Master Stanley
Stanley Yarnall, one of the most influential figures in GFS history, takes the lead. The school is now bursting at the seams; a bigger school, Yarnall says, means a greater Quaker influence. In some areas, GFS adheres to Quaker tenets such as girls prohibited from wearing jewelry. But the school also introduces music, theater, and sex education. The “finest gym in the city” is built (the Little Gym!).
Stanley Yarnall was a handsome man. A group photograph of GFS students and teachers taken the year he arrived, 1898, shows “Master Stanley” as generations would remember him. He was tall, an inch or two over six feet, and he towered over the diminutive Davis Forsythe. His hair, famously white in later years (“he used bluing, you know”)¹ was still dark, swept back from a prominent forehead, and his face, with a handsome, aristocratic nose, gazes calmly and steadily at the camera.
It is his bearing that captures the eye. He was young, only twenty-seven years old and this was his first teaching job, but he projects an air of confidence far beyond his years. He is turned three-quarters to the camera, as if posing for a studio portrait, and he stands straight, shoulders back, head held high. It is a picture of a man of dignity, reserve, composure; a man very well pleased with himself; a man with presence.²
Stanley R. Yarnall was born in Philadelphia August 29, 1871, the son of Hibberd and Mary (Rhoads) Yarnall, birthright Friends. He had graduated with honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Haverford in 1892 and had won a fellowship there in Classics. He took his M.A. at Haverford in 1893. He was working in a book store when he was recommended to Davis Forsythe as a replacement for Charles Brede, a popular Latin teacher. Yarnall would never be a popular teacher, nor did he try to be. Students complained that his “lessons are entirely too long — he is always saying ‘and in addition’ after he has given us enough already. We are killed with work.” One class nicknamed him “Old In-Addition.” Forsythe caught Yarnall’s style exactly in his first assessment of him. “The new teacher of Greek and Latin is exacting and thorough, but judiciously so.”³
In 1905, Yarnall went to Harvard to complete a master’s degree in education. His thesis was “Some Account of the Friends’ School Germantown, Philadelphia with a Discussion of the Program of Studies.” His own copy of this thesis survives, and it tells us a good deal about the school he had just joined and would make his life’s work. It tells us even more about its author.⁴
The thesis (ninety-two pages, plus nine tables) is written in Yarnall’s own hand (a distinct, strong, angular style), and proceeds in careful, systematic order to describe the school’s location and grounds, buildings, governance, faculty, and program of studies department by department. It is intelligent and thorough, but not the work of a scholar or intellectual. It is descriptive, not analytical; the product of a good and prudent mind, but not one, on this evidence, highly imaginative. It is also largely uncritical. Yarnall liked the school’s program as it was and largely approved the direction it was taking. Throughout his long career, he would describe himself as a “conservative progressive,” and that pretty well characterizes his ideology in this thesis.
It is clear that he was not excited about “The Individual System” which the school’s catalog (a Forsythe innovation) was advertising as one of the school’s best features. He never uses the phrase at all, and, in fact, seems to deny its existence. He wrote approvingly that “The Friends’ School is an example of the older order of academics that adhere closely to a fixed program, deviating from it only in the cases of college preparatory students whose work must be planned to meet the requirements of the different institutions they are expecting to enter.” He was more conservative than Forsythe. The latter, for example, had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Committee to consider a limited elective system for older students. Yarnall’s verdict was that “this is a question that cannot be entered upon now unless there were more time to think over the whole situation… with patience the time will come when the whole question can be taken up for investigation and action. In the present in view of the conservative nature of the older members of the Committee, and indeed of the community, it seems best to make haste slowly…” Yarnall had doubts about the elective system, hence the advice “make haste slowly.” When it came to changes he wanted, however, he would charge full-steam ahead. With haste.
Yarnall’s thesis gives a rare, in-depth portrait of the early twentieth-century school, and it is worth examining. It is a lovely portrait, too. He described Germantown as “the largest and most attractive residence quarter” of the city, and Coulter and Greene Streets, the coordinates of the school, were “both quiet residence streets with substantial houses and pleasant lawns.” Bustling, noisy Germantown Avenue, with its prosperous shops and historic house (“the Morris house… scarcely a stone’s throw distance, the home of Washington during the Plague year when congress met in Germantown and sat in the historic buildings of Germantown Academy two blocks west”), the recently electrified trolleys rumbling up and down the avenue “and making connections to all parts of the city,” did not disturb the tranquil scene. The school, he assured Harvard, was set in park-like grounds, set back from the avenue “by a lane, so long as to insure privacy, and almost rural silence.” The school grounds “are ample and well laid out and contain may fine specimens of sycamore, cypress, and ash trees” including “an ancient sycamore that was standing when Penn had the country surveyed.” The Meetinghouse (“severely plain in architecture, but with a dignity”) stood behind a graveyard described as giving “the impression of well-kept old lawns enclosed by stone walls and hedges.” If Yarnall hadn’t turned to education, he might have found a career in advertising.
The school now had three buildings on the campus. In 1898 the school had purchased the Mullen property adjoining it on the north, and where earlier students had peered through knot-holes into the slaughter-yard, a new, modern gymnasium was built in 1902. Equipped with up-to-date gymnastics equipment and even a running track, it was “the finest gymnasium in the city.” In 1914 Yarnall would write of the new gym; “It was like passing from night to day to step from the old shed to the light, cheerful, well-equipped building that has meant so much to all later Germantown Friends School pupils.”⁵ The Pastorian editor who thought a modern gym “visionary” in 1897 would have shared Yarnall’s delight.
The two school buildings housed all four divisions of the school. The Kindergarten was located on the first floor of the new Primary building. Students stayed there one or two years before moving on to a three-year Primary division. The Kindergarten shared the first floor with the Intermediate and High School chemistry and physics labs, which were located in an addition constructed at the same time as the gymnasium. The woodworking, or Sloyd, room was in the basement.
