If you’ve been following staff member Henry Walker’s remarkable video series — over a dozen school history interviews with past students and staff — you know what a profound service this project is for the larger CFS community. In his fiftieth year as a beloved Middle School history and writing teacher, Henry personifies CFS for many of us who were in the first wave of his student advisees in the 1970s. His familiar, pun-laced, and cozy but thoughtful style has proven to be ideal for relaxing alumni and colleagues during Zoom interviews onscreen. The results are hours of authentic stories, memories, and insights into the long-term influence of the School: what Henry called “an empathic leap into the past” during one interview.
I participated in two interviews as a subject, but chiefly took delight in watching my own classmates and former teachers narrate their past school days and current projects. Halfway though the pandemic year, as I watched Friends School history unspool onscreen surrounded by the comfort of my California redwoods, I noticed how Henry had once again led us to be producers and consumers of stories: his ultimate gift.
In the videos, over and over, we hear onetime Middle Schoolers who are now artists, professors, and lawyers tell Henry that whatever their situations were before arriving at CFS, and no matter how rocky their eventual teen years in the Upper School and in college, Henry’s writing classes in the Middle School years constituted a safe harbor. We wrote and wrote and wrote. We practiced not just the production of our own ideas and visions, but we practiced listening to others. We were allowed to be critics who did not criticize; rather, we offered, and accepted, suggestions. At ten and eleven, we may still have battled over the front seat in the carpool, or jeered the contents of one another’s sodden brown-bag lunches, but in creative writing hour we gained the poise and skills of constituting a respectful audience. Reading a fresh story aloud to the golden circle of peers made me the public writer I am today; moreover, when I dare the embarrassment of opening up my diary from 1974, I find many entries detailing what my classmates, as well as Henry, said about how I might strengthen my stories. No one mocked. The environment was one of perfect, authentic feedback. These skills of mutually supporting one another translated into other artistic venues, too. As an Upper School student invited to join Middle School students in watching a Middle School play, I recall being struck by how appreciative and enthusiastic the Middle Schoolers were as audience to their own classmates.
Learning to hear another’s story and to share one’s own is the basic formula for a lifetime of reading and writing. Henry’s videos reveal a variety of ways that CFS kids and staff grappled with exposing our life challenges, and respecting those of others in our community. We also made history as self-aware members of a unique school at a unique time and place in American history. I saw, in the videos, quite a few of us becoming once again just kids on the carpet in Henry’s homeroom, reading aloud to a circle of trusted peers, an hour that was one safety net in an unstable world.
— Bonnie J. Morris ’79
View Henry's video site at https://friendsschoolanunofficialhistory.blogspot.com/