30 Years of BFS's Eeriest Tradition

In the distance... 

It can only be the Lower School Halloween Dance! In 1984, Marna Herrity was our dance teacher and she conceived of the Halloween Dance for the entirety of the Lower School's oldest grade. It immediately became a BFS tradition, a rite of passage of Lower School learning. The Halloween Dance has been directed by Margaret Bary for the last ten years. Margaret reports that this year will be our largest Halloween Dance, with a record number of 55 4th grade student performers.

Many aspects of the Halloween Dance are unchanged, most importantly that students still choreograph the work each year, guided by their director. It is an important early opportunity for BFS students to learn general aspects of theater such as listening and waiting for their cues, entrances and exits. Our students continue to design their own fabulous skeletal costumes using fluorescent tape on black clothing. The music, of course, remains selections from the "scary" album first excerpted in 1984, though those selections vary with the years. 

the sound of bones...

There have been few changes. The performance space has gone from the Lower Gym to the Meeting House Theater and then back to the Lower Gym, where it remains today so that all performers may appear on stage simultaneously. When the Halloween Dance was directed by Dori Dietz, our LS dance teacher for many years, 9th grade "buddies" helped 4th graders create their individual papier mâché masks, while today our 4th graders's smiling faces are covered in make-up also of their own design, applied by parent volunteers. The largest change is that the Halloween Dance was first performed by the 5th grade, yet it's been a 4th grade tradition since the Fall of 1986, when the 5th grade joined the Middle School. And one change is also a first: lighting will be used this year in the Gym! 

As photos from recent years show, the Halloween Dance is an exciting learning experience treasured by BFS students. 

skeletons rising... 

slowly from their graves...

night falls...

the forest holds its breath...

everything is still...

suddenly, the wind blows.

Celebrating a new BFS newspaper

The Willoughby Street Journal, the latest BFS student newspaper

BFS has a new student newspaper, Willoughby Street Journal. First published less than one year ago, Willoughby Street Journal, named for our present Upper School building, has started this new school year strongly. WSJ (of BFS) is published in blog format and features editorials, articles and reviews of events at and beyond Brooklyn Friends School. At BFS, student newspapers are a co-curricular activity, yet all know student newspapers are one of the great academic fruits of all schools. WSJ is a young publication and it is great to see journalism back at BFS! 

BFS students have published magazines and newspapers for over 100 years, of course. Our earliest publications - The Squealer of 1912, The Junior Outlook, and1919-1931 editions of The Life - seem to have been published quarterly in magazine format and apparently more focused on student literature. 83 years ago this month, BFS published its first student newspaper in October of 1931, The Life, which, along with later BFS student newspapers like The Panther Press can be consulted in digital format at the Newspaper Section of the BFS Archives.

School journalism of any kind is a challenging commitment for already hardworking students, as known by all who have ever been involved in student publications. Please read The Willoughby Street Journal and encourage our students' continuing efforts. A little poem found in the BFS Archives seems appropriate today:

Compassion, a BFS and Quaker tradition

The program of our first
commencement, from 1910

BFS has always strived to be compassionate for its community, particularly for its students, both while enrolled at our school and forever after. Compassion is often found at the core of the Quaker Testimonies. One of the nicest BFS archival finds remains the "BFS chapter" from the personal memoir of Dorothea Gillette Murray, our first woman graduate, a member of our first graduating class of 1910. Originally written for her grandchildren, Mrs. Murray kindly gave BFS a copy of the BFS chapter of her memoir in the 1970s with permission to reprint. Mrs. Murray's words give great insight into our school's tradition of academic excellence and also to the tradition of compassionate caring BFS has striven to give its students since 1867.

Mrs. Murray indicated in her memoir that her family consisted of only her and her mother, a working woman - an unusual family for BFS at that time. It seems there was deep compassion for this family from our school and New York Monthly Meeting. Mrs. Murray attended BFS with some financial aid, but her memoir shows it seems to have been more of a work-study program in her final student years. Financial aid for a non-Quaker like Mrs. Murray was unusual at the time: for many years, the children of members of New York Monthly Meeting were educated free-of-charge at Brooklyn Friends School and Friends Seminary, a practice made possible by the interest from certain monies of New York Monthly Meeting that were used to fund their unpaid tuition. Mrs. Murray indicated further, "[Principal] Mr. Rawson got me a partial scholarship to Swarthmore College and later in my freshman year got hold of the rest of the tuition money for that same year." Not only did Mrs. Murray graduate Swarthmore, but she received her Masters from Columbia. A public school educator, Mrs. Murray was also an active retiree who sought to help her community by giving back to BFS, by working for peace, and by teaching English as a Second Language from 1960 to at least 1975, when, at 83 years old, she decided to share a chapter of her memoir with BFS.