The “Primary School” was on the second floor. In the rear addition on the second floor was a lunchroom. The first hot lunches at GFS were served in 1903. Yarnall wrote almost nothing about the Primary curriculum, describing only an emphasis on reading and elementary arithmetic.
After three years of the Primary, students entered a two-year intermediate division followed by a six-year high school course, both housed in the Main Building. In a unique and perversely complicated nomenclature, the grades were called Kindergarten, First, Second, Third (Primary), Seventh, Sixth (the Intermediate division), Fifth, Fourth, Third, Second, First, and Senior classes. This arrangement, with its peculiar names, would be continued for many years. Enrollment was limited to twenty-five students per grade, and there was a waiting list for admission for every division.
The faculty in 1905 numbered eighteen for a student body of 262. Two of these, at least, were only part-time (the drawing teacher and elocution master) and may not have been Quakers, but all the full-time faculty were Friends.⁶ Yarnall disapproved of part-time teachers, but relished a mostly Quaker faculty. “Quaker education” meant to Yarnall the Friends’ values of civility, tolerance, a “family” feeling, simplicity, and concern for others. Who better to teach these values than Friends?
The Kindergarten had a head teacher (Jane Raley for a quarter century, from 1895 to 1920) and a succession of assistants. The Primary had three teachers, but Elizabeth Forsythe (1887–1914) was the “chief teacher” and supervised two assistants. The Intermediate and High Schools had eight full-time teachers, plus the principal (who taught two courses), organized loosely by departments. Teachers taught across department lines and up and down the grade levels. Yarnall thought this was an advantage: “The lines of the departments are not kept so strictly as in most schools. For instance, the work in English is divided among four teachers…” Because the faculty was so small, the Primary teachers took one Intermediate class a day, and High School teachers taught two or three different subjects to four or five distinct grades each day. Yarnall saw an advantage in this. “In this way teachers come to know the individual boys and girls from the time they leave the primary school, and watch their development as a continuous process while the pupils, for their part, feel no need for a re-adjustment as they pass from grade to grade.” Yarnall was making a virtue out of necessity.
A modern GFS student, suddenly caught in a time-warp and transported back ninety years, would be astonished by the school Yarnall described. On the one hand, it was much easier. There were no final exams. Homework was minimal — a maximum of two hours a night for Seniors (and none at all for Primary students). Students advanced from grade to grade not by tests, but because of consensus of the teachers approved them. School was dismissed at 1:30 p.m. There was no after-school sports program.
On the other hand, five years of Latin were required for a diploma, and the only way out of that was to substitute Greek literature in the fifth year. A passing grade for any course was B-, and a C mark was a failure. There were spelling tests every day in every grade, Bible readings every day, and Bible study once a week. A phobia with modern GFS students is geography; they would have foundered in 1905 when geography was studied every year. Even Yarnall thought that a bit much. His description of the curriculum as “the older order of academics” seems appropriate.
Yarnall listed the books used in every course. There was a heavy emphasis on textbooks and the classics. In English, for example, the Sixth class (today’s fifth grade) read Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, short stories by Hawthorne, and poems by Whittier, among other works. The next year, sixth graders read Franklin’s Autobiography and stories by Dickens, Browning, and Ruskin. High Schoolers digested great quantities of Walter Scott, Goldsmith, Tennyson, McCauley, and Emerson. Seniors studied rhetoric.
He was not entirely uncritical. The curriculum in the upper grades he thought needed upgrading. Math, for example, barely got to the binomial theorem. History was weak; the drawing courses too unimaginative. Yarnall taught Classics and the Bible, two subjects he thought were very well presented, but science and modern languages (French and German) could be improved. Forsythe had recently assured the School Committee that GFS would not become a wholly college preparatory school. Yarnall made no bones about it. A college prep school was exactly what he wanted, and more college bound students, too.⁷
He also proposed some additional courses “to enrich and strengthen the program”: economics, history of art, classical literature, mechanical drawing (for boys), and sewing and domestic science (for girls).
Nowhere in his thesis did Yarnall describe the school’s financial base, although he was clearly aware that by 1905 money was a potential problem.⁸ The buildings erected in 1896–97 and 1902 had drained the school’s endowment. Instead of raising money through a capital campaign, as Alfred Cope had done, the School Committee had sold the major part of its accumulated stocks and bonds. Higher tuitions and a waiting list of non-Friends willing to pay the price, kept the school in the black every year. In 1905, for example, the school had a surplus of over $4,000 in a budget of $26,000.⁹ But there was no longer a cushion to fall back on.
Yarnall was careful in his criticisms of the School Committee. He thought it was too large (twenty members), and some older Friends weren’t pulling their weight, but on the whole he thought the Committee able, dedicated, and “in harmony” with the principal. He was evidently unaware for the Committee’s tendency to micro-manage day-to-day affairs. He would soon learn.¹⁰
When Stanley Yarnall returned to GFS from Harvard in the fall of 1905, he was handed the opportunity to put his thesis proposals to work. In April, Davis Forsythe had become ill and had requested a six-month leave of absence. The Committee granted him leave and named Yarnall acting principal.
Davis Forsythe never really reclaimed his office. He tried for six months in 1906, but collapsed in July with “nervous prostration.” The Committee granted him a full year’s leave this time (at two-thirds salary), but finally grew impatient. In May 1907, Edward Wistar, the clerk of the Advisory Committee, was dispatched “to suggest the advisability of his resigning.” To soften the blow, and in recognition of his thirty-three years of service, the Committee gave him a parting gift of $1,000.
