A Son & His Father

Earl Starrett Goudey, 1937

I always hoped to circle back to Earl Starrett Goudey, born in North Adams, Mass. in 1895, a man who took a circuitous path to his vocation.

Earl Goudey spent 35 years teaching biology and sex education to students at the public school in Bronxville, N.Y., a suburban village outside New York City, 29 minutes by train to Grand Central Terminal. Unruffled by controversy, he worked calmly with parents and pastors who wished to keep a lid on things.

The eldest son of Nova Scotian immigrants Henry and Mary Goudey, Earl battered his way out of his boyhood home and navigated through the thicket of church and school before launching himself into the world.

Mary Goudey died of consumption in 1906, leaving her husband with four children, the youngest just two years old. Their father, Henry James Goudey, was a minister affiliated with the Advent Christian Church. He preached in North Adams and Lynn, Mass., Hartford, and Brooklyn.

Reverend Goudey often delivered a speech, “Facts About Hell,” at the local YMCA. With his mother, sister, and brother, Henry had sailed on the schooner Gladiator from Yarmouth to Boston in 1871 and imbibed some sort of gladiatorial ferocity along the way.

Reverend Henry J. Goudey, 1935

He directed his abusive temperament at Earl, forcing the boy to memorize long passages of the Bible as punishment for scrappy behavior. At the age of thirteen, Earl ran away from the family’s wood frame home in Lynn and became a loom setter. (During the late nineteenth century New England’s textile industry had begun to shift to the South, but plenty of cotton and woolen mills remained.)

Earl finished high school at night and, trying to please his father, entered the Newton Theological Seminary in Newton, Mass. In the spring of 1917, on both the verge of graduating and the eve of the U.S. entrance to World War I, Earl headed to the Boston Navy Yard and enlisted. He joined the Navy Medical Corps as an apprentice seaman and served as a Pharmacist’s Mate First Class. 

A PHM1 is a petty officer who – under the supervision of physicians – offers care to naval personnel. In the course of his work on a hospital ship, Earl came to know David Linn Edsall, dean of the Harvard Medical School and an expert in preventive medicine and public health. They worked together on a study of the 1918 flu pandemic, and Edsall encouraged Earl to become a doctor.

First he needed a college degree, so he enrolled at Boston University where he met his first wife, Marjorie Pelton. Her father, who ran a business college, told Earl to skip medicine and go into the brave new world of sales.

Once again Earl danced for others, climbing the ranks to become a top salesman in the soap and ice cream businesses. To assuage his conscience, he also directed “boy’s work” at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston. He would always have a soft spot for wayward boys.

Imagine Earl during these years. Is he frantically trying to find a place in the confusing decade that followed World War I? Is he philosophically ticking through the professions in order to figure out which one is right for him?

When I interviewed Earl’s son Pelton in 1997, he did not know how Earl came to the attention of the superintendent who presided over the nationally-known progressive school in Bronxville. But Willard W. Beatty had a nose for great teachers, and in 1928 Earl joined the faculty.

Clipping about "Elementary Biology," the
sex education class Goudey taught in Bronxville

During the 1920s, Reverend Goudey remarried and divorced and remarried. In 1936, he hopped on a train to Miami, where he felt welcome and decided to stay a while. The Adventists gobbled up his screwball theories about astronomy and physics.

“The earth is an outstretched plain,” he explained, “founded upon the waters of the deep; the sun, moon and stars in motion above; over the whole being the firmamental vault or floor of Heaven.”     

In 1941 Henry published Earth Not A Globe, Scientifically, Geometrically, Philosophically Demonstrated, in which he summoned 75 reasons to explain why the earth is flat.

It was as if he couldn’t stop punishing Earl but realized he’d have to swap out Bible passages for scientific bunk in order to torture his son to the greatest extent possible.

Henry Goudey died in Boston in 1947.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/10/a-son-his-father.html

Edith + Edith

Edith May Penney, passport photo, 1930s

Once there were two women named Edith May, and coincidentally both of their surnames started with a “P.”     

On top of such fortuity, both women were born in Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota.  Each launched her career there; each in the field of education.  Both moved to New York and never returned to their native state.  But they did not know each other. 

