Play an important role at BFS - Friends Forever!

Read the Brooklyn Daily Eagle article 
"BFS Bests Calhoun for Volleyball Title"

Great moment last week at BFS: our Boys Varsity Volleyball team won the PSAA championship, an amazing feat for this first-year team. Our team's ranking, as of today at maxpreps.com: 120th in the U.S, 4th in New York State and 3rd in New York City. Congratulations to these student-athletes who will all return to boys volleyball next year, to our coaches and athletic department, and to BFS, our school which makes such moments possible for all of us. It is wonderful to have record of this achievement, so this historian once again wishes our school had a more complete record of all similar achievements at BFS, which brings us to the important role you can play.

1948 MAAPS League Baseball Championship
in which BFS defeated Fieldston at Fieldston.
Candid photo of Coach Wally Longley shaking the hand
of Leonard Von Heill '48 who pitched six consecutive
scoreless innings to seal the championship for BFS.
Photo courtesy of the late Patricia Doblin Bienfait '49

There have been many great athletes and teams at BFS, some won championships, invitational tournaments, and many alumni played with college and professional teams. Unfortunately, not all of our school's important athletic moments are noted anywhere in the records of BFS. Our Athletic Director David Gardella has been compiling his own list of BFS championships, our college and professional alumni-athletes, and other athletic milestones from 1996 to the present, but BFS needs your assistance in gaining a more complete record for all years earlier.

This historian is assisting by compiling a record of BFS athletic achievements for all years prior to 1996, that can be added to the record now kept by the Athletics Department. To do this, one can search the historic Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the hope that BFS made the paper. Alternatively, one can pore through our school's incomplete run of student newspapers, newsletters, or yearbooks, hoping that an important moment for our school got even the briefest mention in our own publications. Such time-consuming efforts yielded the knowledge that we had a Boys Varsity Softball team that won at least four back-to-back league championships in the late 1970s. We have photographs that now preserve some of our older banners, but they do not shed nearly enough light. BFS simply needs your memories to fill in the blanks in its own history.

Please take a moment to reflect on your BFS memories, to share your knowledge of BFS athletic history and to let us know of the post-BFS athletic careers of alumni, some of whom may be reading this themselves.

Friends Forever - Blue Pride!!! 

Remembering Benjamin R. Burdsall, 1903-1968

Got to thinking about Benjamin R. Burdsall this week as our Upper School faculty has been doing its own thinking about recipients of our annual awards for the Upper School closing ceremony on June 9. Today seems a good day to remember who Mr. Burdsall was for so many at BFS and why BFS gives a scholarship in his memory. BFS encourages the entire BFS community to be deeply involved in and concerned with the life of the school. Among the myriad opportunities for involvement are celebrating reunions at Alumni Day and attending special events like the Spring Gala, giving annually to the Brooklyn Friends Fund, volunteering as a PAT class parent, a Brooklyn Friends Fund class agent or as a guest speaker at BFS - contact the Development and Alumni Office at 718-852-1029, ext. 211 or ext. 208 to learn about such opportunities and much more. BFS also encourages giving to the school to honor and celebrate special people and milestones in our lives. 

One special gift celebrated a 50th reunion and was sufficient to create a separate endowment fund which has enabled BFS to annually remember our 1934-1968 English teacher and Upper School Head Benjamin R. Burdsall, 1903-1968. Thanks to the generosity of the BFS Class of '49 in celebration of its 50th reunion, BFS has given an Upper School junior the Benjamin R. Burdsall Scholarship of $500 towards his/her senior year's tuition for the last decade. The recipient demonstrates the commitment to public service that Mr. Burdsall encouraged in his students and the scholarship helps BFS honor its excellent students of today who emulate the enduring values of a Brooklyn Friends education, the same values Mr. Burdsall helped his students develop in themselves. Through his actions and words and his deep sense of responsibility and commitment to international law and peace, Mr. Burdsall guided his students at BFS to a deeper and more internalized understanding of Quakerism, of what the values of integrity and excellence, compassion and community can help achieve for our own selves and for our world.