From all accounts, Forsythe was a decent and gentle man. Students remembered him with affection, and in 1910, the Alumni Association decided to fund the scholarship in his honor that is still awarded annually. His health eventually improved and he became a teacher at Westtown, clerk of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (1912–1916), and editor of The Friend from 1911 to his retirement in 1929. He died in 1934.¹¹
Stanley Yarnall’s elevation was an explosion. The tone of the monthly “Principal’s Reports” changed dramatically. Forsythe had been deferential, soothing, but Master Stanley was another matter. He was bristling with ideas, plans, suggestions, and proposals. In his very first report in 1905, while still only acting principal, he proposed enlarging the Kindergarten (there was room for thirty), adding two classrooms in the Main Building by shifting walls, and rearranging the structure of classes by adding another grade to the Primary. The next month he told the Committee he had installed bells in the school, reduced passing time between classes, and wanted to close school at 1:30 instead of 1:50. Yarnall’s appointment as principal in 1907 seems to have increased his energy. He wanted an athletic field, electricity, a telephone, an honor roll, a larger office, and more male teachers. The enrollment in 1907 was only 284; he wanted twice that.
The School Committee was dazzled — or maybe dazed. In December 1908 they demanded he give them an agenda. “In view of the many changes suggested by the Principal from time to time, the Committee feel that it would be of advantage to them if they had knowledge of what general Plan our Principal has in mind for conducting the School so that the Principal and Committee may work in harmony.”¹² Yarnall was more than happy to comply.
Master Stanley would eventually get all his specific demands. But missing in the tumult and confusion of the official record are two other issues he was raising. They were stated carefully, sometimes indirectly or obliquely, but they are unmistakable.
The first, and by far the most important to him, was his belief that the school was a ministry. Friends, he stated again and again, had an obligation to spread their Truth — not with an eye for increasing their numbers, but to broadcast the principles. Friends’ schools, he thought, were the best witness to Quaker testimonies. In the “general plan” he produced for Committee, the first point was “To recognize the demand made upon the school by a growing community and to appreciate as a privilege, rather than dread as a danger, this increasing call for social services and religious influences on the part of Germantown Meeting.”¹³ A larger school meant a greater Quaker influence.
Yarnall’s second issue was to persuade the Committee to confine its attention to policy matters and to leave the management of the school to him. He was careful not to challenge the Committee’s authority, but he wanted to redirect its attention. He stopped bringing forward little items for approval; he announced curriculum changes, but did not seek permission to make them “as they have to do with rather technical questions which you would not understand without elaborate explanation.”¹⁴
In time Yarnall would win the Committee to his views, but it would not be easy. The sanitized minutes do not give a clear picture of what happened, but they are full of references to “free and frank discussion.” In May 1908 long-time Committee clerk Jonathan Evans abruptly and curtly resigned (he was later persuaded to resume his post). In June 1909 Advisory Committee clerk Wistar also resigned, and insisted a minute be put in the record stating strongly his opposition to Yarnall. It would be several years before the principal and Committee could truly be said to be in “harmony.”
The plan that Yarnall submitted, initially in February 1908 and again a year later, called for doubling the size of the school. “We think of our school as large. It is really small.” Especially in the upper grades, enrollment was “too small for the best school life. Our most highly trained and highest salaried teachers are obliged to work with handfuls of pupils… to have efficient high school work and to hold good teachers and maintain proper school spirit, we must have larger upper classes.” He proposed gradually adding a second class of twenty-five at each grade level which, in time, would mean a total enrollment of about 600. That would make GFS one of the largest independent schools in Philadelphia.
This would require more construction “either by adding to our present building or adding new ones.” It would also require the purchase of an athletic field “as the supreme need of the Boys’ side of the school.” He did not provide an estimate for the number of new teachers that would be needed.¹⁵
The Committee fully realized the implications of Yarnall’s plan. GFS had always been small and intimate, “a family school” is how Yarnall had described it in 1905, and it would now be something very different. “The changes suggested are radical and important,” Jonathan Evans noted, and the Committee debated them for a full year before finally giving approval. Even then they felt the need to secure agreement from the Monthly Meeting. “While we feel that such a large school will bring increased responsibilities and care, we also feel that perhaps we should not shirk from meeting this call, on the part of a growing community by extending the educational advantages…and the social and religious influences of Germantown Meeting.” The language, of course, is Yarnall’s. The Meeting’s response said simply do what you think is right.¹⁶
The plan adopted in 1909 was the most significant action taken by the School Committee since 1885. Enrollment shot up. In 1901 there were 363 students; in 1915 the figure was 444; in 1920, enrollment was 557 and still climbing. The faculty increased from twenty-three full-time teachers in 1910 to thirty-seven full-time in 1920.
To accommodate these growing numbers, the school buildings were repeatedly expanded. In the summer of 1909, a third story was constructed on the Main Building and a two-level passage way built over the arch connecting Main with the Primary. In 1915 a third story was added to both Primary buildings; the passage of the arch was expanded, and a third level added to it. A new locker room for boys was built between the gym and the library. There was a new lunchroom in the basement, an expanded “collection room,” a new heating plant, electric lights in the gymnasium (replacing gas chandeliers), a new science laboratory, and a fire tower. These were heady times for GFS and for Master Stanley, but somehow he found time for a personal life. In August 1917 he married his secretary, Susan Roberts.
There was never enough money to do all the building “Old In-Addition” wanted. Except for a bequest from the estate of benefactor Alfred Cope, most of the money was borrowed. That made some members of the Committee nervous, and there were some testy exchanges with the principal. In 1914, for example, Yarnall was pushing for the third floor addition for the Primary. The Committee told him that if he wanted the addition he would have to find the money. Yarnall’s answer was blunt: “My attention has been called to a Minute adopted at your last meeting stating in substance that I am encouraged to collect at once $25,000 so that plans for building can be carried through. Some weeks ago when I placed the needs of the school on the material side before the Advisory Committee, I told them I felt it was necessary for schools like ours to have more ample financial support from their friends…. I am still fully convinced of the correctness of this view. Such a minute as that adopted at your last meeting does not, however, give me the encouragement or the warrant to go forward with the effort mentioned. If you are really concerned with regard to this matter and are deeply interested in the school, I shall gladly associate myself with a committee that you will appoint for this definite purpose…Until such action is taken, however, I shall feel free from any obligation to raise funds for the school.”¹⁷
Borrowing for capital construction meant admitting even more students whose tuitions would pay the mortgages. The school found itself continually crowded and cramped despite all these improvements.
