Henry Scattergood: Son of the Meeting
Students had to wear ties and jackets when Henry Scattergood became principal. When he left in 1970, they wore jeans and had long hair. A rapidly changing nation meant the school needed to reassess its philosophy and future. Should it stay in Germantown and remain with the Meeting? Or, take advantage of free property in Fort Washington? How could it combat racism and segregation? Should it add new buildings to lessen the serious overcrowding? Scattergood, a GFS alum, teacher, and administrator; member of the Meeting; and Germantown resident has to shepherd the school through this wrenching era.
Henry Scattergood was a hot candidate to head a Quaker school — and small wonder. He was a birth-right Friend. He had long experience as a student, teacher, and administrator in Friends’ schools. He was physically attractive: tall, powerfully built and athletic, and that mattered to a school that Henry himself described as “a little sissy.” He was affable, easy to talk to, a good listener, and an articulate spokesman for the values of Quaker education. His wife, Sarah (Sally), a charming and quick-witted lady with impressive educational credentials of her own, was another attraction to a board of trustees. Sally was a Bryn Mawr alumna and had taught at Miquon, Springside, and Plymouth Meeting Friends School. They had five children.
Henry had graduated cum laude from GFS in 1923 and then gone on to Haverford College where he won letters in varsity sports, was elected head of the student association, and graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key. After Haverford he taught at the Shady Hill School, Sidwell Friends, and GFS. During the war he had served in administrative posts for the American Friends Service Committee working with displaced refugees in Lisbon and Casablanca. He had earned a Master’s degree in education from Harvard. In 1952 he was principal of GFS’s Junior High, chair of its Advanced Placement program, and shared all the college advising duties with Burton Fowler. He was also president of the Philadelphia Private School Teachers Association.
GFS had looked at him in 1940, when he was still too young by his own estimation, and other schools had courted him since. Sidwell Friends, for example, wanted him to be a candidate for principal in 1942, but Scattergood spurned the overture. Sidwell Friends would come after him again in 1964 following the abrupt ouster of headmaster John Colbaugh.¹
In 1952, Scattergood received an offer to become Principal of Friends’ Central, and this offer he considered seriously. He wanted to stay at GFS. “I knew it better than any other school, and I loved it,” but family responsibilities made the much higher salary Friends’ Central proposed very attractive.
In March he went first to Burton Fowler and then to Edward Evans, the School Committee clerk and his neighbor in Awbury, to tell them about Friends’ Central and to ask about his future prospects at GFS. Evans promised to bring the question to the School Committee.
The Committee promised him little. Despite their expressed admiration for his qualities, he was told only that he would “be among those considered” after Fowler retired. They meant to form a search committee and there would be no guarantee that he would be the choice. Scattergood’s negotiations with Friends’ Central became more serious.
Edward Evans could not stand the thought that Scattergood might leave. Henry was a child of Germantown Meeting. Evans had known him all his life, and knew, too, that the School Committee had long anticipated that Scattergood would be the first alumnus to become principal. Evans decided to offer him the job without consulting the Committee. As Scattergood remembered later, it was during a walk in the woods at Awbury that Evans “asked if I would like to become principal of Germantown Friends.” It was highly irregular.
At the May meeting, Evans told the School Committee what he had done, and that the executive committee backed him. The school could not afford to lose Henry Scattergood. He asked the Committee to validate his offer, to reverse its earlier decision and dispense with a search, and to send Scattergood an official letter appointing him Principal “after Burton Fowler retires in August 1955.” Faced with what amounted to a fait accompli and agreeing that Henry couldn’t be spared, the Committee agreed.
Henry Scattergood knew nothing about Evans’s maneuver. In response to Evans’s question in the woods, he had answered “if the School Committee thinks I can handle the job, I’d like to give it a try.”
Scattergood’s appointment was kept secret, perhaps in fear that an announced successor would undermine Fowler’s authority. Publicly Scattergood was called “Assistant Principal,” but the Committee minutes described him as “Co-Principal.”
Fowler did not complete his three-year contract. In February 1954 he asked the Committee to let him out of his last year. He wanted to retire in June. He said that at the age of sixty-seven, “the wear and tear of such an active job” was becoming too much, and since Scattergood stood ready to take over, he was certain the Committee would let him go. It did so, and the announcements of Fowler’s retirement and Scattergood’s appointment were made simultaneously.
Since Scattergood needed no introduction, and certainly no long letter explaining the reasons for his appointment, all attention turned to saying a proper goodbye to Fowler. On June 7, according to an account by David Mallery ‘41, one of Fowler’s young faculty appointees, “over one thousand parents, alumni, students, teachers, and friends” gathered at the school for dinner and a celebration. Fowler’s accomplishments were listed by several speakers, most impressively by Edward Evans who had earlier announced his own decision to retire as clerk. “School democracy” was mentioned, of course, and community service, non-discriminatory admissions, Annual Giving, the Adult School, student government, and “innovation.” Evans spoke of Fowler’s “bright vision of freedom,” and concluded that “we here, under Henry Scattergood, [will] confidently carry on from where he has left us.”²
The evening’s celebration caught the tone of the transition. It would be seamless, the School would “confidently carry on.” Fowler would be missed, but in Henry Scattergood the school had an outstanding successor: “The fine promise of his young manhood has been more than fulfilled.” Scattergood said in his own speech that evening that there were two things to remember about footsteps: their size and the direction they headed. He hoped he could fill Fowler’s footsteps, but he knew he would follow in the same direction. More than one speaker looked at Irvin Poley sitting next to Scattergood and reflected “with heart warming assurance” that the School’s “anchor” would be at hand for a few more years.³
Fowler read a letter he had received from a third grader:
Dear Mr. Fowler,
I am sorry you are leaving. I am very glad my Daddy is going to be principal...