After his death, the Class of '69 included this line in their yearbook: "Benjamin R. Burdsall was a man of that peace and gentleness which inspired love in all who met him." One '69 graduate included the following on his personal page of that yearbook: "Mr. Benjamin Burdsall - The only person I had ever met who always had time to guide and advise no matter how complicated or trivial the question or problem." In the words of his student, the late L. Ronald Scheman '49, founder of the Pan American Development Foundation, "I am sure today Mr. Burdsall would be deeply involved in getting students to address the issues of climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, and education. In all, he was a man who, with his gentle, caring manner, opened the world to us and wanted to help his students to be positive, constructive global citizens. If he had the opportunity to talk to BFS students today I am sure he would ask them about their primary concerns for our country and for ensuring the health and safety of our planet. And he would give them a lot to think about to help them define the vision for their lives. "

For generations at BFS, Mr. Burdsall inspired many of his students and the Class of '49 was further inspired to give that inspiration back to BFS. How are we inspired today, individually and collectively, and by whom and by what? 

Tribute to Mr. Benjamin R. Burdsall from the October 30, 1968 edition of The Life

Mr. Burdsall must have had a fine sense of humor as shown
on the right in this photo from a 1940s BFS Variety Show

In Meeting
by Benjamin R. Burdsall
published in Friends Journal, June 15, 1968

My ship is now in harbor;

Its sails are furled,

And gentle waves

Make peaceful murmurings

Along the shore

My friends are here to greet me

And to tell

Of what is closest to their hearts

Now that the journey of the week is o'er.

Tomorrow I shall once more set the sails

And head again for an uncertain sea,

But I shall have a compass and a star

And vision that this hour has given me.

1947-48, the year BFS was nearly lost, Part II

Celebrating our school having been saved,
The Friends School Life, February 16, 1948

This week, I'm following up on last week's post concerning the discovery of the 1947-1948 Fight to Save BFS Scrapbook which allowed us to finally remember an incredibly important moment in our school's history. I'd like to share a few items since historical events are deeply nuanced and people's actions even more so.

1947-48, the year BFS was nearly lost, Part I

A jaw-dropping BFS moment of my last ten years working at my alma mater occurred in 2006, during preparations to renovate the MS/US Library on the 3rd floor of 375 Pearl Street. I came to work one day to find a large and worn scrapbook on my desk chair, accompanied by a tiny note from MS/US librarian Angela Ungaro which read, "You are going to love me." She was right.

Bayard Rustin Honored & New York Quakers Apologize to Afro-Descendants

Bayard Rustin

Following up to my Gatekeeper No More post of November 7. That post shared the known history of our school's winding path to integration which helped Brooklyn Friends School become the racially and ethnically diverse school it is known to be today. A few related and important events occurred last month.

Gatekeeper No More

1940, BFS Principal Douglas Grafflin's Address to the
Trustees of the Schools of New York Monthly Meeting 
proposing the enrollment of African American students at BFS. 
Please click to read Grafflin's entire address

This week, I'm unexpectedly switching gears thanks to a courageous conversation focused on the experiences of students of color in independent schools, a conversation that occurred at the BFS Alumni/ae Facebook group thanks to Bernard Dory '88, who shared the October, 2012 New York Times article, "Admitted, But Left Out." When it comes to our school's history, I wind up being a "gatekeeper," a word I despise and first reluctantly applied to myself in 2007 while attending an Undoing Racism workshop with other BFS employees. All institutions are imperfect and our school is no different. As it did in the past, our school tries, learns and grows today - such is the nature of Quakerism's continuing revelation. 

Our First Meeting for Worship, 1941

Meeting for Worship is such an important element of the Brooklyn Friends School experience that it is difficult to imagine that it did not exist in its present form at Brooklyn Friends School until October 30, 1941. We can thank Douglas G. Grafflin and S. Archibald Smith, two former BFS Heads of School, for introducing the Meeting for Worship we know today to both Brooklyn Friends School and

Lovely Surprises

I typically hate surprises, but some are always appreciated: there is nothing quite like finding a BFS historic treasure in either a traditional or electronic mailbox. Every once in a while, kind people find BFS-related items among their personal collections and choose to share them with BFS, thinking (correctly) that BFS might wish to have them or that I, Susan Price '86, am so interested in BFS history that I'll definitely want them (people have come to know me pretty well).

BFS History? There's a book for that...

Some of us will remember that BFS did publish a book about its history, Seventy Five Years of Brooklyn Friends School, in celebration of the school's 75th anniversary in 1942 and written by alum Edgerton Grant North of the Class of 1918. If you've never had a chance to see it before, you can now read it online right here at the BFS Archives and it is full of fascinating tidbits about the early days of Brooklyn Friends School. Some little items of interest one can find within: