GFS were shut out of the new league. He and Yarnall recognized that GFS would be weak competitors against larger, all boys schools like Germantown Academy and Episcopal, and that proved to be the case. GFS and the new Inter-Ac were never happy together.
Smith’s soccer teams continued to win, however. In the next decade, the “Smithmen,” as one alumnus called them, won league titles in 1931, 1932, 1934, 1936, and 1940. The 1932 team may have been Smith’s greatest. It won the City Championship by defeating Public League champion Northeast High School. A half-century later, Eric Johnson remembered the moment: “There were just two or three minutes left and Bill Doak, who was playing outside left — he was the greatest dribbler in the world — got the ball away back near our goal line, and he dribbled it all the way down the field on the left side — imagine going right by everybody with the crowd cheering like mad — and single handed — didn’t pass to a soul — shot it in and we won the championship.”¹³
GFS was never a power in football, but it did produce one memorable football season in the twenties. Coached by Herman Breininger, a “plain- spoken, peppery Pennsylvania Dutchman,” the team was undefeated and “its goal line never crossed.” “I was in the seventh grade, that was then called the Fifth class,” Henry Scattergood recollected, “and it was a remarkable season. They were my heroes, of course, Tommy Atherton and Jimmy Nicholas and some others” in the class of 1922. The team tied its first game against Germantown Academy 0–0 (the year before GA had won 34–0) and went on to defeat schools like Friends’ Central 60–0 and Chestnut Hill Academy 39–0. There would never be another season like it. A plaque forever preserving this year is in the school archives.
Girls fielded interscholastic teams in hockey and basketball, and the hockey team, in particular, had great success in the twenties. Coached by Elizabeth Maris, hockey won the Inter-School League (Springside, Irwin, Stevens, Friends Select, and Westtown) five times in ten years. The hockey players even attended the summer camp run by Constance “The Apple” Applebee, the grand dame who brought the game to the United States. A stellar player in these years was Elizabeth Cadbury ’24, who would return to teach and coach at GFS for many years.
There were other sports teams in the twenties that did well, and even some new sports were introduced. Girls’ lacrosse, for example, was begun in 1928 and lasted through the thirties before it died out — not to be revived until the 1960s. There was even, briefly, a boys’ fencing team.
The important point is that sport had become accepted as a major part of school life in this decade. Intramural contests between classes, or between “Blues and Whites,” continued, as did gymnastics demonstrations and Field Days. But competitive team sports were the future. Sport became part of the rhythm of the school, an accepted, natural part of the day. Afternoons devoted to sport at Clark and Wistar Brown fields became accepted, normal, and, eventually, required.
By 1930 Stanley Yarnall had reached the peak of his professional career. His school was becoming known at least regionally; and he had become something of a national figure in education. He was an advisor to the Carnegie Foundation; an officer of the Progressive Education Association; and, in 1930, he was elected president of the exclusive, and prestigious, Headmasters’ Association.
That same year he asked the School Committee for a sabbatical year. He was tired and needed a chance for renewal. The Committee readily complied and he was granted a leave of absence at full salary plus expenses. The Committee also sent him a special “minute” of praise. “The vision of many years has now been realized in our great school, with its double classes full from Kindergarten to Senior — its building equipment sufficient, if not ample, in classrooms and laboratories — its two gymnasiums and fine playing fields. This is an impressive monument to thy foresight, unremitting care, and good management.”
In Yarnall’s absence, Irvin Poley would act as principal.
Next: Irvin Corson Poley: Master Teacher
Previously: Master Stanley
Notes
1 School Committee minutes, May 29, 1919.
2 The comprehensive plan, entitled “A Forward Look for the Germantown Friends School,” GFS Archives.
3 These examples, and those that follow, are in the GFS Archives.
4 Poley, Speaking of Teaching, pp. 100–102.
5 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, July 1990, GFS Archives.
6 Edith Knight was given a parting gift of a Ford runabout “complete with rumble seat” and a special grant of half-salary by the School Committee “for the rest of her life.” She died in 1933.
7 Stanley Yarnall, “Music in School,” pamphlet published in 1940, in GFS Archives
8 Johnson’s remark is from the transcript of the 1980 Calder roundtable discussion. It follows a reminiscence by Henry Scattergood. “There was no music for boys — oh yes — there was a mandolin project. I guess if you had a mandolin you got to play. And there was a girls’ choir or chorus, and we had a lady named Mrs. McCloskey who taught music — and if we were very good, which was very hard for most of us, she would bang out the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers on the piano for the last three or four minutes of the period. That was our reward for behaving.” GFS Archives.
9 Student Handbook for 1930, GFS Archives.
10 Student Handbook, 1931–1932, GFS Archives.
11 Smith’s record has been pieced together from scores published in The Pastorian for these years. Other sources used here include Takyi Morgan, “History of Soccer at Germantown Friends School” in GFS Archives, Folder 93; and the Alumni Record, February 15, 1940, GFS Archives.
12 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, June 1994, GFS Archives. “Sweetheart” is the word used by Virginia Childs when interviewed by Bill Koons, June 1994, GFS Archives.
13 Calder Roundtable transcript, 1980.