Love, from Ellie Scattergood.
Fowler left to become a consultant on educational programs for the Ford Foundation and the Educational Records Bureau.
In the fall, Bob Boynton, a new teacher, wrote a poem about his first impressions of the School: “GFS Scene Through Four Frames.” Frame number one can stand as an epitaph to the Fowler years.
An unblurted legacy of quiet sanity,
A turn of mind which
Has builded a more stately mansion
Resplendent in dust-grained mortar:
A simple conviction that all are godly
And all are human;
The unspeaking affirmation that
The whole truth is worth courting
And can be won.⁴
Henry Scattergood entered the Pilot House that summer without missing a beat. “I don’t recall any difficult adjustment period,” he recalled. “All my former teachers were very loyal to me and supportive. They were very helpful. I mean they didn’t snipe at me or treat me as if I were a kid.”
It helped, too, that Scattergood knew everyone on the School Committee, and they felt warmly toward him. Steve Cary ’33, was the new clerk succeeding Evans, ’98. Both the School and its governing board were now headed by much younger men. “Steve Cary, Sam Fessenden, some others, my contemporaries, were now my bosses on the School Committee. We spoke the same language; we understood each other. So on the whole I moved into the situation fairly easily and painlessly. We didn’t have any great crises to deal with in the middle fifties. By the time the sixties came along, well, things got tougher.”⁵
The early years were a happy time for Scattergood. He got on well with the Committee, parents, and faculty, and he knew the name of almost every student. He continued to teach a class (“to keep in touch with what really went on”), and the door to his office was almost always open.
He was a man who was more interested in people than programs and would make fewer changes in the curriculum than had Fowler. He was basically satisfied with the program that had been created. Asked by an interviewer to list the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum in these years, he said, “I don’t think there were any great weaknesses. We were basically in pretty good shape. We had problems finding good people to teach the Junior High, I remember that.” Strengths? “Clara Dewsnap had a very fine Lower School” and in the Upper School “the English Department was the best.” He singled out English teachers Ed Gordon (“outstanding teacher”) and David Mallery (“he made students feel like a million dollars”). The measure of a school, he believed, “was the kind of lives its graduates live,” and by that measure GFS was doing well. He saw GFS graduates as “people who have given a lot of their lives to a profession or have done something useful often way beyond the call of duty. I like to think the school had an influence in their lives.”
He had an example he cited frequently. “When I looked and saw that the chairman of the Board of Bryn Mawr, Ned Spaeth, and the chairman of the board of the University of Pennsylvania, Bill Day, and the chairman of the board of Haverford College, Jonathan Rhoads, and the chairman of the board of Swarthmore, Bob Browning, were all GFS graduates, that said something to me.”
The early years continued in familiar rhythms and patterns. Teachers from the Yarnall era continued to retire, and their replacements usually measured up. Burgess had finally managed to save enough money to buy a place in the Fairview Nursing Home in Chestnut Hill and retired in 1960. He had taught for fifty-one years, the longest tenure in the school’s history. Scattergood visited him at Fairview. “He was an old man, he was pretty feeble. But he knew me, and we would talk about old times.” In his later years Burgess loved martinis, but he could not afford them at Fairview, “So Irvin Poley endowed him with a martini fund. We would be sitting there for a while and he would look at his watch and say ‘Nurse, I think it’s time for my first martini.’ Irvin, who never drank a drop in his life, was a sensitive and loving and caring man.’’
Poley retired in 1958, the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from GFS. To mark the occasion the School published a collection of his articles as a book, Speaking of Teaching. Haverford College awarded him an honorary degree. In 1968 the school would honor him again by naming the assembling room the Poley Auditorium.
The last chapter of Speaking of Teaching was addressed to GFS Alumni and was Poley’s reminiscence of the last quarter century at the school — “Our School Then and Now.” He more than anyone, more even than Stanley Yarnall, had made possible the differences he described.
As I look back a quarter of a century, I feel there is improvement in many areas of school life. The school meeting for worship, for example, seems distinctly better suited now to the needs of young people than it was. We no longer have talking down — ’messages for the dear children.’ Boys and girls now seem to be part of the meeting as a whole. In such matters it is easy to be fooled, but my belief is that meeting is now honestly valued by many of the boys and girls…
There is less emphasis than there was on marks and prizes; there is no class ranking now, no honor roll. There is more emphasis, I truly believe, on ideas, on group achievement, on maturity, on self-respect, on learning for the sake of finding out something interesting or valuable…
Instead of the old-fashioned separation from the community — an education “guarded/ in the Quaker phrase, from contact with the world — our older students may go to urban minority Close Ups, to the Schools Community Council, to conferences, to seminars, to settlements, to work camps. They tend to work with people rather than for them.
Students and teachers are much concerned now about the emotional and social life of boys and girls; in my early days, little faculty conferring was done on pupils without academic difficulties. Now both students and teachers are actively concerned for the new student, the shy student, the unaccepted student. The school has had a student advisory committee since 1950 which tries to help the youngsters who show their maladjustment in abnormal self-centeredness, in snobbery, in cruelty, in minor dishonesties.