For a long time I have juxtaposed them in my mind.  It’s not just the coincidences listed above, but also the allure of their American lives.  Neither married.  Both descended from English settlers.  Both were very serious people.  One of the women lived to the age of 98; the other, 96.            

These two could have been Victorians, but they cast off the demon.

Edith Penney was born in 1878, the daughter of Frederick Constant Penney and his wife, May.  The descendants of New England farmers, Frederick and May were swept into the great westward movement during the early 1870s when the Civil War was a fresh memory.  In a wagon they traveled to Minneapolis, whose population would soar from 13,000 in 1870 to 165,000 in 1890.

 

Soon after they arrived, Frederick zoomed into real estate.  He purchased land that would eventually be incorporated into the new city, and improved it by grading and paving the streets.  He made a lot of money, and then became a builder.

Although Frederick lived to the age of 108, he never again saw Canaan, Maine, nor his father, Uriah, and brothers and sisters Sylvanus, Almira, Arvesta, Isaac and Silas.   

However, Frederick and May would return east in 1925 when Edith, now an English teacher, was hired as high school principal in a village just outside New York City.  The family bought property in the town next door – far more affordable – and Frederick built a stone house that still stands, its back to the woods and a meandering creek. 

Edith Phelps was also an educator, but in a different way from Edith Penney.  

Born in 1881 in Beaver Falls, Minnesota, she too was the daughter of an East Coast transplant.  Her father, Charles Levi Phelps, had been a little boy when he and his family departed from New York before the Civil War.  Charles would meet and marry Alice, a Wisconsin native.  He worked in a sheet metal plant, as a grocer, and as a foreman in a flour mill.  The family moved around the city as his income dictated. 

Edith and Aura Phelps, center and right;
University of Minnesota yearbook (1907)

When the University of Minnesota beckoned to Edith and her younger sister, Aura Idella, the parents encouraged them to go.  Upon graduation in 1907, Edith and Aura became teachers.  Then an unusual opportunity came along.

University of Minnesota

  (1911)

For nearly 10 years, a Minneapolis entrepreneur named Halsey W. Wilson had capitalized on rising literacy among Americans.  He, too, was a graduate of the University of Minnesota, and owned a bookstore near campus.  As the twentieth century loomed on the horizon, Wilson noticed a trend.  His customers increasingly asked for specific articles, or for all articles on one particular topic.  He started reprinting these articles as a side business. 

H.W. Wilson Company Bookstore, circa 1900

But how did the readers learn about the articles they sought?

Only by word of mouth, Wilson realized.  There was no place to go look things up, no compendium that listed recently published material.  So he started to produce digests of articles and books, a book review index, informational handbooks, bibliographies, and, perhaps most famously, the weighty The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, each volume of which required a crane to be lifted from a library shelf.*

These reference guides may sound dull as dishwater.  But they were extremely important to enthusiastic readers.  Schools, libraries, scholars and students – no one could get information fast enough. 

Now Wilson needed intelligent, motivated employees to make it happen at lightning speed. 

See post on June 26, 2019, for part 2.
*The H. W. Wilson Company is still in the information business, although today its products are largely digital.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/edith-edith.html

William H. Holmes & the Mt. Vernon Schools

Typical street on Mt. Vernon's North Side;
around 1913 when Dr. Holmes became superintendent

Superintendent Holmes was an intimidating man.  He could appear kindly when he spoke to a circle of children who gathered around him.  However, he preferred to be stern, his gray eyes blinking behind thick spectacles. 

“Come back when you have real experience,” he would tell new graduates of Teachers College when they came knocking on his door.  One applicant recalled a monolithic desk and booming voice.  She scurried away to teach in New Jersey.  Several years later, Holmes hired her.

In 1913, when Dr. Holmes became superintendent of schools in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., he arrived with a newly minted doctorate from Clark University.  He proudly carried his dissertation, The Individual Child, in his back pocket (figuratively speaking).  He had studied under G. Stanley Hall, a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology whose research on adolescence inspired education reform in the U. S.   

Hall had worked at the University of Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt, a philosopher and physiologist whose experiments in the social aspects of human thought and behavior launched the field of psychology in 1879.

To say that Hall and Wundt were eminent falls far short of the mark.  More than a century later, all of their ideas have been disputed but their work remains influential.

