Edgewood, NMS Celebrate Centennials

You walked home for lunch and walked back. There were two recesses, few fat kids, and little homework until fifth grade. That guard who walked you across Edgewood and West Rock? John Resnick and his friends called him ​“cement head” because of his hair.

Now Resnick’s is about the same color, if not a little whiter.

But the school remains vivid in his memory all these years later. Though it, too, has grown and changed.

Crossing guard or no crossing guard, Resnick made it back to Edgewood School Sunday to share those fond memories.

At least 200 staff and students, current and alums including a least two dozen graduates from the 1940s, ​‘50s and ​‘60s, gathered to mark the centennial of the founding of the Edgewood School. They came together in a building that has been beautifully restored to its former grandeur, and added on to, as it enjoys a renaissance with a new mission as a magnet school.

Meanwhile across town a different kind of anchoring educational institution, the Neighborhood Music School, was also strutting its centennial stuff. (More on that later in this story.)

Prather Stack’s Stunt

Amid balloons, a birthday cake, and a long scrolling sheet on which alums wrote their names by year, the prize for the most venerable Edgewood graduate went to Dr. Ernestine Stowell, who graduated in 1933.

She went on, as did many of the older graduates, to attend Sheridan and then Hillhouse. Then she moved to live and work at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

She hadn’t sent foot in Edgewood for 70 years or so. When she did Sunday, she remembered her tallest classmate, one Prather Stack, who performed a regular stunt that the decades haven’t erased.

“We had this fellow in our class, a big tall fellow,” she recalled. Whenever Prather passed the clock high up on the wall at the front of the class, if the teacher wasn’t looking, ​“he flicked the hands. So we went home 20 minutes early.”

As John Resnick (right in photo) and his classmate of 1947 David Silver (pictured with Nancy Ahern, ​‘48) looked at old pictures and reminisced about the pens you had to buy and bring to school. They weren’t ballpoints or Sharpies. Resnick said that at the corner of West Rock and Edgewood, where a restaurant stands today, was a variety store where such purchases were made.

“A holder costs one cent and nibs two cents each,” he said.At least the school provided the ink into which you dipped your nip. Each desk held an ink holder and the teacher came around and filled the holders up from a large bottle.

Celebrating ​“Mr. C”

The event was dedicated to Edgewood’s remarkable teachers. One in particular: Richard Cavallaro. ​“Mr. C.” was born on one end of West Rock Avenue. He and his wife Carolyn both went to Edgewood. (Read more about him here.)

When Cavallaros married and bought a house on the other end of West Rock, they sent their three kids Alicia, Leslie, and David to …

Edgewood, of course. A teacher who remembered every name and face, he worked there from 1965 to 1995. He was known as a caring and approachable lover of good writing and history, and a friendly mentor to newer teachers.

One of those new teachers in 1981 was Rhonda Jackson. As a rookie second-grade teacher she was sent to Mr. C. Along with Dorothy Martino, another seasoned Edgewod instructor on hand, he counseled the young Ms. Jackson not to wear quirky clothes that she thought the kids would think cool.

They steered her right. Today Jackson’s the assistant principal at Hamden Middle School.

One of Mr. C’s students, Rachel Eisner (Class of 1973), recalled his instructions for writing good compositions: stay in the present tense; introduce each new idea with its own paragraph. As she spoke, she and Jackson laid eyes on each other for the first time in decades.

“Oh my god, you’re a woman!” exclaimed Jackson.

Edgewood faced acornfield when it was built in 1911. In the mid-1990s it became the pilot for Mayor John DeStefano’s citywide school construction program. When the the new building, incorporating the old, was completed in 1999, the community room was dedicated to Richard Cavallaro.

He died in February of this year after a struggle with pancreatic cancer. He’d been given three months to live. He made it through more than two years, but did not live quite long enough to celebrate his 80th birthday, 50th wedding anniversary, or the centennial of Edgewood. His wife said anticipating those events and trying to reach them were major factors in his living longer than the medical sentence.

Edgewood is planning special dinners and other events throughout the rest of this year to continue to celebrate the Edgewood centennial. Committee member and teacher alum Stephanie Fitzgerald said leftover money will help buy interactive digital white boards (so long chalk boards) for all of Edgewood’s classrooms.

Paulishen’s Pics

Jack Paulishen, a Hillhouse High teacher who lives up the block from Edgewood, brought his camera to the party. Here are some of his pics.

Neighborhood Music School Plays On

Later, on Sunday event, the Neighborhood Music School kicked off its 100th birthday party on Audubon Street. NMS is the state’s largest private music school (2,500 students from Greater New Haven) and one of the ten largest in the country.

NMS Sunday evening filled filling its studios, hallways, and public spaces with 100 performers including faculty, students, and guests.

Notable among the former is Grace Feldman. She has been teaching at NMS for 50 years! She began when the NMS was in a building on Chapel Street, not far from Olive.

NMS started out as a music project within a settlement house there, said current Director of Development Alice-Ann Harwood. The music program grew so quickly that it soon had its own building.

In 1968, NMS moved to the Audubon Street building. Feldman continues to be director of the string ensembles at the school.

NMS’s ensembles number nearly 100, Harwood said. Feldman said they include a ​“huge contingent of adult beginners,” like Christine Howe (pictured at the top of this story).

Howe said she took up the cello five years ago. She’d always loved listening to the music. Then a friend and her 8‑year old visited her, and the 8‑year-old gave her a lesson. She was hooked.

Howe’s been in two of Feldman’s ensembles, ​“Yearlings,” for those who have studied only one year; and he ​“Never Too Late” ensemble, composed of people who are yearning to play music and need to overcome the notion that it’s, well, never too late.

Ada Wilson, a recorder student, fits that category. She said that a music teacher allowed 18 of her 20 high-school classmates to be in the holiday chorus and pageant. Wilson and another were deemed to have such poor music ability that they were told to usher.

Wilson has been studying at NMS for 20 years. ​“It took Grace 15 years to show me that I could hear,” she said.

Harwood said the school has students from six months old to over 80. The six-month-olds are part of a state certified and arts-based pre-school program. There’s a group called ​“dancing with Parkinsons,” and about everything in between.

Harwood said the goal of the centennial is to raise 100 percent more than last year, or about $1.2 million. That money will go to equip the school’s 38 studios with computers; none have them now. The computers would be a boon for teaching and learning composition and music theory.

NMS also wants to double the budget of $225,000 that enables 350 students to go to the school on scholarship.

That includes a vigorous program with five New Haven Public Schools and growing. NMS is off to a good start with a $100,000 recent donation from First Niagara.

Feldman and her NMS teaching colleague Marshall Barron conducted a ​“play-in” Sunday of baroque music with a pick-up ensemble of violins, flutes, cellos, and woodwinds, musicians ranging in age from about 4 to 75-plus. She said that while she would like to see the school grow, it feels just perfect to her.

“It’s got a community feeling,” she said. ​“It’s family.”