In addition to their major place in the physical education program, athletics play a big part in meeting these emotional and social needs. A bigger student body has enabled us to have more teachers and to offer a more varied program…
The success of the athletic departments in giving more widespread opportunities for all demands a great deal of student leadership and cooperation. It seems to me that in these twenty-five years such student responsibility and the practice of self-discipline have greatly increased in many areas of school life. Our Wednesday and Friday assemblies are usually presided over by students and planned by both faculty and students. The Seniors are now getting good practice in self- government by studying in the library with only their classmates supervision…
Twenty-five years ago the value of the arts for the realization of personality was beginning to be appreciated. Nowadays drama is studied as a part of English, recognized for the important form of literature that it is. In recent years Bach is sung or played oftener than Gershwin or Sullivan, and every piece taught is likely to be good of its kind. There has been growth in the graphic arts, too…
Years ago the student body had great ranges of academic ability — perhaps more evident than now, because we knew nothing of remedial reading, because we knew little of individual differences and their recognition in the course of study. Some boys who could not read adequately were attempting both Latin and French. Now we know that foreign languages confuse rather than help the youngster who needs first to get straightened out in reading and spelling, that many children — some of them very able — have reading difficulties, that there is no one perfect curriculum for college preparation. If the student body was more varied then in its abilities to profit from a completely book-centered program, it was much less varied racially and religiously. In addition to every known variety of Protestant, there are now in our school Catholics and Jews of all shades of orthodoxy. There are Negroes now, very much a part of the whole; there is likely to be an Oriental or two and several guests from Europe.
The teachers are more nearly professional now… [and] there are relatively more men. . .
Some of these changes are not peculiar to G.F.S.; education in general has moved ahead. In an age when it is easy to be depressed, it is important to see clearly those areas in which progress is evident, and education is one of these. For its day, our school twenty five years ago was good; for this day I am convinced it is better than that. But then I don’t claim to be unbiased.⁶
The 1950s rolled on smoothly. Enrollment continued to edge up — it passed 700 in 1956 — and the waiting list for places grew longer (305 in 1957). Dorothy Platt’s admission reports were invariably optimistic, even chatty. The hardest part of her job was turning so many good people away.
She liked to give a picture of the kind of parents who chose GFS. Her 1955 report is characteristic. “We usually enroll more doctors’ children than those of any other profession, but this year teachers and manufacturers are in the majority. As usual, our new parents come from every walk of life. We have a psychiatrist, a minister, a pediatrician, chief of the Serum Exchange of the Children’s Hospital, a geophysicist who formerly worked with Einstein, now director of the Geophysical Laboratory of Carnegie Institute; engineers, chemists, a lawyer, an executive of Sears Roebuck, one of Kresge’s 5 & 10; a shipping clerk, teachers, the vice president of a steel company; a musician; a Chinese importer; a secretary, a research psychologist at the Franklin Institute; a professor of city planning; a judge of the Municipal Court; a diplomat; a banker; a social worker; the head of the counselling of the Philadelphia Public Schools; a control clerk; an insurance man; a food broker.” There were 137 Friends’ children, 123 alumni children, and nineteen African Americans.
The surface of school life may have seemed steady and placid in these years, and the school attractive to a diverse population, the future bright, but a critical moment was at hand. In 1957, the school faced the most important decision in its entire history.
“Out of the blue,” Steve Cary remembers, the school was offered land in the suburb of Fort Washington by the McLean family, publishers of the Philadelphia Bulletin. The McLeans had no prior connection to the school. “McLean decided he wanted a school on that property, and he just picked us out.” Cary remembered visiting the estate. “It was a beautiful property,” and the offer was extraordinarily generous: The land was to be given freely and with no strings attached.
A move could solve the pressing space issues on the urban campus. The school had struggled to find adequate space for new programs, growing enrollment, and athletic fields over the previous decades. There was little available land near the campus. Germantown, too, was changing. The post-war shift of well-paying manufacturing jobs to the south or to sites with better highway access meant that there were fewer employment opportunities for local residents. The post-war growth of automobile-centric suburbs drew middle-class Germantowners to places like Plymouth Meeting and Jenkintown. With these changes, Germantown businesses suffered or closed. These neighborhood changes foreshadowed the efforts of the 1960s and seventies to revive inner-city neighborhoods through “urban renewal.”
The School Committee had a difficult decision to make. A special Development Committee weighed the school’s options. The tract in Fort Washington was attractive but would require a huge investment in new construction for the school; it would also drastically change the “center of gravity” of the school community.
In May 1957, the Development Committee reported that “after much discussion of the problems involved, especially the financial ones, the School Committee decided that the reasons for staying at the present site outweighed those for moving.”⁷ The decision to reject the McLean’s offer was, in the first place, a moral one. Good neighbors don’t betray their neighborhood. There was an additional moral dimension. When people in the fifties used the term “changing,” they meant racially. The number of African Americans in Germantown was increasing, and “white flight” had begun. To many in the school community, a move to Fort Washington would be to join in “white flight,” it would be shameful, immoral, cowardly — a betrayal of Quaker principles.
There were other considerations, too. No one wanted to move Germantown Meeting. It served a still-large Quaker population in the northwest part of the city. A move would threaten that relationship between the school and the Meeting. It might also lessen the Quaker character of the school, and Scattergood and School Committee members were absolutely opposed to that. Jack Childs remembered doing a survey of GFS families at that time — where they lived and how they came to school, by private car or public transportation (PTC buses or trolleys, the Reading or Pennsylvania railroad), and concluded that a move to Fort Washington would be a move away from the school’s supporters. How would students already enrolled get to a new campus? Childs’ survey is the probable source for the statement in the Committee minutes that GFS should remain where it was because “the center of gravity to the school’s population is at Stenton and Gowen Avenues.” GFS might find new families in the suburbs, but it would be a very different school if it did, and nobody wanted that either.
