RADNOR MIDDLE SCHOOL

Posted with permission from Marta McCave

Mr. Howell and his wife, Betz, have fond memories of their schooldays during that Depression era. After school, they and their friends often went for banana splits at the Media Drugstore on the comer of Lancaster and South Wayne Avenues where the Gap store now is. In the back of the drugstore was a long soda counter and four booths.

The junior high faculty included both men and women teachers, but most (if not all) of the women were "Miss" because in those days, married women didn't teach. Among the men, one of the most admired and respected teachers was Paul Teel, a civics teacher who also established the school band. By contrast, Pete Howell also recalls a stem teacher named Mr. Nixon who "scared the heck out of us."

Did they need scaring to be kept in line? It seems that junior high school kids could be mischievous, even then. "I was in trouble all the time," recalls John Wood, who attended Radnor junior and Senior I-Egh, graduating in 1931. "I got sent to the principal's office for harmonizing in the hall between classes with my friends. We would sing Sweet Adeline, other old songs like that. Another time, on a dare, I asked Miss Dusenberg whether a brassiere was a comb." (Despite what some of his teachers may have expected, Mr. Wood went on to become a successful salesman and business-owner.)

In those early days, one of the most solemn events on the school calendar was Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I. (It's now called Veterans Day.) There would be a schoolwide assembly, with a moment of silence at 11 a.m., the hour of the armistice's signing. Someone would recite the most famous poem about the war, Flanders Field:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Students didn't have to look far for a reminder of the sacrifices made by American soldiers. Charles Mintzer, the Dean of Boys, was a World War I veteran who walked with a limp because of shrapnel in his leg. Memorial plaques listing Radnor's World War I military "honor roll" flanked the door to the school office. (The plaques are still there today.)

When World War II was declared, it too came close to home. Some high school students went off to war; others filled in at the firehouse as junior firefighters. Junior high school students could join in the scrap metal and tin drives; some also organized air raid drills and the sale of war stamps and bonds. One G.I. who received a particularly warm welcome home was the beloved Mr. Teel, a lieutenant J.G., who was greeted by the marching band at the train station when he came back from the war.

The Middle Years

Once the new Radnor High School opened in 1958 on a sprawling campus on King of Prussia Road, seventh, eighth, and ninth graders had the old school building on South Wayne Avenue all to themselves. (The junior high wouldn't become a middle school for grades five through eight until some years later.)

Junior high kids quickly became accustomed to ruling the roost. As the 1965 Seventh Grade Orientation Manual trumpeted:

Your first six years of schooling Were fun, and really rate

But your next years of junior high Will be equally as GRRRRREAT!

Gary Kime began his 36-year teaching career at Radnor in 1962 (at an annual salary of $4,300). He remembers being invited to have cookies and tea with a school board member who lived across the street from the school. It was her custom to welcome new faculty to the community by asking them to her house.

At the time, teachers received 10 paychecks a year and didn't have the option to stretch their pay over a 12-month calendar. "Everyone had a summer job," Dr. Kime recalls. "Some worked at the swim clubs or the golf clubs in the area."

As a new staffer, Dr. Kime was assigned to partner with longtime teacher Sally Tongue, an older lady who wore her hair in a bun. Miss Tongue had a deep interest in the classroom segment that was devoted to Radnor Township history. "I thought the unit would last a week and half," he recalls. "It was six months long in her curriculum."

Civil defense drills were a regular part of the school routine in the early 1960s, Dr. Kime says. When the alarm sounded, students gathered in the lower gym, where they would sit against the wall with their hands over their heads. These drills weren't taken lightly; with all of its refineries and the naval base, Philadelphia was viewed as a prime target for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

Boys and girls went separate ways when it was time for "specials." While boys learned woodworking in industrial arts "shop," the girls learned to keep house. In "home ec" class they were taught to cook, plan meals, and set a table properly, and they demonstrated their skills by serving lunch to their mothers. A highlight was the seventh-grade girls' trip to a local shopping center to learn how to shop on a budget.

Boys' and girls' gym classes were also separate and unequal. Until 1971, the upper gym at the middle school was for boys only. Girls' classes were held in the dank, concrete-floored lower gym, which-thanks to the spring under the building-flooded whenever the pumps stopped working. Gym teacher Marge McCone kept a wary eye on the pumps all the time. "One time the basement filled up with three or four feet of water," she says.

Being weatherwise extended to her coaching duties. On the days when her girls' lacrosse team had a home game, Mrs. McCone made sure to cart wood chips from the wood shop out to the soggy fields behind the school and lay them in front of the goalposts.

Town soda fountains still had their attractions. Kids sometimes went "up Wayne" after school to the Wayne Rexall, a drugstore that stood where Reader's Forum now is, according to Radnor alumina Patty Lee. She is now a reading and English teacher at the middle school.

The "Sixties" were a time of tumult across the nation, and the Radnor schools weren't immune to it. Boys and girls challenged the dress code prohibitions against blue jeans, untucked shirts, and miniskirts more than six inches above the knee. Teachers who used to chase gum-chewers down the hallways with wastebaskets in hand now had to monitor hemlines and patrol the bathrooms, looking for illicit cigarette smokers and the occasional earpiercing session in the girls' lavatory.

"I remember getting sent to the office for wearing too short of a skirt," recalls Heather Thompson, who was a junior high school student in those years. "I loved to sew, and I had it down to a science, where I bought fabric after school at Lafferty's in Wayne and could make an A-line skirt to wear the next day. I must have hemmed a skirt at the last minute, and it was too short."

For a time in the 1960s, students were required to bring notes from their parents if they planned to shop in Wayne after school let out. Some merchants had complained that junior high kids were misbehaving when on the loose in their stores.

One day in the late 1960s, a blaze erupted when a student threw a firebomb through a window before school. The school office was damaged. Guidance

Department secretary Rita Davis still has a file cabinet that was scarred by the fire.

The Radnor Middle School building has been renovated a number of times in its lifetime, but the last major work was done in the 1980-81 school year, when modern windows were installed, an elevator was added and other improvements were made.

Some other notable events in the school's recent history:

• In 1973, ninth graders moved up to the high school.

• In 1986, the district's only teacher's strike occurred, a brief walkout that delayed the start of classes.

• In 1990, fifth-graders joined the middle school, giving sixth graders someone to feel superior to.

• In May 1997, a sewage leak on the ground floor closed the school early for the year, and forced the repairing of walls, the replacement of a ceiling, and the resurfacing of floors. Students attended classes at Villanova while the building was closed.

• In the summer of 1998, the oak stairway doors were replaced with fire doors, and decades' worth of paint was stripped from the oak stairway railings.

Despite the changes over the years, a walk through the school's halls is still a trip back in time. Behind a door on the main floor lies a former rifle range- it's now a storage area. Behind the steel walls of a classroom that once was a foundry, theater props are now stored. And some mysteries persist: In the basement, a locked door leads to ... nowhere but a wall. In the main office, a chimney lies concealed behind another wall.

As Radnor Middle School marks its 75th anniversary, some feel the old schoolhouse has outlived its usefulness. They say it's antiquated and inadequate for public education in the 21st century. They point to the computer room, where serpent-like wires spiral from the ceiling to the computers because that was easiest way to retrofit the room for the Internet.

Others disagree. They cherish the old building for its architectural features- its high ceilings, oak classroom cabinets, and old-fashioned slate blackboards.

To them, Radnor Middle School is an invaluable part of the community's heritage.

Whatever difficult decisions lie ahead, we celebrate a beloved school's heritage as we mark its 75th anniversary. If buildings could speak, just imagine how many more stories that this school could tell.