A lost chapter of Black history
Breaking the color barrier at Greenwich Country Day School 50 years ago was sort of an asterisk on David (“Moochie”) Waddell’s time there. It wasn’t really acknowledged then … or now.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he says. “We didn’t know we were making history.”
His mother and grandmother knew exactly what he was doing. They were the architects of him becoming one of the first two Black graduates of the school in 1973 (the other was Monique Lee). The two women had already done so much more on behalf of Black rights in Greenwich, and beyond. His grandmother was a charter member of the Greenwich chapter of the NAACP in 1940, and led a wartime effort to combat discrimination in Connecticut factories.
“My grandmother was low-key but very intense,” Waddell recalls. “My mom was in your face. It was a ’60s kind of thing.”
They were in a Town Hall audience in the 1960s when longtime GCDS Headmaster John Webster responded to an audience question about opening doors to Black students with the words, “not in my lifetime.”
David’s mother, Carol, tapped her mom, Gertrude Steadwell, on the leg.
“I will be damned. I will get one of my kids into this school,” she vowed.
His father, Milton, pushed back a little, telling Carol “maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
“The hell with that, we’re going to do it,” she responded.
They had a lot of teammates to help open doors. When David pitched in youth baseball as an 8-year-old, his batterymate was Scot Weicker. Scot’s dad, Lowell, had been the town’s first selectman and served a term in the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate in 1970 (and becoming Connecticut governor in 1990).
Meanwhile, a new headmaster, Frank Efinger, decided enough time had passed since the school’s opening in 1926. Then, as now, Greenwich Country Day School was seen as elite even in a town synonymous with the word. It’s where former President George H.W. Bush went to school (Class of 1937). But by 1970, as Waddell points out, even the University of Alabama had become integrated.
“(Efinger) and Mom were going on parallel lines. Then their paths crossed,” he says, forming an “X” with his hands. Two trains hurdling toward the same destination.
‘I don’t know if you’re fit’
Two of Waddell’s younger siblings, Joseph and Wendy, earned asterisks of their own when they started at GCDS in 1970. He would soon follow, and would graduate from ninth grade in 1973.
Waddell has written a book with classmate Kim Bancroft, “Same School, Different Class: A Memoir of School Integration” (they’re looking for a publisher). So many of their lessons and anecdotes would be a snug fit for a children’s narrative version as well. They didn’t know each other well half a century ago. When we talked via Zoom Friday (Bancroft now lives in California and Waddell in Hutto, Texas), she kept trying (and failing) to call him “David” instead of “Moochie,” the childhood nickname he picked up from a Disney character.
Bancroft moved from California to Greenwich in 1968, but couldn’t start at GCDS right away because the school had met its defined quota on girls (“a different kind of ’ism,’ ” she says). When the school year started in 1970, she says students were gathered in a conference room and told “this is a very important year because we have our first Black students.” Those students were Moochie’s kid brother and sister.
And that was about the last time it was officially mentioned. There were no DEI councils in 1970, no one to offer a rescue or direction when racism persisted. Moochie (it’s hard not to call him that) cherishes his time there. He was a star athlete on the baseball, football and basketball teams, cited in Greenwich Time as one of the first athletes “in many years” to win varsity awards in all three sports.
But he doesn’t flinch from sharing details of the rougher moments. While the class was studying “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a peer “walked up to me and said, ‘are you our (n-word)?’ ”
The teacher had to hold Moochie back.
“This kid thought it was funny.” A different teacher once taunted him with, “I don’t know if you’re fit to be in this school.”
He wasn’t the only member of his family who endured slurs over integration. Unlike most of his classmates, he didn’t grow up wealthy. His dress shirts and pants came from Korvettes across the town line in Port Chester, N.Y. His dad supplemented his income from Pitney Bowes by bartending at events at Greenwich estates. A host would point out to kids that Milton Waddell’s children also attended GCDS. Milton, a Korean War veteran, would come home and beat the pillow over comments he had to swallow from drunken teenagers.
Family legacy
Greenwich didn’t change Moochie’s family. They changed Greenwich. The resolve was always there. His grandmother, Gertrude Steadwell, was born in 1909 and witnessed discrimination at Greenwich restaurants by age 6. She wasn’t allowed to join the local Campfire Girls.
“Because of my color, I couldn’t get in. I was really very disgusted about it, and I kept on with ‘when I get old enough, I’m going to do something about it,’ ” she recalled in a 1996 interview.
On Dec. 6, 1942, she presided over a meeting at the Greenwich YWCA, declaring the mission “to provide full and equal opportunities for the Negroes, and such other minorities as may suffer from job discrimination, for employment in war industries.” A Stamford Advocate article reports on four “colored residents” detailing to the audience how they were unable to gain employment at local factories.
A decade later she hosted an event that was probably considered just as bold in Greenwich, an NAACP fashion show at Julian Curtiss School (Gertrude worked from home as a seamstress).
She led a demonstration (billed as a “prayer vigil”) outside Greenwich High School in 1964 to try to persuade visiting speaker U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond to “discontinue his role” in the Civil Rights filibuster.
It’s the kind of history Greenwich Country Day School students should have been studying in the classroom in 1973. It’s the kind of history they should revisit during this, and future Black History Months.
Lessons
Some students were paying attention. Moochie recalls the day he was poised to win a school speech competition, only to forget the words to the poem a teacher insisted he memorize the night before (five decades after the words eluded him, he reflexively recites a stanza from Langston Hughes’ “I Too”).
“I froze. I stood there and said, ‘I must sit down because I forgot.’ ”
A year later, Moochie won the competition with a speech about baseball trailblazer Jackie Robinson, who’d recently died in his Stamford home.
Decades later, a classmate reminded Moochie about that time he forgot the words. Passing years wrote a better ending to a moment he preferred to forget.
“You failed that day, but you showed class and dignity,” the classmate said, adding that he used it as an example of life lessons for his children.
Recovering history
Greenwich Country Day School published an excerpt in 2022 from the “dual memoir” written by Waddell and Bancroft, which contrasts his struggles and “fond memories” with her “unhappy experiences” and explores the nuances in between. To play it safe in the alumni magazine, they chose passages that honored mentors.
But that’s about it for the school’s acknowledgment of the color barrier being vanquished. GCDS’s loudest headlines in recent years have been about expansion fueled by a $12 million donation from NBA star Donovan Mitchell, the school’s most famous Black alumnus.
As we wrap up our conversation Friday, I ask Moochie if the landmark moment was noted when he and Lee graduated.
“Nope, it’s still not acknowledged,” he says.
The 50th anniversary is coming up. It’s as good a time as any for this moment in history to finally be recognized as more than an asterisk.