Dr. Holmes meets with students, 1930s

Given these prestigious connections, the Mt. Vernon board of education considered itself fortunate to have landed Holmes, and he immodestly agreed.  But the new superintendent would face twentieth-century challenges for which his mentor had not prepared him.  

Enrollment in the four-square mile city – which had incorporated two decades earlier – was rising rapidly, as was the case in all of the nation’s cities.  Most residents called for more schools but some old-timers did not.  Opposition to high schools had been common during the nineteenth century; those feelings persisted here even as the Mt. Vernon school board commissioned plans to build a new one.    

Further, although Mt. Vernon was technically a suburb, its demographics were more urban than suburban.  Founded and controlled by Protestants, the city had been home to Irish and German immigrants during the 1870s.  Along came enough Jews to support two synagogues.  A small black community, established after the Civil War, grew slowly on the South Side of the city.

Certainly a far cry from the hamlets of Grafton and Upton, Mass., where Holmes had served previously as superintendent.

Finally, there were Italian immigrants, part of the late-nineteenth century wave of European immigration.  They were most detested and exploited by the city’s establishment.  The men found jobs as stone masons, digging the cut for the New York Central Railroad which would bisect the city of Mt. Vernon, much to its detriment later on. 

Italian artisans also created beautiful stone and tile work for the homes of wealthy suburbanites.  And when they got on their feet sufficiently to form their own construction companies, Italian-American contractors always held the winning bids to build new schools.  Among these was Mt. Vernon’s gleaming new academic high school, completed in 1914.

However, when it came time for the children of Italian immigrants to go to high school, most were consigned to Edison Vocational & Technical High School, not the aforementioned college preparatory school.  Black students also were directed to Edison.

It was an excellent place to learn a trade but the students were robbed of liberal arts degrees. 

At play: scene in a South Side elementary school, no date

Life would change for Mt. Vernon’s Italian immigrants, however.  Over the course of a generation, the community gained seats on the school board and eventually came to dominate city government.  

Unsurprisingly, the black community remained powerless.  Before the Great Migration, about 1,000 black students attended the public schools.  Yet “the Negro situation” was pronounced enough to draw the attention of the State Commissioner of Education. 

The commissioner and several state senators saw that Holmes had taken his cue from the board of education, which sanctioned inferior facilities in black neighborhoods.  And they wondered why black teachers were employed only in classes where white students constituted a very small minority.

“Many white persons would move from the neighborhood of any Mount Vernon school in which a Negro teacher had a position, and realty values would depreciate,” Dr. Holmes told a state legislative hearing, according to the New York Times.

“There was a storm of protest from parents when we once assigned a Negro substitute teacher,” said the school board president.

Mt. Vernon never integrated its elementary schools, so how could one have reasonably expected a measure of equity during the twenties and thirties?     

And yet, turning back to Superintendent Holmes, undeniably he gave his best to the schools over which he presided for 27 years.  Nearing retirement in 1940, he decided to write a history of the district.  It’s packed with photographs, charts, and self-adulation.

Here are some of the things he accomplished, in line with progressive education initiatives of the time:

       Separated the 7^th and 8^th grades from elementary school to form what he called the “central grammar school,” a forerunner of the junior high school,

        Introduced the “platoon system,” invented in 1907 by the enterprising superintendent of the Gary, Indiana schools.  Instead of staying in one classroom with one teacher all day long, students moved around for science, art, music, and physical education,

         Established a medical department to check the ears, eyes, chests, and teeth of poor children,

         Created supervised study periods for children who otherwise would do their homework "in poorly lit kitchens" and

         Organized a counseling program to offer students health, educational, social, vocational, and ethical guidance.

Under Holmes, the Mt. Vernon schools gained a fine reputation.  But the superintendent’s heart really lay back in the nineteenth century.  After he retired and returned to his native Maine, he became fixated on a rundown Victorian mansion in Portland.  He and his sister, Clara, bought it and started to restore it.  He died not long after, in 1948.

Today the Victoria Mansion is a flourishing tourist attraction and the Mt. Vernon public schools have seen far better days.  