As Henry Scattergood noted, “the school was the child of the Meeting,” and it would be unwise to sever that bond. Ultimately, GFS was a city school and its directors were determined to remain in the city. McLean then offered his land to Germantown Academy, which accepted and prepared to leave the city. The decision to remain in Germantown would have enormous consequences. Fred Calder described it as the kind of decision an institution makes once in a lifetime, a “make or break” decision. The decision did not seem so fateful to those who made it. Eric Johnson, who had returned to the school as head of the Junior High, later called himself “an innocent” in those days. In an interview shortly before his death, Johnson defended the decision as the right one, but admitted that the costs incurred were higher than he had ever imagined. Jack Childs, then a member of the Meeting’s Property Committee, later had second thoughts about his own part in the decision.
Today it is easy to see that the mid-fifties were just the beginning of the long and serious decline of Germantown. It was not so obvious then. The decline was not unique to Germantown, or even Philadelphia, of course. It was part of a long-term transformation of the manufacturing cities of the rust belt Northeast to a post-industrial economy. Industrial historian Philip Scranton suggests that because Philadelphia had a non-diversified and specialized manufacturing sector, and fewer huge enterprises, its decline was less visible than elsewhere. In contrast to Pittsburgh or Detroit, “Philadelphia’s decay, like its advance, was spread across half a century, a pattern that robbed it of sudden drama and made it difficult to perceive or reverse.”⁸ Scranton dates Philadelphia’s industrial peak as “workshop of the world” to the mid-1920s, and notes that “in the half century after 1925 the city lost two thirds of its industrial jobs and virtually all of its greatest firms. Of the 25 largest in 1925, only the Budd Company remains [in 1990] a major player in its sector.”⁹
World War II had disguised this pattern and given new life to struggling companies in Germantown, Nicetown, East Falls, and Manayunk, the neighborhoods surrounding GFS. But by the 1950s, the decay had resumed.
Part of this pattern was clear to the men and women of Germantown Meeting in 1957, but not all of it. Germantown was in a period of transition. The textile mills, knitting mills, and carpet mills south and east of the school were already shutting down or moving South, taking jobs from workers in the neighboring row homes. But much remained: the Budd plant, for example, and Midvale Steel and Nice Ball Bearing, all cutting back, but still alive. The central Germantown business district was still anchored by two upscale department stores: Rowell’s at Germantown and Chelten, and Allen’s one block away. People still came from all over the city to shop in Germantown, and people who lived there didn’t need a car to shop for anything they needed. There was still Sears, Penney’s, two Woolworths, and two car dealers.
Immediately around the school, businesses still flourished. James S. Jones and daughters occupied three of the four corners of Germantown and Coulter and, like Rowell’s and Allen’s, catered to affluent customers. The fourth corner, however, was a worry. The Coulter Inn had become a shabby, low-rent apartment building. Jack Childs described it as the kind of place where the tenants, eighty or so mostly old men, handed over their social security checks to the landlord in return for a cheap room and meals.
Germantown was showing signs of decay; in places it was even a little seedy. Businessmen complained about a drop off in trade. All this the school and Meeting knew. Could GFS in conscience add to the problems of Germantown by escaping to the suburbs? Or could the school by remaining help arrest the downward slide?
But remaining in Germantown also raised difficult issues. The school would remain where it was, but could it continue as it was? The underlying financial problems had to be addressed.
In 1956 the School Committee had responded to familiar complaints from Scattergood and Dewsnap about losing good teachers because of poor pay (Dewsnap mentioned Hall Cushman, in particular, who left for a public-school job) by adopting yet another salary scheme. This one had a starting wage of $3,000 and a maximum after ten years of $5,600. Moreover, the new scheme was to apply equally to all—there was to be no more pay discrimination between men and women or between Lower and Upper School teachers. The intention was good, but the results (as we shall see) fell short. To pay for this new scale, tuition was increased 10%, the latest in a series of increases that worried the Committee considerably.
Salaries could not be raised by admitting more students because, as usual, the school was overcrowded. But now the crowding, especially in the Lower School, had become desperate. In the last Pennsylvania Association of Private Academic Schools (P.A.P.A.S.) evaluation, the Lower School’s physical facilities had been found to be “inadequate” and the evaluators had warned darkly of GFS failing the next accreditation unless there was improvement. Too many students were stuffed into too few square feet, and there was severe criticism of poor lighting and inadequate ventilation. The Main Building was in sad shape, too, and Scattergood worried that it might not pass fire and safety inspections. Except for the Alumni Building, there had been no new buildings added to the campus since 1925, and enrollment was 35% higher.
To make matters worse, there was no space on the campus to add more buildings even if the Meeting, always jealous of its space, gave permission and the school could raise the money. Burton Fowler’s warning of a few years earlier that the city was crowding in on the school had proved true.
The School Committee wrestled with all these issues in 1956 and 1957. The Development Committee, already in place to review the McLean’s offer now looked at options to relocate somewhere else in the city. The Development Committee studied possible sites in the city’s northwest. They wanted at least twenty-five acres, and the Strawbridge-Hayman property on School House Lane received the closest scrutiny. A second possibility was an undeveloped tract near McCallum and Mermaid Lane belonging to the Woodward-Houston estate, although this was judged to be too far from the Meeting. Either site would be costly. The Development Committee, headed by Robert Yarnall ‘40, guessed it would cost $2.2 million to develop either property.