Yarnall also had his eye on acquiring an athletic field for boys. It was necessary, he said, to retain boys in the High School. He had also changed his mind about the desirability of the inter-scholastic sports. In 1905 he had written that such contests were probably not “wholesome” (a favorite word), but the success of teams coached by Walter Cowing had changed his mind. The only playing space available for both boys and girls was still the ground between the school and the Meetinghouse. A colorful account exists of Yarnall and School Committee member Frederick Strawbridge “plotting” and “skulking” around the neighborhood of the school “frequently at night so that no overly-curious soul might discover what was afoot” looking at the property.¹⁸ However it came about, in 1909 Yarnall spotted what he wanted: three acres at Coulter Street and Wissahickon Avenue belonging to the estate of Edward W. Clark. The School Committee was persuaded again to borrow, the land was purchased, and, with financial help from Frederick Strawbridge, a building on the property was converted to a locker room. By 1910, a football field, baseball diamond, and one-fifth mile track had been built. Four years later the Clark family gave an adjoining fifty-foot wide plot to the school, and the whole was officially named Clark Field.
Only boys used Clark Field; in fact, girls could only go there with a chaperone. The girls’ field hockey team would be homeless for another decade. They made do with the tiny space at school, on rented fields at the Germantown Cricket Club, or a playfield on Limekiln Pike. Two tennis courts for the girls were built west of the Meetinghouse fronting Greene Street, but it hardly compensated. In any case, five tennis courts had been built for the boys at Clark Field.
Yarnall tried repeatedly to interest the School Committee in acquiring more field space for girls, but he failed. The school was mortgaged to the hilt; girls were staying in school through the upper grades anyway: and, in any case, girls and athletics seemed a peculiar and not entirely “wholesome” mix to many. Not until 1920 did GFS girls get an athletic field, and even then it was second best. That year Agnes Brown Leach offered to sell the school six acres west of Wissahickon Avenue, stretching from Midvale to School House Lane, for half its market price. The School Committee jumped at the opportunity, and the T. Wistar Brown Field (named in honor of Agnes Leach’s father) was acquired. The central portion of this is the modern GFS Athletic Field. It was bigger and better than Clark Field and so was developed for boys’ athletics. Girls thereafter used the older, small Clark Field.
Master Stanley was a great builder, the greatest in the school’s history, and his grandest projects in brick and mortar were still to come. But he also built with people. Probably his greatest accomplishment was recruiting and retaining a faculty who would dedicate thirty to forty years of their lives to GFS.
Some of these teachers were on the staff when Yarnall moved into the principal’s office. Jane S. Jones, “Teacher Jennie,” taught math to High Schoolers from 1889 to 1926. Elizabeth Roberts taught in the Primary for thirty-six years before becoming the school librarian. She retired in 1940 after forty years of service. “Teacher Emma,” Emma D. Roberts, a Bryn Mawr graduate, taught English from 1903 to 1940. Also from Bryn Mawr was English and Latin teacher Helen Zebley, a GFS graduate, who taught from 1903 to 1930.
Master Stanley’s favorite among the teachers he inherited was Walter Cowing, the boys’ PE director. He paid him more than twice what the women teachers earned, $2,000 (women were paid $750 to $850), more even that Frank Maxfield, the vice principal and science teacher. He repeatedly praised Cowing for his “clean, manly sports program,” and, when Cowing resigned in 1914 to become Philadelphia Boy Scout director, Yarnall was crushed. “A serious blow to the school,” he told the School Committee, “a great disappointment… it is doubtful if we shall be able to fill his place.” He did, though. He hired a young, inexperienced graduate of Springfield College named Alfred A. Smith.
Yarnall favored male teachers. “It is not a good thing for a school like ours when the proportion of women teachers becomes too great,” he told the Committee in 1909. That year he hired two men who would become legends. Henry A. Domincovich (“Mr. Domi”), who had an A.B. from Haverford and M.A. from Harvard, had taught at Moses Brown and Phillips Andover. He would spend the rest of his life, thirty-eight years, at GFS. Daniel Lawrence Burgess, also a Haverford graduate, stayed even longer. He retired in 1950.
Year by year, Master Stanley assembled the faculty that would lead the school to prominence. Irvin C. Poley, ’08, was hired in 1913; the next year brought A.A. Smith, Iro Trueblood, and Katherine Dobson. Each would remain over a quarter-century; in Irvin Poley’s case almost twice that. Glenn Bennett, Anna Comfort, and Joseph Haines Price, all hired in 1917, complete the roster of long-time teachers Master Stanley recruited in his first decade.
The long years of service by these teachers is a testimony to Yarnall’s leadership. “He was not always an easy man to work for,” Eric Johnson remembered. “His standards were high; he could be stubborn; he was tenacious.” Surviving faculty meeting minutes from these years add other adjectives. He was demanding, sometimes imperious; he could be a nitpicker. But he created an atmosphere where good teachers felt encouraged and supported. He gave them room. He trusted them, and they in turn were loyal to him.