See posts November 2, 2015; November 23, 2015; December 21 2015; May 18. 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/06/dr-holmes-mt-vernon-schools.html

An Education in 1930s Suburbia

University of Michigan School of Education,
Ann Arbor, 1930s

This is what happened. Gordon and his wife, Helen, returned to the U.S. from Lucknow with no means to earn a living. With their children, they moved in with Gordon’s mother. He lectured here and there on international issues while working on the Socialist Norman Thomas’ 1932 presidential campaign.  

The following year, the family moved to Ann Arbor where Gordon studied for an M.A. at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. His thesis about progressive schools somehow drew the attention of the school superintendent of Bronxville, N.Y., who wrote to him in 1934, offering a teaching job at $2,000 per year.

Reflecting on the village years later, Gordon described it as a “company town.” This characterization was incorrect. A company town is controlled largely by one firm on which residents depend for employment, housing, goods, and the like.

In fact the affluent, one-square mile village was dominated by progressive Republicans who made their fortunes in banking, real estate, and retailing. They ran the school board and decided, in the early 1920s, to institute the most modern educational methods and hire the best teachers and administrators.  

Bronxville, N.Y., 1930s

Unfortunately, Gordon arrived in Bronxville just as new worries about Communism emerged nationwide. While Senator Joseph P. McCarthy would instigate the nation’s second Red Scare during the 1950s, the seeds were planted years earlier when the New Deal stirred concern about Communist subversion.

Gordon fell under suspicion almost immediately. If you were to draw up a list of activities that would provoke most parents of 1930s-era students – well, he hit every one:

-field trips to cooperative housing built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in The Bronx,

-visits to slums, organized by an interfaith group which taught young people about the living conditions of the poor,

-a dinner with Father Divine, a black minister who ran the Peace Mission, a non-governmental relief agency in Harlem,

-a play presented by the Works Progress Administration,

-meetings with officials of peace and justice groups,

-“national dinners” hosted by Gordon and Helen, where students ate indigenous food and learned about different cultures.

While local residents grew concerned about these and other activities, the superintendent who had hired Gordon departed and was replaced by a more conservative man. In 1937, at a community rally held in the school auditorium, agitated parents yelled about radicalism in the schools and the revolutionary activities of a teacher who could only be Gordon.  

Since his contract expired in 1938, it made sense for him to move on.

We were in Bronxville living on schoolteacher's pay of $2000 [per]
year - then by helping with the football team - an increase of $200.00.
Wow! We could not afford a telephone!
(excerpt of letter from Helen to me, 2002)

About 60 years later, while living in Bronxville, I wrote a history of the school, one of the first public progressive school districts in the nation. In the course of reading newspaper accounts and interviewing retired teachers, I learned about Gordon. 

Zoom forward to 2002. Gordon still intrigued me. Perhaps there was more to write. And he and Helen were still alive! Hence the trip to Vermont.

However, I soon discovered, sitting around listening and sifting through papers in the attic of their comfortable, disorganized home, that Gordon and Helen had thoroughly documented their lives. Gordon had self-published a book about their years in India and was 88 pages into an autobiographical manuscript. Helen also brought forth an autobiography.

We spent three days together, carrying on nearly nonstop conversation about everything.

With voluminous notes, I returned to Kansas. Over the years, I tried several times to write about him and them, without success. 

But recently, I’ve thought a lot about how Gordon found his way in the world.

He believed that he took a wrong turn at Bronxville, and I had reflexively adopted his view:

-he had a bad time of it with awful people,

-he gained nothing from it,

-the interesting stuff came afterward,

-it was not worth an ounce of reflection.

Looking back, this perspective seems flawed.

Gordon dismissed teaching in Bronxville as his least important, most unpleasant experience. Now I’m inclined to think it was an essential experience.

He had returned from Lucknow in exhilaration, having put forth a bold statement about British imperialism.

But he needed to support his family – and it wouldn’t necessarily be on his terms. That was a jolt. Luckily, he could afford graduate school and found a job quickly.

The Bronxville School 

In Bronxville, Gordon and Helen soon learned that life can be brutal in a small community. Unfortunately, they formed lifelong stereotypes of wealthy suburbanites who surely returned the favor.

Yet Gordon forged ahead despite the discomfort. He formed a student Peace Club in 1935. He screened films depicting life in Asia. He visited Russia in the summer of 1937 and lectured about it that fall.  