A second option, and the one chosen, bore a lower price tag—about $750,000. The school would remain where it was but upgrade the existing buildings, construct a new Lower School, and attempt to acquire more land in the immediate neighborhood. The historic decision was made by the School Committee on May 21, 1957.
The decision at first seemed not only prudent, but wise. Property was available for development around the school. In July a neighbor, Mary C. Emlen, offered to sell the school her house and land on School House Lane for only $20,000 provided she could remain as tenant. The Committee jumped at the chance. Then, in September, another neighbor, Dr. Mary T. Mason, died and her large property adjoining the athletic fields came on the market. The school purchased the six-acre Mason tract for $120,000 and made plans to develop it for additional playing fields. Over the next few years quietly, even secretively, the school acquired others parcels in and around Germantown and Coulter. Eventually GFS would find itself at odds with community groups who would accuse the school of acting like a slum lord.
To pay for the upgrade of facilities, the Committee announced plans for a new capital fund drive in November of 1958. The drive was chaired by Samuel Fessenden ’28, and had a target of $600,000. This campaign had a more professional air to it than earlier drives. The firm of John F. Rich, Inc. was hired “to ascertain an accurate picture of our fund raising potential.” It was the Rich firm that recommended the target figure; the Development Committee had hoped for much more. A Buildings Committee, chaired by F. Joseph Stokes ’31, was formed “to guide the planning of physical alterations and new buildings,” and the architectural firm of Chappelle and Crothers, already retained to work on the Mason property, was asked to draw up designs for a new lower school and a campus plan for the school “and of the block surrounding them.”¹⁰ Another committee was charged with designing “a program in which the School can stimulate (with other groups) a regeneration of the Germantown Community.”
Henry Scattergood was content to leave issues of money and real estate largely in the hands of others. “I was never much of a builder,” he said later. “Bricks and mortar didn’t much interest me.”
Scattergood was too modest. Bricks and mortar may not have interested him, but education did— and his school and his vision of education required some new bricks and mortar. Two major buildings were constructed during Scattergood’s administration: the Lower School and the science building (Sharpless). Scattergood would always play down his own role in this construction process.
Henry Scattergood was—first and foremost—a school man. His reports to the School Committee showed his delight in the small, but important, triumphs that made up daily school life: the appointment of the first African American faculty member, Jamesena Faulk, as school librarian; the successes of GFS students in European work camps; the 1955 soccer team, the first to win an lnter-Ac title since 1938.
Meanwhile, he was putting together his own team. Clara Dewsnap resigned as Primary principal in 1953 to accept a position at Wellesley College, and Ed Gordon, head of the Upper School, left the same year to head the M.A.T. program at Yale. To replace them, Scattergood brought back Hall Cushman, who had taught at GFS from 1952 to 1955, from the Upper Darby public schools to succeed Dewsnap, and he promoted history department chairman Robert Boynton as Gordon’s successor.
Scattergood was proud of his faculty appointments, too. One of the first was Allen Clayton in 1954. “I hired Al to teach music, but had in mind, too, that he had been an all-American soccer player at Haverford.” Clayton taught instrumental music in the Junior High and High Schools, and he became varsity soccer coach in 1960. Scattergood hired Pat Reifsnyder away from Friends’ Central in 1961. Both Clayton and Reifsnyder were Quakers—an important consideration for Scattergood—and both were extraordinary teachers who became legends in the school.
Like many American cities, Philadelphia had begun to feel the effects of the demographic changes of the post-war era. So-called “urban renewal” had become a priority of city government, and Germantown was one of the areas of focus. In 1963, the Redevelopment Authority’s draft plan for Germantown raised alarms for the school and Meeting. One of the primary concerns for redevelopment was to find a way to smooth the flow of traffic from the northwest neighborhoods and the growing suburbs beyond into Center City Philadelphia. A key feature of this plan was a recommendation that Coulter Street be widened into a five-to- seven lane road. Clearly, this would be significant for GFS. The widened road would require the taking of the open space in front of the Main Building and Meetinghouse, the properties on the opposite side of Coulter (including the Alumni Building), or both. The minutes of the School Committee’s Planning Committee indicate that the school was blindsided by this development. The bisecting of the campus by a new major traffic artery made use of any properties on the south side of Coulter problematic; this would include Alumni Building (if it survived) and the Boys’ Club fields, which GFS used for physical education classes and sporting events. The minutes also note that “the City is paying G.A. a highly inflated sum for its property, which prohibits its resale to an educational institution. It is ironic that G.A. should be rewarded for moving out of Germantown while G.F.S., which has raised and spent more than $700,000 improving its properties here, has been cut into two parts by the Plan.”¹¹ At a public meeting on June 18, 1963, Cary reminded the several hundred community members in attendance that the school owned and used properties on the south side of Coulter, and had plans for acquiring other properties there. With the widening of Coulter, the school’s “hopes of developing something on that side of Coulter St. are damaged.”¹² The Meeting also reacted with alarm to the proposed widening of Coulter St., noting in an “URGENT” letter to members and attenders that the traffic survey for the plan anticipated that the average number of vehicles using Coulter Street each day would go from 6,200 to 20,400 by 1980.¹³ While this part of the Plan for Germantown would soon be abandoned, it would not be the last time that the School and Meeting would be presented with challenges raised by the economic and demographic changes that the city and neighborhood faced.