For students, Yarnall’s early years also brought exciting changes. The sleepy, little school woke up with a start. Elocution contests, “declamation” contests, debates, gymnastic exhibitions, field days — each year the calendar became busier. The Pastorian gave a snapshot of school life in the 1913 issue: “The recesses of spring are the most heterogeneous and productive of all school activities. The future soccer stars developing in the space by the stone wall; the fair, would-be field hockey players taking their daily training around the Meetinghouse; the hand-ball enthusiasts on the cement walks at the side of the building, with their row of spectators on the fire escape; the baseball fans; and the various groups scattered all over the grounds, engaged in anything from taking a nap to discussing the political conditions, certainly prove that the Germantown Friends is a very busy and prosperous place.”¹⁹
The longest-lived of all those new activities was the “dreaded” General Information Test. For almost fifty years, beginning in 1911, D.L. Burgess produced the annual test. “What is the capital of Poland?” “Why does the statue of William Penn on the City Hall tower face north-east?” “Give the real name of the author called Mark Twain.”²⁰
Academic standards were improving rapidly. In fact, Master Stanley worried that they were going up too fast. In 1912 he noted “the unfortunate report is spread about that our school is too severe,” and he while he praised his teachers “for the advance in the school’s intellectual standards” he cautioned them “against the dangers of over strain. A complete education is not given by driving children on to continuous compliance with rigid requirements.”²¹ There was now a monthly honor roll for both Intermediate and High School. By 1915 there was even a Primary honor roll.
Sport was becoming more important. Most contests were intramural. Twice each year the Intermediate and High School were divided into teams of “Blues and Whites” (“Crickets and Spiders” in the Primary) for “wholesome” competition in gym and field events. Tennis courts were constructed in 1910, both at school (behind the Meetinghouse) for girls and at Clark Field for boys.
Varsity inter-scholastic competition grew steadily each year. Boys fielded teams in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, and track — all coached by A.A. Smith, who also taught physiology and Sloyd. Girls’ teams did not play a league schedule, but the number of games with other schools increased. In 1910, for example, both field hockey and basketball (two girls’ sports) played only an annual match with Friends Select. By 1920 there was a full schedule with schools like Westtown, “Miss Irwin’s School,” Stevens School, and Springside. The separate Boys and Girls Athletic Councils even printed “approved” school cheers. They were just awful:
Bommajigger, boomajigger, boomajigger, boom –
Riggaragger, riggaragger, riggaragger, room –
Cannon ball, cannon ball, sis boom ba’ –
Germantown Friends School, rah, rah, rah.²²
Master Stanley approved all this (one hopes he winced at the cheers) in part, it would appear, because GFS teams regularly whomped the daylight out of Penn Charter and Germantown Academy.
As a result of the school’s improved academic reputation and the success of its sports teams, more boys chose to remain at GFS in the upper grades. In 1913, for example, eighteen seniors graduated, ten girls and eight boys. The class poet, Katherine Cooper, boasted of the numbers:
The greatest honor won as yet,
Our class alone enjoys;
I’ll tell you so you won’t forget:
We’ve with us here eight boys.
Nineteen twelve of four could boast.
‘Eleven of but one.
We’re proud to have the most,
And end as we’d begun.²³
Seven of the eight boys went to college (two each to Haverford and Penn State, and to Penn, M.I.T., and Textile). Four girls from this class were college bound: Bryn Mawr (two), Mt. Holyoke, and Western Reserve.²⁴
A highlight of the early Yarnall years was the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration in 1916. This was a pageant, a festival of song, dance, and drama that signaled how far — and how quickly — Master Stanley’s school had come from the GFS he described in 1905. It is also evidence of the growing influence of young Irvin C. Poley.
Poley had a passion for the theater and was impatient with the traditional hostility of Friends to drama. As a student at GFS he had been warned repeatedly by teachers to stop his play-going. “They all accepted the contemporary Quaker suspicion of the arts in general and the theater in particular — not just because of the assumed immorality of actors, but because of the pretense of being somebody else, because of the feeling that playing a villain might lead the performer to villainy.”²⁵
Quaker attitudes were changing, however. The year Poley returned to teach at GFS, he announced his intention to produce a play about Queen Elizabeth in his Intermediate English class. The School Committee heard of this from Yarnall and immediately appointed a sub-committee “to consider the desirability of the children of the school giving plays.” That group spent five months trying to get “a sense of the meeting” and finally issued a report in October 1914: “The use of plays as an educational factor in schools has become so general that we must take a broad view of the subject. That they have a proper place in school life can scarcely now be questioned.” The School Committee’s policy was hedged in with restrictions. Plays must be “in connection with work in history or literature;” costumes must be simple and subject matter be “in sympathy with the view of Friends;” and Yarnall must be asked for prior approval. But Irvin Poley had won his first battle for drama.
Music, too, was starting to make a small appearance. In 1915, a part-time teacher of “vocalization,” Elizabeth McCloskey, was hired to teach Primary students a few songs one day per week. A year later she was even provided with a piano. There was no music in the Intermediate and High School.
The Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration was a pageant, a spectacle much greater than anything the School Committee had imagined, and they had to be persuaded. A carefully worded petition from the faculty was heard. Because the Shakespeare festival was a watershed event in the history of the school, this petition is worth quoting at length.
It began with an appeal to duty. “For some years the spring of 1916 had been anticipated as the time for an international festival in honor of Shakespeare’s contributions to English literature and the culture of the world. Present conditions in Europe have forced the abandonment of the program there.” The United States Commissioner of Education “has issued a call to American schools and colleges to make this a special occasion” and the faculty “have felt laid upon them a duty to consider what our School might do as its share.”
The program was deliberately described as modest. “The representation of several scenes from The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Julius Caesar, by boys and girls of the first, third, and fourth classes, set in a framework of Shakespearean songs and Old English folk games and movements, the former by High School pupils, the latter by Intermediate pupils.” It met the restrictions outlined in the Committee’s policy. “The portions of the works of Shakespeare mentioned above come naturally in the respective English classes; the Old English exercises would fit in well with the gymnasium classes…Due consideration would be given to simplifying the matter of costume.”
