Campus School on the Digital Commons!

For all of you who may have attended the Campus School, or did your student teaching there, or worked there, you'll be interested to know that our Digital Commons now has a collection devoted to the Campus School. It was only launched this past week, but there is some material in there already, and more will be added. If you aren't familiar with what the "campus school" was, the brief explanation is as follows.

Brockport's campus school ran from 1867-1981. It served several purposes, including offering hands on training for students learning to be teachers, and as an experimental school in which to try out new teaching techniques and technologies. It was an actual school; it varied over the years, but always included at least grades 1-8. Usually there were two sections of each grade, and the students were children from the local area for most of its history, although in the last years the school was a pioneer in urban suburban integration efforts. The children had full time teachers who both taught the classes, and oversaw the rotation of student teachers through the class. For many years the school was housed in a wing of the main building, then in 1965 Cooper Hall opened, which was built expressly to house the Campus School. (Pictured here are campus school children running around a Maypole on the lawn of Hartwell in the early 1950s.)

Balopticoms & lantern slides

Pictured here is a Bausch & Lomb "Balopticom," ca1930. This antique looking device is a type often referred to as a "magic lantern" and was used to project lantern slides. If you aren't familiar with these things, the story goes as follows. Before Kodak came out with its 35mm color slide film in the late 1930s, and long before Powerpoint, if you wanted to do a slideshow, you did it with something like this Balopticom. You loaded one glass slide at a time into the projector, displaying the images for a class, a civic group etc. The slides were typically made up of two pieces of glass, one with the image on it, the other sitting on top of the image, and the two sealed round with a paper tape. One major sector of the glass slide business was educational. Companies hired photographers to shoot scenes of nature, localities and people across the world, and then produced and sold the images to educational institutions. The NY State Department of Education used to distribute slides to schools, including Normal schools like Brockport. In the college archives we have a large set of wooden cabinets with hundreds of slides, covering a tremendous range of topics, life in Hawaii or Norway, animals of North America, works of art etc. This set of equipment was a key part of audiovisual equipment here from the 1920s up through, well, perhaps the 1950s; do any readers recall using or viewing the glass slides as students or staff here?

Historical Information on the College at Brockport

The college archives has records, photographs and other materials going back almost to the founding of the school in 1835. Although visitors are welcome, and the archivist is glad to research information as time permits, a growing amount of history of the college is available online. For years we have had the archive web pages, but now in the new Digital Commons we have a whole section for the archives! Visit the site sometime and browse through yearbooks from the WWI era, or look for a relative or ancestor in one of the old Normal School alumni directories, or read one of the many excellent student papers on various aspects of the college's history.

Genial, smiling and friendly...

That's how Beryl Roberts '45 described Dr. Donald Tower in a piece in the Stylus in February 1945, when he had been here just about a year as president of the college, having taken over from Ernest Hartwell in February 1944. Tower was a native New Yorker, having grown up in Dundee NY in the Finger Lakes. He was educated in the local schools there, and then attended Albany State Teachers College and New York University. His first job after graduating Albany in 1919 was as a high school teacher in Olean NY, for $1,100 per year!  

After receiving advanced degrees he was head of the training school department at Oswego before coming to Brockport.  When he became president of this college in 1944 it was quite small, just 325 students, and the whole campus was what we now call Hartwell Hall and Alumni House (at the time, Alumni House was the president's home; Dr. Tower was the last president to live there.)

In here "Personality Plus" column, Beryl Roberts described Dr. Tower as saying that as far as hobbies went, he loved hiking, and also swimming and reading, His real hobby he said was his job, that he immensely enjoyed working with people and teaching. She noted that "Steak and French fries are Dr. Tower's favorite dish - though he admits that like most of us he hasn't partaken of them in a long time." (This was during WWII, and food rationing was in effect...) She also noted that Dr. Tower's academic interests were in English and dramatics. (Dr. Tower wrote an early book on dramatics for the college level, Educational Dramatics, 1930.)

In a Stylus article a few years later, in 1953, the writer noted that "Dr. Tower's theory of administration is one of close contact between the administrator and the administrated. At no time is the door to Dr. Tower's office closed... Dr. Tower said, 'Please don't make your story an obituary, I want the student body to know me as a person, not merely as an office holder."

When Dr. Tower retired from Brockport in 1964 he had helped establish the SUNY system in the late 1940s, and seen Brockport grow as a campus and a school much beyond what it had been in 1944. He didn't completely retire though, as he taught for several years more as an adjunct at St. John Fisher. Dr. Tower died in 1977, but is fondly remembered by many Brockport alum and emeriti to this day.

Cherishing This Heritage

Cherishing This Heritage is the history of the college published in 1969 as part of the observation of our centennial anniversary of becoming a state school in 1867. Wayne Dedman, a history professor at the college,was given a year sabbatical to research and write the book. It is an excellent work of scholarship that relates the personalities of the people who made the school what it was, the culture of the school and its students, and something of the history of education and teacher training as well; what were those academies anyway, or what exactly was a "Normal" school? There is also some in depth treatment of the history of the village of Brockport.

There are several copies in our circulating collection: LD571.B782 D42. Check one out soon - something a little different to read at the beach this summer!

A great sports story!

The story of the 1955 Brockport soccer team that is. They were National Co-Champions along with Penn State that year. It's a great sports story of a truly amateur team from a small teachers college defeating all comers. You can read Daniel Cody's paper on the team in our Digital Commons. Shown here is a team photo from that year.

"Our little untried craft"

Thus the first editorial staff of the Stylus described it in their inaugural issue of May 1914: "We are starting our little untried craft, 'The Stylus' upon its first voyage, which is always a more or less perilous one simply because of the very newness and unproven seaworthiness of the vessel. In the case of 'The Stylus' even the crew, the editiors, are as new and untested as the craft itself."

It is almost a century later now, and certainly the Stylus has proven "seaworthy," perhaps more so than the editors who launched it could ever have imagined! Pictured here are two of the original Stylus staff, Gertrude Cook '17 and Loyd Coleman '14.