Through various activities, Gordon affirmed his liberalism and started to develop a network of people and institutions that supported the kind of work he wanted to pursue. Although he never again worked as a teacher, he grew professionally.

There’s no question that Gordon knew excruciating details about the plight of the Indians who lived under British rule. He had witnessed the destitution of the Great War refugees. Power, politics, oppression – Gordon had a vast understanding of international issues.

But my hunch is that he possessed less insight into the suffering of Americans at the bottom of the Great Depression. He had a lot to learn.

When he visited those New York slums, his eyes must have opened as wide as those of his students.

Ultimately, four years in Bronxville were not a waste. They enabled Gordon to receive an introduction to his own nation in his own time.

"I felt the world I had come to know and the ideas churning

in it must be as remote to these youngsters as the moon."

(excerpt of Gordon's letter to me, 1995)

 
See post October 26, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/11/getting-educated-in-1930s-suburbia-part.html

Through the Hourglass: An Education in 1930s Suburbia

Lives of Christian Socialists

Syracuse University, 1928; Gordon and Helen
(first row, second & third from left)

They met at Syracuse University in 1927. The occasion was a joint meeting of the campus chapters of the YMCA and YWCA.

During the 1920s, many college students embraced the Y’s departure from its traditional emphasis on Bible studies and evangelism. The new movement, often called “Christian Socialism,” promoted universal brotherhood – peace, social welfare, social justice. The Y developed a reputation for liberalism that lasted about 20 years, now largely forgotten.

Gordon H., a third-year Syracuse student, became committed to the tenets of Christian Socialism and never let go.

The blue-blooded descendant of New York State farmers, born in 1905, Gordon planned to be a doctor but sacrificed much of his college coursework to the new agenda, giving speeches and attending conferences.

Gordon, front & center;
president of his high school radio club (1918)

Now back to the 1927 meeting, when he looked across the room and became captivated by Helen H., the unhappy middle child of a Syracuse family whose father was an alcoholic and mother a wounded Victorian matron.

He offered her a ride home in a taxi. When she accepted, he knelt to put on her galoshes. They were married in June 1928, on graduation day, wearing borrowed wedding clothes. That was in line with the Y’s endorsement of simple living.

Gordon and Helen had made plans to travel to the American University of Cairo where he would teach biology and she would work as a librarian. A series of events intervened. Instead, they became affiliated with the Methodist Church and left New York on the USS Pennland to travel to Lucknow, India, where they would spend four years mentoring Indian students at the Lucknow Christian College.

“We were firmly opposed to imperialism and the British Empire,” Gordon recalled later, “and harboring pretty poor feelings about missionaries.” Their thoughts were reinforced when an English missionary on board remarked as the boat crossed the Suez Canal, “Let not your voice speak what is in your heart.”

Pushing off, Helen felt absolute relief to be out of Syracuse, liberated from her grim family situation. Gordon felt himself to be an internationalist at last, on the verge of self-transformation. They were modern people who considered themselves equal partners (and used birth control, acquired at considerable cost, Helen confided).

The cause of Indian independence inspired the couple, who spent four years in Lucknow at the height of Gandhi’s leadership. The city turned out to be a hotbed of nationalism. Helen and Gordon became good friends with Sarojini Naido, India’s foremost national woman leader, and spent time with Jawaharlal Nehru. Their three children were born there.

1930s

In 1932, the Raj ordered the family to leave after Gordon wrote and published a manifesto about British imperialism, urging rebellion. 

By the time I met Gordon and Helen at their home in Vermont, they were in their mid-90s and had filled their lives with adventure and hard work. Gordon held 14 different jobs between 1934 and 1965, including community organizer, teacher, educational administrator, fundraiser, and entrepreneur. He always advocated for racial equality and international understanding. Their family included three highly accomplished children and several grandchildren.

So why was I visiting them, anyway?

See post November 2, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/10/lives-of-christian-socialism-part-1.html

Through the Hourglass: Lives of Christian Socialists

This was Kindergarten

Mrs. Friedlander's morning kindergarten class, 1963

“Kindergarten babies!”