Finally the petition argues the “many advantages to be derived.” Increasing a spirit of unity, bringing parents closer to the school, and “it would have some influence in our community on higher ideals of culture.” The elaborateness of the petition, its studied and careful tone, is evidence that Quaker attitudes hadn’t changed that much. The teachers expected opposition.
The School Committee gave its approval, but reluctantly. “It is felt that this occasion must not be regarded as a precedent for similar occasions in the future.” But of course it became a precedent. Here are the roots of The Virgil Pageant, Poley’s Malvern Festival, and the modern school’s claim to be a place “where the arts flourish.”²⁶
The tercentenary was a great success. The Pastorian claimed over a thousand spectators at Clark Field watched the Grand Procession, plays, dances, and songs. Although Poley’s later accomplishments with drama would eclipse this one, he recognized its importance in gaining acceptance for his ideas. It also provided him with a favorite story. One of the boys he directed in Midsummer Night’s Dream left GFS the next year for boarding school (which was still happening more frequently than Master Stanley wanted). He wrote Poley that “I miss my English class most; the teacher here has no dramatic ability.” Poley’s rueful comment was “evidently I spent too much time on drama and not enough on spelling.”²⁷
Master Stanley was willing to accept educational changes and to support good teachers like Poley, but some changes he did not like at all. It pained him to see the plain speech disappear. He and many other teachers continued to use it, but even Quaker children dropped their “thees” and “thous” at school.²⁸ The practice of addressing faculty as “Teacher” and “Master” was also fast disappearing, and he asked his teachers whether efforts should be made, as he thought, to retain those forms. The faculty said no.²⁹ Some trends he adamantly opposed. Any boy caught smoking would be expelled. Girls were not to wear “bracelets, rings, or any unnecessary jewelry.” There would be no dances, no fraternities (although girls had Beta Sigma, a Christian study group). In at least one instance, Master Stanley actually turned back the clock. Davis Forsythe had abolished final examinations in his “Individual Program.” Yarnall brought them back, and, by 1919, students were taking two-hour finals in four major subjects. It all adds up to the description of himself he always preferred — a conservative progressive or a progressive conservative.
World War I was a testing time for Master Stanley and his school. As a Friends School, GFS was bound by the Quaker peace witness and could not support the war. Yarnall, himself a firm pacifist, was determined to permit nothing that would even give the appearance of supporting the war, and it brought down on his head substantial criticism from the Germantown community and even from some GFS parents and students.
Three issues raised the most noise. The first was the presence of German in the modern language program. Students and their parents wanted it dropped, apparently in part because the teacher, “Frau Krickscher” (Pauline H. Krickscher), was German. Enrollment in the course dropped dramatically, and in 1918 Yarnall was forced to let her go (She had been at the school since 1901). That he was forced to do so “by the unfortunate circumstances of the war” is evident by the tribute he paid her in morning collection.³⁰ A second section of French, taught by Irvin Poley, was substituted.
The second issue concerned a request from the newly formed student council, which started in 1916–1917, “to raise a flag on the school grounds.” So far as can be determined, the school had never flown a flag, and Yarnall decided it wouldn’t do so now. “Its presence might be understood as an approval of our country’s declaration of war.” Many parents and students were outraged. They saw no contradiction between Quaker principles and flying a national symbol. Even the faculty was divided. D.L. Burgess, perhaps influenced by the fact that he had taught four years at the Bootham School in England, wrote Yarnall a letter asking him to reconsider, but the School Committee backed the principal.³¹
A compromise was eventually worked out. Committee member Agnes Tierney explained it in a letter to the Meeting: “When our country first entered the war it was deemed inconsistent with the Meeting’s attitude toward all war to permit the display of a flag in honors of that event. But when in the Fifth Month it was discovered that the little boys were planning to present a flag to the school your committee believed it wise not to discourage this evidence of loyalty to the school. The condition was made, however, that a letter should go out from the principal stating that to the Society of Friends the flag did not stand for war but for the highest ideals of patriotism, internationalism, and brotherhood.” The compromise seems a little weak-kneed and the whole affair something of a tempest in a teapot. But such turmoil was new and unsettling to Germantown Friends. Tierney called 1918 “the most difficult year in the school’s history.”³²
The final issue raised by the war brought the school wider, public criticism as unpatriotic. Yarnall refused to cooperate with the Liberty Loan campaign, then being pushed by the Wilson administration as a patriotic duty. Most Americans did participate. The Treasury reported that over 20 million people, more than half the adult population of the country, bought the bonds in 1918. Not Master Stanley.³³
Yarnall was convinced his course was right, and while the criticism hurt, it was bearable.
Two families withdrew their children from the school in protest, and more were unhappy, but “I believe there is a favorable reaction now among the most sensible people.” Other schools, he thought, had given in to war excitement, but “we have taken the ground that it is our work to keep steady along lines of instruction and wholesome academic life. We are, I think, equally patriotic and wiser to insist that at this time our chief contribution to the country is a group of well-trained boys and girls.”³⁴
Yarnall was not unpatriotic, and he was aware of the value of good public relations, so he looked for ways “to display patriotism that are consistent with Friends’ principles.” He appointed a joint faculty-student committee (another first) to explore the problem, and soon GFS students were raising money for Armenian refugees and sending boxes of books to soldiers in overseas camps; girls were sewing and knitting for the soldiers; and a few boys were studying auto mechanics at Rinker’s Garage. (Friends could in good conscience serve in the ambulance corps.)
