A present of its colourful past
School’s new mini-museum includes report about a student who was ‘strapped for being annoying’
For years, a grey filing cabinet sat in a back room at Clinton Street Junior Public School collecting dust.
Inside were yellowed folders packed with brittle papers and photos riddled with age, documenting the life of the 127-year-old school at the heart of Little Italy. It was time the artifacts saw the light of day, former principal Wendy Hughes decided, just after the school’s 125th anniversary two years ago.
She rallied together current and past parents and staff to build a room where hidden gems — old nursing implements, attendance logs and school desks — could be shown off to curious students. On Thursday morning, the miniature museum, complete with hundreds of treasures, was unveiled.
As visitors wandered the room, a small group of teachers gathered around a glass case displaying a faded corporal punishment book from the 1800s outlining the consequences that had been doled out for reams of student offences. They laughed about Albert Mondel, “a repeated offender” caught for “chewing gum in room” one January day, and Elliot Krever, who was nabbed for “fighting a girl in school.”
But perhaps the most giggles came from a student “strapped for being annoying.”
“That’s definitely not happening nowadays,” one of the teachers remarked.
Steps away, Hughes showed off wooden desks, oldfashioned school toys, an early school diary and 25,000 registration cards holding information for the school’s pupils between 1920 and 1990.
Among them were records for famed alumni Sam “the Record Man” Sniderman, Arcade Fire instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry and longtime city councillor Howard Moscoe.
“At one point, we even had the head of NBC and CBS at the school,” Hughes said, referring to esteemed newsmen Reuven Frank and Morley Safer.
She said both attended the school around the time of its second rebuild and decades after it held a rifle range in the basement.
She was hoping students would discover those fun facts about the institution’s history when their teachers begin to use artifacts in class lessons in the coming weeks.
Plus, she said the pupils would be able to borrow a number of the items, including yellowing yearbooks, old photographs of women’s basketball teams with outrageously large hairdos and recordings of the school’s song.
She was hoping their exposure to the archival materials could help solve a mystery dating back to just after the school’s Victorian era, when a bell went missing from the hallway.
It came from the original schoolhouse and was meant to be a permanent fixture in each of the rebuilds, but somehow disappeared.
“It was not unusual for bells to go missing and then show up at someone’s cottage, but they cared enough to keep it after each renovation so we would love to have that bell,” she said. “If we found it, it would be the highlight of the year.”