The editors of View From the Overlook, thank
Robert Gaebler, former Park School student and current Illinois resident,
for submitting the following article. Anyone who possesses additional
information about Park School is encouraged to contact the editors of
this publication at www.heightshistory@aol.com or Mr. Gaebler at
rgaebler@earthlink.net.
Although I only attended Park School in Cleveland Heights for two and
a half years, part of second grade and third and fourth grade, before
it closed in 1942, the school left a deep impression on my life, and probably
started me on a lifelong pattern of creative problem-solving, just as
its founders might have wished. But the great mystery about Park School
is that much of its history remains obscure. Finding traces of this school
which had such a large impact on my life in the late 1930s was almost
impossible. Histories of Cleveland and Cleveland Heights make almost no
mention of Park School except as the institution from which Temple Anshe
Emmeth bought the land upon which Park Synagogue now rests. It has bothered
me greatly that a school which had so great an impact on the early formation
of my character should have virtually vanished from the Earth without
a trace. So my recent trip to Cleveland focused on cracking that mystery,
and I did have some modest success.
At first I found almost no reference to Park School in any sources.
A search of the local newspaper, the Heights Press, at the Cleveland Heights
Library, made no mention of Park in the year it closed, 1942. The Cleveland
Heights Historical Society had no information on it and neither did the
Western Reserve Historical Society. Finally, in the Special Collections
section of the Case Western Reserve Library, Sue Hanson found a brief
History of Park in a History of Cleveland, which I have quoted in full
below.
Park School flourished for nearly a quarter-century as one of the area’s
pioneer progressive schools. It was founded in 1918 by a group of area
Vassar alumnae who wanted to provide a type of kindergarten unavailable
in Cleveland. Early sponsors included Dr. and Mrs. Alexander McGaffin,
Henry Tucker Bailey, Mrs. Wm. Feather, and Mrs. Charles Thwing. The first
kindergarten was located in a room at the Day Nursery and Kindergarten
Assn. on E. 98th St. and later moved into a house on Adelbert Rd. As higher
grades were added, the school leased quarters from the Cleveland Tennis
and Racquet Club in Cleveland Hts.
Aerial photo
“Where Park School Will be Found Next September.
An airplane photo by Aerial Surveys Inc. showing the new site for
Park School in the Rockefeller estate. The school will have 12 acres
adjoining a private park. There will be entrance ways to the school
property from both Mayfield Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard.
In 1929 Park School moved into
a group of inexpensive frame buildings constructed on part of the Rockefeller
estate at Forest Hills on Euclid Heights Blvd. The twelve acre site was
granted outright to the school by John D. Rockefeller three years later.
[Cleveland Heights land records show this happened 6-16-1932. –RG]
Enrolling about 150 students, the school aimed to stimulate children to
think for themselves rather than merely acquire knowledge through rote
learning. Desks were arranged informally, and pupils were provided with
brooms and wastebaskets to keep their own classrooms orderly. Miss Mary
E. Pierce was director for most of the school's duration." [Speaking
of arranging desks informally, I remember that in second grade we moved
all the desks to the periphery of the room so that the entire middle of
the classroom could be devoted to a map of Cleveland, painted on the floor
with water-soluble paint. – About the address on Adelbert Road,
it was where University Hospitals now stand, built on the old Park School
site in time for me to be born there in 1932! –RG]
Only one year after adding a 12th grade and celebrating
its first high school commencement, Park School closed in 1942 due to
faculty dislocations caused by World War II. Its site was acquired by
the Cleveland Jewish Ctr." [i.e., Congregation Anshe Emmeth, 11-25-1942
for $ 31,500.00 –RG]
The buildings that housed Park School are still intact, except for one
building and an enclosed passageway which succumbed to fire several years
ago. A half dozen years ago I peered into my old fourth grade classroom,
where we studied dinosaurs and the planets back in 1941, and saw above
the blackboards the same pictures of planets and dinosaurs that hung there
60 years before! On the most recent trip in 2003 I visited the old lunch
room/gym/auditorium, and found several of the old orange mugs I used to
drink milk out of 63 years ago! Words can't begin to describe the joy
of drinking once again from a cup which has been thought to have been
destroyed for almost two thirds of a century! Who says you can't go back?
Girls working
“Inclination Is Their Leader and Guide;
Park School–Where Children Are Developing Along the Most Natural
Lines; Dip, dip, dip. Into the hot, melted paraffin go the growing
candles. Later other Park School children may use them to adorn
the cutest placecards imaginable. Left to right the miniature dippers
are Kathleen Webster, Kathleen Firestone, and Betty Baudauf.
Another piece of the puzzle
was clarified by Rabbi Armond Cohen of Park Synagogue. Rabbi Cohen is
now in his 90s, and was instrumental in buying the Park School land for
Congregation Anshe Emmeth back in 1942. He had had personal contact with
John D. Rockefeller back in New York and knew some of the history of Park
School before it became the home of Park Synagogue. It seems that Rockefeller
had built rather nice homes in the area around what later became Park
School, and some of the folks who settled there wanted a private school
nearby for their kids. So Rockefeller made land available so that Park
School could move to the land off Ivydale in Cleveland Heights, the same
land now occupied by Park Synagogue.
Rockefeller continued to be a supporter of the school,
often making good its operating deficit at the end of the year. But in
1942 he had an audit done of the school finances and learned that many
families were not paying any tuition, and he may have begun to feel that
they were freeloading on his generosity. The withdrawal of Rockefeller's
financial support was more the death knell for the school than any dislocation
of teaching staff caused by the war.
Rabbi Cohen reports that after the Congregation bought
the school, Rabbi Cohen went to the principal's office and found the school
records, which he believes may still be in the basement of Park Synagogue.
Among those papers was an operation manual which stipulated, among many
other things, that Park School should never enroll more than 10 percent
Jewish students. Exclusionary clauses were quite common in those days,
and a 10 percent quota may even have been generous for its day in the
eyes of the non-Jewish community.
Kids
on tree
1930; The Park School of Cleveland “A school among
the trees, close to the heart of nature....Here will be a laboratory
for the study of nature in its own environment, and a natural setting
for the play of children.”
Apart from that, the student
body was fairly mixed, although class pictures to not show any black or
Asian students. My own family was of very modest means and must have been
one of the ones subsidized by Mr. Rockefeller. But one of my classmates,
Charlie Baker, was the grandson of Newton D. Baker, who was mayor of Cleveland
from 1912 to 1916 and Secretary of War in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet during
World War I. Another student, Betty DiMaiorobus, was the niece of a powerful
Cleveland politician. In a lower grade were the twin daughter and son
of a prominent psychiatrist on the staff of Western Reserve University
Hospitals. I suspect a complete student roster, if we are ever able to
find one, would reflect a broad spectrum of middle-class Cleveland society
of the time.
All of this takes us far beyond what we knew when I planned
my trip to Cleveland. The two remaining unsolved mysteries of Park School
are, (1) what happened to the school records? and (2) is it possible to
find or reconstruct a list of the faculty and students who attended Park?
Perhaps the basement of Park Synagogue will yield the answers to these
questions.
Editor's
note: Additional reference material and photos on
Park School are available for viewing at the Superior Schoolhouse.