That’s what the teacher said as she pushed a few naughty boys through the door of our classroom. They must have been about eight years old and committed some terrible transgression like throwing spitballs or putting chalk in the erasers.  

We looked up to see our own teacher, Mrs. Friedlander, place them in a corner of the room. What was the punishment? Who wouldn’t want to be back in kindergarten?

 

Martin H. Traphagen School, 1940s (before my time).
Kindergarten entrance was around the left side of the building.

I remember feeling very pleased that our kindergarten had its own entrance, tucked away on the side of a monolithic four-story school constructed during the mid-1920s. The door looked like it had been drawn by Beatrix Potter herself; one almost expected Peter Rabbit to hop out.

Instead, there stood Mrs. Friedlander, looking very postwar in a flowered dress and beads. A friendly woman, she did once scare us by grabbing a classmate and washing his mouth out with soap. We’d heard about the punishment but never witnessed it. No water required: take one bar of soap and insert into pupil’s mouth.

In my imagination, washing out someone’s mouth with soap involved lathering and rinsing and patting dry with a towel. So this was a revelation.

When I interviewed her years later, she was 90 years old and laughed uproariously telling stories about the school’s principal. Evidently he insisted on accounting for all of the red rubber kickballs we used during recess. If things didn’t add up, he would insistently knock on each teacher’s door, stating urgently: “I’m missing a ball, I’m missing a ball.”

            Thirty-four years later, I forgave her for the soap incident.

Once you stepped through the Peter Rabbit door, the kindergarten opened into a double-height space with sunlight flooding in through a tall, wide bay window. There was a piano, a fireplace, and a loft, a balcony of sorts where we were allowed to play unsupervised.

Although it may sound strange to say, this was a room that respected children. In 1997 when I started to study the history of American education, it came in a flash that our kindergarten was a perfect example of how the progressive education movement influenced school architecture.

The basic idea behind progressive education was to free children from recitation and drill –the one-room schoolhouse model that had dominated American education since the early nineteenth century. Colonel Frances W. Parker, a Civil War veteran and teacher, challenged the lockstep archetype as early as 1875 as superintendent of the Quincy, Mass., schools.

Others followed, including the famous philosopher John Dewey. Slowly, the ideas caught on and the Progressive Education Association formed in 1919.

Progressive education reached the peak of its popularity in the 1920s and ‘30s. Most of the tenets associated with its philosophy – the teacher is a guide, learning by doing, experience is education – translated brilliantly into classroom practice although not everyone got it right, of course.

In the years following World War II, progressive education was vilified for several reasons. Notably, the launch of Sputnik led many parents, educators, and government officials to warn that American students were not competitive academically, especially in math and science. That started the business of perpetually reinventing the school curriculum which has brought us to our current predicament.

I’m really skimming through history here. Suffice it to say that the kindergarten I knew, with its separate activity areas that encouraged moving around and individual experimentation, and even a table where we grew plants, was designed for a child-centered program.

The Peter Rabbit door, built to the scale of children, intended to make us feel welcome. Inside, the organization of the room encouraged playing and learning.

 

Kindergarten classroom, probably mine, around 1940;
in 1963 it appeared much the same. 

A few months ago, while strolling with a friend, I stepped off the curb and pitched forward, twisting my ankle and slamming my hand. The last time I fell so hard was during kindergarten.

In 1963, walking home from school, carefully carrying the top of an onion that had sprouted green leaves, I saw my mother waiting for me at the next corner, excitedly started to run, and went sprawling.

The onion flew from my hands into the future, where I now sit telling this tale.

See posts: May 18, March 16, 2016; December 21, November 23, November 2, 2015

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/07/this-was-kindergarten.html

The California Days of Willard W. Beatty

Willard W. Beatty, early 1920s

It has long interested me that Willard W. Beatty was one of the few prominent progressive educators who came of age in the state of California. Most of his colleagues hailed from small towns east of the Mississippi River, from which they hoped to be released. Their hours were split between farming and studying.

Instead, Beatty was an urban person of the West, having grown up in San Francisco during the critical years between the 1906 Earthquake and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He was naturally independent and open to the world. He could spend his time as he chose.

Without a doubt, Beatty’s life’s work reflected his enlightened youth in the Bay Area.