J. Tyson Stokes ’24 was a student at GFS through most of the early Yarnall years. He remembered them vividly.
“On reaching the Kindergarten age it was ordained that I should go to Germantown Friends School, then, as now, one of the leading independent schools in the Philadelphia area and located about a mile from our house.” He attended for the full time, twelve years, from 1912 to 1924. “That was a most satisfactory time in which to be educated if one was born on the right side of the tracks and one’s parents could afford the relatively low tuition charges of a private Quaker school [tuition rose from $100 to $300 during Stokes’ years].
The 19th century didn’t really end until November 11, 1918, the calendar notwithstanding. And so half of my school years were passed in the relaxed atmosphere of a past age, and half in the six years after World War I…
During my time the late Stanley R. Yarnall was at the height of his powers as principal. Stanley Yarnall looked good like a Headmaster should. Well over six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion and a magnificent head of curly hair prematurely white, and always dressed in a dark three-piece suit and starched white collar, his bearing was sufficient to inspire awe. The nadir for a GFS student was to be sent, very rarely, from the classroom to Mr. Yarnall’s office where, after cooling one’s heels in the anteroom for an appropriate interval for self-analysis, one was invited in to the presence. Since this never happened to me, I don’t know what was said behind the closed doors, but whatever it was, was sufficient to preclude the culprit from repeating the error responsible for the visit. There wasn’t much backslapping camaraderie or togetherness between students and principal in our day, and it never occurred to us that there ought to be.
In our early years the principal was called ‘Master Stanley,’ in accordance with the early practice of Friends’ schools; and there were a few of the older teachers whom we gave the first name treatment, such as Teacher Emma and Teacher Jenny. By the time we had graduated this practice had been pretty well abandoned…and it now occurs to me with some surprise that none of our many women teachers were married.
The advent of the Class of 1924 about coincided with that of Irvin C. Poley, a fortunate coincidence for us. My first recollection of Mr. Poley as a teacher was in seventh grade, when he was assigned to teach French to the boys. It is extraordinary to realize that even in a Quaker school the emotions aroused by World War I were sharp enough to eliminate German from the curriculum and Frau Krishka [sic] from the faculty… A classmate, the son of German parents, was regarded with suspicion and rumor had it that his father maintained lights in a tower in his house to guide approaching Zepplins…
Mr. Poley was saddled with the trying task of picking up the pieces after we had been subjected to a disastrous first year of French with Monsieur W… [Jules Marcel Wilmart, 1918–1919]. He had been selected on the prevalent but dubious assumption that the basics of a foreign language are best taught by one native to the tongue. Monsieur W…, he archetype of French academic, know his French all right but had little conception of how to motivate and control adolescent American boys.
I should guess now that Irvin Poley would not have maintained at the time that he was perfectly qualified to teach French. My mother, who spoke French well, would be critical of my pronunciation of certain words, but all discussion ended when I said, “Mother, that’s the way Mr. Poley pronounces it”. Guess who won…
The great Poley contribution to our education, however, was his single-handed relaxation of the Quaker sanctions imposed on fiction, music and drama, still quite evident in our early years at GFS. At that time the only permitted gesture in the direction of the performing arts was the so-called Elocution Contest, when we recited once a year for the benefit of long-suffering but proud parents stirring lines from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and lengthy ballads and epic poems of Scott, Tennyson and Browning. Under the Poley aegis, that diet was seasoned by some of Shakespeare’s lighter moments and the works of then-living authors like John Maesfield and Sir James Barrie. Irvin Poley produced, with the limited talent available to him in his English classes, Shakespearean excerpts such as the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude from A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the ‘stage’ of the old Collection room. As the ‘stage’ consisted of a platform about twenty feet long, six feet wide, one foot higher than the Collection Room floor, with no curtain, and as the time available was restricted to about twelve minutes, it is obvious that the limitations on high dramatic achievement were formidable indeed. The Class of 1924 may be said to have sown the seeds of liberation; but we graduated too soon to benefit from the Malvern Festivals…
Stokes also remembers, but doesn’t credit, the fact that Yarnall was one of the first private school educators to address sex education. In 1918 he sent both his PE directors to a seminar on “social hygiene.” Thereafter, both A.A. Smith and Elizabeth Jones gave lectures on the subject.
I remember a School announcement that there would be an afternoon lecture on “Hygiene” which we upper class boys were required to attend and to which our fathers were invited. This was anticipated with a good deal of relish and high hopes; but the speaker, alas, never emerged from behind the veil of birds, bees and flowers.
Our classes were mixed [co-educational] in the primary grades, separate in the intermediate and mixed again in high school, but the ‘home’ classrooms were always single sex… I remember the moment in senior English when we were studying Macbeth line by line and word by word for the College Boards. A male classmate… asked in a mixed class, ‘What, Mr. Domi, is a soldier’s whore?’ Titter and a moment of electric silence, and then, with obvious embarrassment, ‘A woman of ill repute. Next question.’
He described a decorous student social life.
Our contacts were mostly on a group level at class parties or the Dancing Classes attended by some of us and where the dancing consisted of the fox trot, one-step and waltz… There was practically no pairing off or ‘going steady.’ The great class party of the year took place annually at the Francis Strawbridge farm in Exton, the girls spending the weekend and the boys arriving Saturday morning by train and hay wagon. We swam in the Blue Hole, an abandoned quarry, ran hare and hounds…, engaged in mixed three-legged races in a hazardous cow pasture and played softball. A great time was had by all.”³⁵
It adds up to a pretty picture of Master Stanley’s school. What Tyson Stokes did not know was that the year he graduated, 1924, Master Stanley himself was engaged in the biggest battle of his professional life.
Next: A Vision Realized
Previously: The Old School
Notes
1 Virginia Childs, interview with Bill Koons, June 1994
2 The word “presence” is invariably used to describe Stanley Yarnall. Most of the alumni interviewed for this book used the term; it was invoked in testimonial dinners marking his twenty-fifth anniversary at the school and his retirement in 1941. It was literally the last word used to describe him. His obituary notice in Friends’ Journal, volume 10, p. 90 concluded: Friends will miss his counsel and impressive presence.”