A little over a year ago, while researching in Proceedings of New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends for 1910, Mrs. Murray's experience at BFS sprang to mind since she entered BFS in 1899, plus there was only one other non-Quaker in her 1910 graduating class of five and he seems to have gone to Harvard. From the Education Committee's Report to NYYM, delivered by the Schools Board Chairman, Will Walter Jackson in May, 1910: "The case has arisen of a pupil who has been in one of our schools for eleven years and is now ready for Swarthmore, but who is not a member of this society. The committee asks, if there should be an unexpended balance this year, the Meeting would be willing for a portion of it to be used in this or similar cases." It seems more than probably that this request was for Mrs. Murray and that it was granted

Such a request by the Schools Board Chair may have more typically occurred for Quaker children attending Quaker colleges. Additionally, many of those institutions regularly received financial contributions from Friends Meetings and were helped by broad solicitations by many Friends Meetings to their members, work which helped build those college's endowments. Dorothea Gillette Murray, BFS Class of 1910, seems to show our school's earliest known effort in assisting a non-Quaker student in need. She may have been grateful to BFS, but our school is probably even more grateful to her.

The BFS Panther, a mascot history

Last month, on the BFS Facebook page, an alumna asked about the BFS Panther, the mascot of the BFS Athletics program. The Panther is relatively new to our athletic program as both our nickname and costumed mascot. BFS Athletic Director David Gardella shared his understanding of the history of the BFS Panther and further information was found among school records in the BFS Archives.

In the 1998-1999 school year, Henry Spinella was our Athletic Director: he noted that one of our Upper School student-athletes felt that BFS athletics could benefit from a costumed mascot to help promote our athletics program and that this student was working to make it a reality. A "Fighting Quaker" was suggested, yet that idea was set aside as there have always been those who feel that such a mascot is inappropriate, even thought it is an oxymoron. A fox, likely in reference to Quakerism's founder George Fox was also suggested. Henry Spinella agreed that BFS should have such a mascot, as did the school's administration. 

The beginning of the 1999-2000 school year saw a school-wide vote. Five mascots were suggested for the consideration of the entire school: a superhero, a panther, a penguin, a bear and a dog. David Gardella recalled that "the penguin came in second... but the Panther came in first." Records reveal that the vote was not even close: ballot came in with 143 votes for the penguin and 175 for the panther. It seems a BFS Panther mural was created by an artist in the Pearl Street gym for the following school year. The actual panther mascot costume seems to have finally arrived in the 2006-2007 school year. 

It should be noted that our former student newspaper, The Panther Press, obviously chose a title that reflected our panther nickname and mascot. The first publication of The Panther Press in 2003 was an important moment for our school as BFS had then been without a regularly published student newspaper for many years. Our current student newspaper is The Willoughby Street Journal, a title which will likely be retired when the Upper School moves to One MetroTech in September, 2015. 

During the 20th Century, particularly in the media, we were often known as "The Quakers." Photos from the 1970s and 1980s show that some of our athletics t-shirts - and perhaps even uniforms - included a depiction of a man wearing a traditional Quaker hat. In 1955, BFS Upper School students selected a "Quakerman" as the BFS mascot, as mentioned in The Life. According to 1942's Seventy Five Years of Brooklyn Friends School, we had been known for several years as "the Fighting Quakers." Of course, the Fighting Quakers is the athletics nickname of Sidwell Friends in Washington, DC and, your historian's 2010 visit to Sidwell noted a near-caricature of a"Fighting Quaker." Guilford College's athletics teams are also known as the Fighting Quakers. All schools that use "The Fighting Quakers" for nicknames fully understand and acknowledge that the term is an oxymoron. 

BFS history, the video

"This Is Our Quiet Time"

BFS ordinarily shares brief clips in its Video Archives, but we make an exception this week with the full version of the original BFS musical, Forward to the Past. Written and performed by the BFS community in 1989, Forward to the Past: the Historical Hysterical Follies of Brooklyn Friends School, relates our school's history as uncovered by an extra-terrestrial cultural anthropologist visiting the Planet Earth in his search for "friendly peoples." And he just happened to land at BFS. Of course, there are many familiar faces among the cast of teachers, parents, students, and friends, including Cheryl Foote, Don Knies, Jack Ramey, Martin Norregaard, Lawrence Gibson and many others. A clip of just the hip-hop finale was posted almost a year ago, yet today the beautiful solo, "This Is Our Quiet Time," beginning at 49:30, merits a listen.