During the early 1930s when the Depression deepened, he grew ever more convinced that anything could be rebuilt from the ground up; he had seen San Francisco rise from the ashes. 

If he railed against the Hearst newspapers for opposing academic freedom; well, he had already done that as managing editor of the progressive journal, California Outlook. 

Having watched the Commonwealth Club set an agenda for change, Beatty believed in the power of advocacy through organization. With an activist uncle as his guardian, Beatty recognized that citizenship corresponded to action and education.

“I believe that Dad’s interest in education began when he was a student in Lick High School,” Willard Beatty’s son wrote to me. “They had a rather novel idea that education should be directed at the development of all aspects of an individual.”

San Francisco’s Lick High School started life as the California School of Mechanical Arts.* Endowed by the entrepreneur James M. Lick, a piano maker, in 1895, the school required that students spend half of their time in a skilled apprenticeship. Therefore Willard’s college preparatory work comprised equal parts manual training and academic studies.

Willard Beatty
Lick High School debate team, 1908

First in his high school class, Willard appeared in Lick’s yearbook, The Tiger, wearing the pince-nez popularized by Theodore Roosevelt. The inscription beside his photo stated: One who needs no eulogy, he speaks for himself. 

Since Lick had a debating society, it’s no surprise that Willard led it. One of his nicknames was Willard Jennings Beatty.   

“Fancy Beatty without words bombastic,” cracked the yearbook editors, who also noted that Willard had surprised his friends by performing the role of a bishop in the senior play: “notwithstanding his natural inclinations, he did not appear at all out of place in the clerical robes.” 

One must assume that Willard disputed religion.

And he had a great imagination, possibly influenced by his uncle’s penchant for mystery novels. In a short story entitled “The Lost Link,” Willard moves from New York to Egypt on the trail of “the greatest archaeologist whom the world has ever known” who has perished in an explosion at Beni Hassen. Descending into a cave, Willard’s character finds his hero crushed behind a giant statue of the Aztec War God, Huitzilopotchli, clutching a torn piece of paper that would have provided proof of a connection between the Egyptian and Mexican civilizations.

The story is very good.

In 1909, Willard graduated from Lick and went off to Berkeley. He planned to become an architect. 

Within a year or two, he fell in love with Elise Biedenbach, daughter of the longtime principal of Berkeley High School who was an early member of the Sierra Club and friend of John Muir. Charles L. Biedenbach’s parents “had come around the Horn in a sailing ship, fleeing as refugees from one of the oppressions in Prussia, and had landed in San Francisco and started a grocery store,” a grandson recalled in a 1993 interview. Both Charles and his wife, Lulu, graduated from UC-Berkeley. They were just a few years younger than Willard Beatty’s parents, also Berkeley alums.

Elise Biedenbach engagement announcement,
Oakland Tribune, November 28, 1913

By 1913, when Willard graduated and married Elise, his interest had shifted from architecture to education. He spent a year teaching at Oakland Polytechnic School. Then he became managing editor of California Outlook, which covered such issues as child labor, juvenile delinquency, Indian education, and conservation.

 “We don’t want too much dry stuff,” the journal’s editor, Meyer Lissner, wrote to Beatty;

You must look out for that. One fault with the paper is that it has been too heavy. We must try to popularize it or treat scientific subjects in a popular manner. . . What you say about the “Revolutionary Artists” sounds interesting.

The following year, Beatty joined the faculty of the San Francisco State Normal School and launched his career in education. 

At that time he was invited to join the Commonwealth Club of California, where he addressed the group about the League of Nations and served on committees on education and city planning.

By his early 30s, Beatty had distinguished himself in at least one important way: he had wrestled with problems related to social justice, urbanization, and acculturation long before entering the field of education, whereas many of his contemporaries encountered these issues further on, by way of their work in the schools. So he looked at things differently.

Unlike his peers, he never spent time getting out from under God-fearing elders.

And very significantly, Willard Beatty actually experienced a truly progressive high school education.

*Lick later merged with the Wilmerding School of Industrial Arts and the Lux School for Industrial Training for Girls. Today it is called Lick-Wilmerding High School.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/california-days.html

See also: November 11, November 29, December 2, 2015; January 12 + August 3, 2016.