The composition of the student body was another matter. GFS had begun the process of integrating its enrollment and faculty in the 1940s, but the efforts fell far short in the eyes of many. The September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls and injured twenty-two parishioners, would prove a catalyst for one of the school’s most successful initiatives. In the bombing’s aftermath, the GFS community wanted to know what they could do to support the congregation. After discussions led by Ted Wolf ’47 and Eric Johnson ’36, the community realized that while segregation and racism were a serious problem in the American South, the community around the school also suffered from those biases. The GFS Community Scholarship Program arose from these discussions. The CSP fundraising prospectus stated that an increase in minority children at GFS would allow all students to be “healthily exposed to similarities and differences as they pursued their education” and that GFS should “relate itself more closely to its immediate community.” Ted Wolf said that the bombing “reinforced the school’s earlier decision to remain in Germantown.”
A September 1965 editorial introducing the program in the Germantown Courier noted that “Central Germantown is a thickly populated area in many respects with inadequate education…. [GFS believes that it can be of] service to the youth of the area by enrolling as members of its regular student body boys and girls attending public schools. Most of these will require full scholarships.”¹⁴ In the first year, six Community Scholarship students joined the seventh-grade class. The GFS Bulletin in 1965 said that the “community scholarships can be a first-hand contribution toward integration, both racial and economic; it can broaden the living educational experience of our students, who should learn to know more people of all economic and social levels.”¹⁵ Initially, funding from foundations supported nine six-year scholarships. By the late 1960s additional scholarships were funded by individuals; the Class of 1969 stepped forward and funded a thirteen-year scholarship for their class gift and current parents donated towards the program, covering the tuition for several neighborhood children for the 1968- 1969 school year. In a letter to Scattergood, U. S. District Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. (also a GFS parent) wrote of his “growing conviction about the importance of the program.”
In a society where high-sounding words so often seem to be a conscience-solving substitute for deeds, it is refreshing to me to be involved, even in a small way, with specific accomplishments. You know that I see your Community Scholarships Program as important far beyond the amount of money that goes into it, the small number of people involved, and the physical boundaries of the community it arises from.
Later in the letter, he noted
Henry, I see GFS as much more than a very good private school. Somewhere in your literature you say you want to make it “as public a private school as possible.” That is exactly it! GFS is extraordinary in the same sense that are some of the best privately controlled colleges and universities — extraordinary because it has decided as a matter of policy to put its power and facilities to work as much as possible for the community rather than for the granting of more privileges to the already privileged. I agree with the School that excellence in isolation is not enough. It may even be harmful. But excellence with involvement is socially useful and more excellent because it is more relevant to the pressing issues of today.¹⁶
As the school worked at opening its doors to a wider number of neighborhood children, it also eyed possibilities for physical expansion within Germantown. With Germantown Academy’s acceptance of the McLean offer of the Fort Washington property, their large campus across Greene Street was an obvious solution to GFS’s space needs. Colonial Germantown, Inc., a group started in the 1950s to preserve Germantown’s Market Square had, by 1962, broadened its focus to include the revitalization of the wider neighborhood. Working with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, Colonial Germantown became the de facto broker for the Germantown Academy property. GFS discussed the property with them over the course of several years. Steve Cary noted, however, that Colonial Germantown never made a “formal, identified, face-to-face approach to GFS” to negotiate an agreement beyond their initial, non-negotiable one-million-dollar price tag.¹⁷
By late 1964, GA’s Fort Washington campus was almost ready, and the candidates for buying their School House Lane property had come down to two: GFS and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which planned to open a Lutheran high school in Germantown.¹⁸ The two groups presented their plans to the Redevelopment Authority and awaited their decision. In January 1965, the RDA voted 3–1 to sell the property to the Lutherans. In his communication to the GFS community in the Winter 1965 Bulletin, Cary (who noted that his “report cannot be objective; it will, I hope, be candid.”) noted that Colonial Germantown considered that they had made “repeated offers” to GFS that were met with “repeated rejections.” In the school’s view, though, Colonial Germantown’s refusal to negotiate meant that no formal offer had ever been made. As the RDA’s local consultants, Colonial Germantown recommended acceptance of the Lutherans’ offer over GFS in part, at least, because of the school’s prior refusals of their offers. Cary also noted the political reality was that Colonial Germantown had gone so far down the road in negotiating with the Lutherans that backing out at that stage would endanger “the city’s future ability to attract new industry and institutions” by “violating a commitment, regardless of its context or legality.”¹⁹ Cary told the school community that the school’s options included pressing the school’s claim with City Council (which would need to pass legislation authorizing the RDA’s sale of the GA property) or moving on and looking for other expansion options, in particular properties across Coulter Street owned by the Boys’ Club.²⁰
By the spring, the School Committee had decided “that it is in the best interests of both the School and the Germantown community” that they end their bid for the GA property and instead accept the RDA’s “offer to relocate the Germantown Boys’ club on an adjacent block and make substantially all of the so-called Penn Street block available to” GFS.²¹ Writing in the Bulletin, Stephen Cary told the school community that the idea of the school and the Boys’ Club “sharing space and facilities on this block is absolutely unacceptable.” He continued, noting
The club has generously indicated a willingness to explore moving, but this will take time, and would have to be on terms acceptable to the club, since we are unwilling to put any pressure on a fine, neighboring institution to move unless it will be to its advantage to do so.
