BFS school-year beginnings, today and yesterday

Brooklyn Friends School began its 148th school year this month with its traditional convocation. Our opening assembly for older students, held at the Brooklyn Meeting House on Schermerhorn Street, came to be known as convocation in the early 1990s, yet this year's largest-ever student body required separate convocations for the middle and upper school divisions. Quite similar to years past, as one can see on this page from the 1916 Brooklyn Friends School catalog.

1916: Principal John L. Carver addresses the entire
BFS student body at a Thursday assembly

98 years ago,  each division, then called departments, held separate opening exercises just as we did this year. The photo above was taken at one of the bi-monthly assemblies of the entire school, in the exact same meeting room at the Brooklyn Meeting House. Since 1916, the meeting room has changed slightly and our entire student body has grown by perhaps 300 percent, but BFS and its historic home of the Brooklyn Meeting House remain beloved by students as one can see in this video of the upper school convocation, featuring the upper school student body singing our school song of today "Simple Gifts."

Simple Gifts 2014-15 from Brooklyn Friends School on Vimeo.

50 years ago, we wore what at BFS Commencement?

BFS and the Class of 2014 may be gearing up for Commencement right now, but at this time 50 years ago, it was the Class of '64's big moment to graduate BFS. Fun to look back since many of our '64 alumni are planning to celebrate their 50th reunion on June 7 at BFS Alumni Day. And BFS is very fortunate to have both '64's commencement photo and the last edition of The Life for the 1963-64 year to shed a little light on how BFS celebrated the Class of '64 in 1964. BFS has neither complete collections of class and commencement photos nor of the student newspapers, so please share from your personal collections with BFS.

Commencement photo of the Class of 1964
wearing our school's former graduation attire of
black tuxedo pants and white suit jackets for the boys
and white semi-formal dresses for the girls
Photo donated to BFS by William Forgang, Ph.D. '64 (thanks again)

Commencement 1964 articles from The Life:
the guest speaker for the June 5, 1964 ceremony was
noted Quaker author and theologian D. Elton Trueblood, Ph.D.

Times change at BFS and everywhere else. The long-standing tradition of white dresses and jackets probably departed BFS Commencement around 1969 (this and other changes at graduation were intimated in the March, 1969 Life article "New Exercises"). Today's Class of 2014 will graduate with blue caps and gowns, a student-led decision and new tradition that began at BFS with the Class of 2007. 

BFS through the years - the last major class photos update

The Class Photo Collection received its final serious update from the BFS Archives recently, this time from yearbooks to make this important collection more complete. As many know, BFS does not have a complete collection of class photos and not all BFS yearbooks contained class photos. The only way to have a more complete collection now is for alumni to share their class photos

History, Weiss Style - 40 years ago...

Welcome back to a new year at Brooklyn Friends School! For those who may not have attended opening days at BFS this year, Head of School Larry Weiss pointed out that it has been 40 years since he first came to BFS, at the start of the 1973-74 school year. Our former student newspaper The Life actually published the article below about Larry in its November, 1973 edition.

New to the Digital Archives

This week, we have a few additions to the Digital Archives.

• Two new items in Playbills: the 1980 Middle School production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience or Bunthorne's Bride and the 1982 Intergenerational Chorus performance at the CUNY NYC College of Technology's Klitgord Auditorium on Jay Street. 

Archival Updates and Theatrical Enigmas

The Pajama Game, 1970s

The photos in BFS Sampler 2 photo album have finally been corrected and re-uploaded, meaning better quality images for visitors. The class photos originally in that album have now been moved to the appropriate class photos albums. Many of the photos in BFS Sampler 2 can now also be viewed in person in the Upper School hallways of BFS. Our students and faculty really enjoy them and it's so nice to have our school's history more present in the daily life of BFS once again. I'm so happy to have been part of such a fun project with our terrific PAT parent volunteers.

Found: New Class Photos!

1924-25, Class of 1927, 10th grade

A recent excursion in the unsorted BFS photo archives uncovered a few class photos that were not previously included in the albums in the digital class photo collection. Found were 26 additional class photos from all decades, including two class photos taken before 1949, the most poorly represented period in the BFS archives. Our pre-1949 class photos either did not survive or copies were not given to the school in the first place, something which unfortunately occurred in later years as well. These new photos have been added to both our Picasa albums and to the BFS Alumni Facebook Group's photo albums.