3 Principal’s Report, in School Committee minute book, 11th month, 3rd day, 1898. The anecdote about “Old In-Addition” is from Agnes Tierney in the Alumni Bulletin, 1923, in a memorial marking Yarnall’s 25th anniversary at the school, GFS Archives
4 Yarnall’s thesis is in GFS Archives.
5 The purchase of the Mullen property is described in School Committee minutes throughout 1898. The price is noted at $2,500 in the budget figures for 9th month, 28, 1899. The School Committee delayed building the new gymnasium for four years evidently for financial reasons. Not until May 1902 did it authorize construction of the gym and an addition to the rear of the lower school (where the laboratories and lunchroom were located). Yarnall’s “from night to day” comments come from an article he wrote about physical changes in the school for The Pastorian, volume 5, number 6 (May, 1914). In it he describes the old shed: “Twelve years ago the ‘gymnasium’ was a low room between the rear of the library and the present gymnasium. It was dusty and generally forlorn, without locker facilities or showers and with little equipment. One of the most prominent features was a coal stove with a stove-pipe that had a habit of getting in the way of balls and boys in rapid motion with disastrous consequences.”
6 Yarnall doesn’t mention the faculty’s religious affiliation in his thesis. However, two years later all the full-time faculty were Quakers and the only two teachers in the 1895 roster who left were both Friends (Davis Forsythe and Agnes Tierney). Annual Report of the School Committee to Germantown Monthly Meeting, 1907 in Monthly Meeting minutes. There was no policy forbidding the hiring of non-Friends. In 1891 Davis Forsythe hired Mary Hughes, who was not a Quaker, as a primary assistant teacher. Some members of the School Committee objected, but after consideration the Committee approved her appointment. No stated policy was developed, however. Mary Hughes seems to have been the first non-Friend ever employed as a teacher. She left the school in 1893.
7 Forsythe’s assurances to the Committee appear, for example, in the Principal’s Report for 1900 and 1903. School Committee Minutes.
8 His only reference to finance is a vague statement about the school’s endowment — which “had formerly been liberal.”
9 The tuition for the High School in 1905 was $125.
10 For an example of “micro-managing”, see the Committee minutes for January 28, 1904: “The Horizontal bar in the Gymnasium having torn loose from its fastenings in the floor and there seeming to be difficulty in making it secure, the Committee on Buildings authorized to have it fixed in such manner as they deem best.”
11 The Alumni Association was started in 1905. The affectionate memories of his students are found in a tribute to Forsythe delivered at the 31st Alumni Association Meeting and published in the Alumni Record, June 1, 1936. The Forsythe scholarship was approved officially in 1910, the same year as the Susannah Kite scholarship. The Kite scholarship was awarded that same year, but it would not be until 1914 that the first Forsythe scholar was announced.
12 School Committee Minutes, January 28, 1908
13 Yarnall’s plan was introduced twice, in 1908 and again 1909. This statement appears in the 1909 version. School Committee Minutes, February 1909.
14 School Committee Minutes April 29, 1015
15 The quotations here are from both the 1908 and 1909 versions of the plan which do not materially differ.
16 Letter to Monthly Meeting from Jonathan Evans dated 4th month, 29, 1909 recorded in both School Committee and Monthly Meeting minute book.
17 Letter to School Committee included in minutes for May 28, 1914.
18 From an anonymous account in the Alumni Bulletin, April 1, 1939.
19 The Pastorian, vol. IV, no. 17 (May 7, 1913) p.3.
20 Examples from the 1920 test.
21 Minutes of the Faculty, GFS Archives.
22 The Pastorian, March 1918, p.77.
23 The Pastorian, June 10, 1913, p.11.
24 Principal’s Report, the School Committee minutes, June 1913.
25 Irvin C. Poley, Speaking of Teaching, privately printed 1957, p. 115, GFS Archives, Poley personnel folder. Confirming Poley’s memory is minute from the faculty in 1909, the year after he graduated. “Monthly Meeting has voiced its deep concern for the spiritual welfare of the School. Feeling that the concern of the Meeting should be shared by the teachers, Stanley Yarnall acquainted the teachers with the feelings of the Meeting and expressed the desire that each individual might deeply appreciate the large responsibility resting upon him to lend his influence in fostering and practicing Christian principles. Various teachers expressed their sympathy and wished that a stronger influence might be exerted opposition to theater going.”
26 The petition was not attached to the School Committee minutes for an unexplained reason. The Committee’s reluctant approval is recorded in the faculty meeting minutes of March 2, 1916.
27 The anecdote is from The English Journal, January 1925.
28 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, February 1981.
29 The Pastorian as early as 1910 reported that Mr. and Miss were replacing Teacher and Master. Yarnall remained Master Stanley at least until the late 1930s, long after the practice was abandoned. The source here is a transcript of a round-table discussion led by Fred Calder with “school veterans” in 1980.
30 The tribute to Frau Krickscher is not recorded, only referred to in the School Committee minutes. German was not dropped. A few students remained in the class which was taken up by D.L. Burgess.
31 Burgess letter is in School Committee minutes May 23, 1918. It was most unusual for a teacher to disagree with Yarnall so openly.
32 Annual Report of the School Committee minutes May 23, 1918.
33 Mark Sullivan, Our Times, (Scribner’s, 1925) volume 5, p. 652.
34 Principal’s Report to School Committee, May 2, 1918.
35 Two versions of Stokes’ memoir exist. They are very similar and I have borrowed from both versions. The earlier is a text of a talk he gave to GFS students in 1974, his fiftieth anniversary of graduation, GFS Archives folder #40. The other is his autobiography No Axe to Grind, Haverford House, Wayne, Pa. 1982.