These matters are currently being explored, and until answers are found, our future course will remain in doubt.²²
Negotiations between the Boys’ Club, the school, the community, and the city over the next several years would not yield a plan acceptable to all parties, and GFS would begin to look elsewhere for space to accommodate the growing school.
Just as the economic and demographic changes of the 1960s were reshaping GFS and its relationship with the community, the social changes of the 1960s were also affecting what was going on inside the school.
On the playing fields, while soccer and cross country were “flourishing,” interest in the traditional fall high school sport, football, was waning. In 1968, Ed Thode wrote in the Bulletin:
Probably the most traumatic event we’ve lived through recently is the dropping of varsity football. This has been a difficult experience for all concerned. For several years now, we have had trouble fielding a squad of sufficient numbers to compete at the varsity level. This year, after a few weeks of preliminary practice, during which time efforts were made to solicit more players from the student body, the squad had shrunk to an all-time low. The administration of the school made the decision to drop the sport. To that small, loyal group of students who were on the team, this was a sad moment.
The football equipment was put in storage, awaiting the day when or if “a groundswell of interest in the sport appears among our boys.”²³
One of Scattergood’s first challenges as principal was to emphasize the school’s dress code. A note to the Parents Bulletin in September 1954 reminded parents that “‘reasonable neatness’ in dress contributes to orderly, controlled behavior.” That “reasonable neatness” included ninth- through twelfth-grade boys wearing jacket and tie to school every day, and seventh and eighth graders wearing a jacket or sweater with tie on Thursdays for Meeting for Worship. Students were asked “not to wear blue jeans to school except for work-days, special trips, or on Saturdays.”²⁴ In 1956, the Parents Auxiliary felt it necessary to propose to Scattergood and to the Student Council a set of guidelines for school attire, especially for girls. “Numerous parents” expressed the opinion that GFS’s girls (especially those in the Junior High grades) had made clothing an area of unhealthy competition, noting that there were:
Too many and too “fancy articles of clothing, especially in reference to blouses, skirts, and petticoats. One young lady is reported to have worn 12 petticoats! Another, so many bracelets that the whole classroom jingled. Overly-conspicuous earrings and shoes were also reported as distractions.
Those who cannot keep up with the increasing spiral of “What am I going to wear today?” are made unhappy about it, and have their attention drawn away from their school work.²⁵
By the late 1960s, though, it was the students who had strong concerns about the school’s dress code. A committee of faculty and students, meeting in late 1968, decided that the school’s dress code should be reduced to: “No specific rules, but sensitivity to the situation and considerateness towards other people should apply at all times.” Scattergood noted in a memo to the school community that “What we are doing is turning over to students the responsibility to develop and practice good taste and good judgement in matters of dress.” He concluded the memo adding that “the faculty was in agreement that they were glad to turn this responsibility over to students, because they do have confidence that students at this school can be trusted to handle matters in a mature and considerate way.”²⁶ In addition to new freedom in dress, the students asked for a voice in making school policies. This led to more unstructured free time for Upper School students, including signing out to leave campus, fewer athletic requirements, and most significantly, two seats for student representatives on the School Committee.
Eric Johnson had spent the 1968–69 school year teaching in the Virgin Islands. In an article written on his return for Covenant (an inter-school newspaper), he noted that while he was away, “the tides of change rose and swept through the school.” Friends had written to him that the school’s “standards had been abandoned, and the old place was no longer the old place.” While Johnson was startled by the wardrobe changes — he expected “that along with the weird get-ups would go sloppy attitudes, inconsiderate behavior, and general irresponsibility” — he was pleasantly surprised by the changes and the seriousness of the students. He felt that “by giving up our rules about the non-essentials we seem to have converted energy into wrestling with the essentials: intellectual development, community responsibility, and the search for meaning.”²⁷
The students were not concerned solely with their life on Coulter Street. As in the rest of American society, the war in Vietnam was a focus of activism. On October 15, 1969, GFS students, faculty, and parents participated in the day-long Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. In a letter to parents, Scattergood noted that
As a Friends school, we expect to devote a part of the morning to learning something of the history and culture of Vietnam, the background of our involvement in the war, and to discussing our response to this both as individuals and as a nation. We will hold a Meeting for Worship that will include a large part of the pupil population, Upper and Lower School, in different Meeting Rooms.
This would be followed by a silent vigil on the edges of campus, as well as workshops in sign-painting, role-playing for leafletting, and writing letters to Congressmen. Students who did not wish to participate could leave after the morning activities; parents of Upper School students were asked to sign a permission slip for their children to participate in the afternoon activities.²⁸ John Harkins, principal of the Lower School, wrote to parents that there would be age-appropriate programming for the younger students, including “a walk within school grounds to observe the vigil, but not participate in it.” He encouraged parents who wished to join their children to participate more actively in the vigil in order “to express themselves as a family.”²⁹
By the late 1960s, GFS was both the same school that it had been when Scattergood took the helm in 1954, as well as a product of the social forces that had reshaped American life in the previous 15 years. Van Kalbach, an Episcopal Academy student who arranged to visit GFS for several days in the spring of 1969 gave an outsider’s view of the school in an essay he wrote after the visit:
At GFS, there is an atmosphere of hard work by and knowledgeable concern of students, leading to awareness. Having coeducation and people of various backgrounds (e.g., six Germantown Community scholars in every class) and a free dress code has made the school loose but not lax. One doesn’t have the impression one is beginning an eight-hour work day when he begins classes at 8:30; I have felt this way often at Episcopal. The students feel more the value of the school for their lives, and they live there while they are in school, not just exist and work there. This does not seem to cut them off from events outside the school, because GFS is the first to admit outside experience is necessary for a rounded upbringing. Whenever possible, it tries to encourage students to get involved outside school. I don’t think GFS is breeding a generation of fakes, either… While I felt it difficult to break into the students’ world, I didn’t feel they treated each other exclusively — I did hear it’s hard to be a conservative, at least openly, there, but probably not as hard as being liberal at [Monsignor] Bonner [High School]. I don’t think the students are mostly potential anarchists. They know the value of a close relationship with others, of concern, and cooperation. They are sometimes disgusted, sometimes superficial in their condemnations. Is this not better than hollow support of another generation’s way of doing things?³⁰
By the beginning of the following school year, Scattergood had decided that he no longer had it in him to lead GFS in this new era. Chris Nicholson, a member of Germantown Meeting who would join the School Committee in 1971, recalled that Scattergood was tired of conflict and of being an administrator.³¹ A young faculty member at the time, Carl Tannenbaum believed that the 1960s clearly overwhelmed Scattergood, and that things had gotten too “loosy-goosy” for his liking.³² Ellie Elkinton, then a teacher at GFS (and who had lived with the Scattergoods at Awbury during the 1968–69 school year), feels that the world got ahead of him; while he loved being in the classroom, he was beleaguered by the youth culture, the marches, the dress code battles, and evening calls from faculty complaining about something.³³ Whatever his reasons, Scattergood tendered his resignation, effective at the end of the 1969–70 school year.
In his final column in the Bulletin, Scattergood reflected on his time at GFS. He recalled that when he entered the school in 1916 there were 460 students; at his retirement, the enrollment had topped 800. These types of changes were easy to see, he noted, but others were more important. In his time as a student, he felt that “my teachers seemed more concerned with their teaching and the covering of subject matter than with my learning.” The curriculum “encouraged mastering of facts, consistent application, steady work habits and promptness in meeting daily tasks” but that it did not encourage students “to raise questions or range independently over a field of knowledge.”
In 1970, though, Scattergood saw the value in
trying to meet the student where he is and in consulting his interests and preferences. Some educators long for the good old days when school life was simpler and more orderly, but despite the problems that accompany greater flexibility and freedom, I think the present climate produces better educated, more mature students.³⁴
While Scattergood realized that the new climate produced better students, he also realized that he was not well-suited to manage that change.³⁵
Previously: The Future Is Yours Rather Than Mine
Notes
1 William R. MacKaye and Mary Anne MacKaye, Mr. Sidwell’s School, A Centennial History 1883–1983, pp. 199–200
2 David Mallery’s account is in Alumni Record, June 1954. The School Committee minutes for April 1954 include Evans’s tribute and list of Fowler’s accomplishments.
3 The words are David Mallery’s.
4 Pastorian, December 1954.
5 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons.
6 Irvin C. Poley, Speaking of Teaching, GFS Archives.
7 While the report of the Development Committee is noted in contemporaneous records, there is no copy at GFS or in the School Committee records at Haverford College’s Quaker Archives. Queries to various School Committee members, faculty, and administrators has not yielded a copy either. A summary document prepared by Barbara Brecht (Coordinator of Community Projects) in 1971 summarizes the report.
8 Philip D. Scranton, “Philadelphia’s Industrial History: Context and Overview,” in Workshop of the World, The Oliver Evans Press, 1390. p . i i
9 ibid, p. i i — 8
10 Alumni Record, November 1958
11 GFS Planning Committee Minutes, June 17, 1963.
12 Germantown Courier, Thursday May 6, 1965, p. 1.
13 Letter to Members and Attenders of Germantown Monthly Meeting, Seventh month 2, 1963.
14 “Our Brother’s Keeper,” editorial in Germantown Courier, September 30, 1965.
15 GFS Bulletin, 1965.
16 A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., letter to Henry Scattergood, June 6, 1967, GFS Archives.
17 Germantown Friends School Bulletin for Alumni and Parents, Winter 1965.
18 GA’s Fort Washington campus would open in September 1965. https://www.germantownacademy.net/about/history-traditions
19 Bulletin, Winter 1965
20 Bulletin, Winter 1965
21 Letter to GFS Community, April 23, 1965, reprinted in the Germantown Courier, May 6, 1965
22 Bulletin, Winter 1965.
23 Bulletin, Fall 1968.
24 Henry Scattergood, typed note for Parents Bulletin, September 27, 1954, GFS Archives.
25 “To the Student Council” memo from Parents Auxiliary, November 12, 1956, GFS Archives.
26 Memo from Henry Scattergood, January 23, 1969, GFS Archives.
27 Eric Johnson “Back to GFS After a Year of Change: Co-Educational trousers, Long Hair and What Else?”, Covenant, November 1969, typed version in GFS Archives.
28 Letter to parents, October 9, 1969, GFS Archives.
29 Letter to Lower School parents, October 10, 1969,GFS Archives.
30 “Germantown Friends School — Summary”, an essay by Van Kalbach, an Episcopal Academy senior who spent several days at GFS in the spring of 1969; GFS Archives.
31 Chris Nicholson, interview with Kate Stover & Tim Wood, September 2014, GFS Archives 32 Carl Tannenbaum, interview with Kate Stover, August 2014, GFS Archives
33 Ellie Elkinton, interview with Kate Stover, August 2014, GFS Archives
34 “From Mr. Scattergood’s Desk”, GFS Bulletin, Spring 1970
35 After his retirement from GFS, Scattergood taught history at Penn Charter.
