The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.
In honor of the games, I wanted to share some athletic feats from Henry Scripps Booth’s classmates at the Asheville School. Like many schools and clubs do today, his boarding school in Asheville, North Carolina, staged their own version of the Olympics in 1918!
“The Olympian Team – Seneff, Fowler, French, Platt, and McLain,” Pleasures of Life, Album 3. Photo by Henry Scripps Booth, Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
Henry Slaughter competing in long jump, Charlotte-Asheville Track Meet, 1918. Pleasures of Life, Album 3. Photo by Henry Scripps Booth, Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
Henry Beatty competing in long jump, Charlotte-Asheville Track Meet, 1918. Pleasures of Life, Album 3. Photo by Henry Scripps Booth, Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
The Quarter Mile, Charlotte-Asheville Track Meet, 1918. Pleasures of Life, Album 3. Photo by Henry Scripps Booth, Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
Zo Walter wins the 220 yard dash, Charlotte-Asheville Track Meet, 1918. Pleasures of Life, Album 3. Photo by Henry Scripps Booth, Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
Henry Slaughter competes in High Jump, clearing 5 feet, 4 inches in the Charlotte-Asheville Track Meet, 1918. Pleasures of Life, Album 3. Photo by Henry Scripps Booth, Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
So prepare your snacks, turn on NBC, play Summon the Heroes, and get ready to cheer! Best wishes to all the athletes competing in the Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo this summer!
– Leslie S. Mio, Associate Registrar, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
Summer school. Those two words usually make most children cringe—who wants to spend their summer vacation studying and attending classes? Sheer morbid curiosity made me explore further a few folders in Brookside School Records, a collection just opened for research last month. What I found was not the usual story.
The Brookside summer school program, AWAKE, had a different purpose than remedial education for elementary students. Developed in 1968 by Pontiac Elementary Principal Jim Hawkins and Brookside Headmaster John P. Denio, it was designed to promote harmony and understanding amongst young children who might not otherwise share life experiences due to racial, social, and economic segregation.
AWAKE followed on the heels of the “long hot summer” of 1967, which saw civil unrest in Detroit and cities across Michigan, including Pontiac, due to long-standing racial inequalities for Black Americans. Instituted in 1968, AWAKE’s purpose was to “bring together young children in essentially two segregated school areas,” in some ways foreshadowing the desegregation of Pontiac and Detroit schools in the early 1970s.
On the playgrounds of Brookside School and Bethune Elementary, circa 1968. Jack Kausch, photographer. Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
Roughly fifty children split their time equally between the Bloomfield Hills and Pontiac schools for five mornings a week, over a four-week period in July and August. Co-sponsored by Cranbrook’s Brookside School and Pontiac Public Schools’ Bethune and Whittier Elementary Schools, the program included art projects, field trips, swimming, reading, and other enrichment activities for kindergarten-age children in both communities. Directed at young children because of their natural receptiveness at that age, Denio believed that,
With AWAKE, children four through six, through work and play activities and through simple, open contact with each other may perhaps develop the knowledge and understanding necessary to reinforce their acceptance of each other as human beings.
Governed by a Board comprised of community members and Pontiac Public School administrators and teachers, the program was self-sustained through tuition fees (waived in cases of need), financial contributions, and community support. Christ Church Cranbrook, for example, played a significant role through both donations and parishioners’ participation in the program. Familiar Cranbrook names, such as Cranbrook School teacher and Horizons-Upward Bound founder, Ben Snyder, and his wife Margot were also regular advocates of the program.
Borrowing lyrics from Rogers and Hammerstein and with photographs by Jack Kausch, poster displays sum up AWAKE’s ethos: “Getting to know you … Getting to know all about you … Getting to like you … Getting to hope you like me.” Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
A grass roots experiment in creative problem-solving of the urban crisis faced by cities across the country, AWAKE only lasted for five years (1968-1972). Because of its short duration, the effectiveness of the program was never fully appreciated, despite a 1969 study conducted by a University of Michigan Ph.D. student in education and social sciences and regular solicitation of teacher and parent feedback. Ultimately, rising costs and a lack of grant money; shortages of staff; and dwindling enrollment, undoubtedly due in part to the integration of Pontiac schools and the unsettling atmosphere of anti-busing protests, prohibited the continuation of the program.
—Deborah Rice, Head Archivist, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
In early June, the Center’s Assistant Curator Kevin Adkisson and Collections Interpreter Lynette Mayman hosted the Cranbrook Kingswood Middle School for Girls students and staff for Greek Day tours around the sculptures of Cranbrook Academy of Art. Today, Lynette explores one of the myths central to the sculpture of Carl Milles: Orpheus and Eurydice.
The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice has many versions, most of them adding and leaving out various details. As in all Greek myths everything has a back story, and everything is linked. If you start to retell one tale, then you end up telling many more, which is how you might have been invited to stay at the palace indefinitely, recounting the myths.
These days many of these myths are known only in part, the grimmer consequences and endings forgotten or deliberately omitted to make them less peculiar and frightening.
Carl Milles’ Orpheus Fountain, well-described elsewhere, does not actually include the massive sculpture of Orpheus, though the model for it, once on display atop the column in the Arts and Crafts Court, is currently on display at Cranbrook Art Museum.
Carl Milles’ Sketch for Orpheus, circa 1926, on display in the Cranbrook Arts and Crafts Courtyard, July 17, 1945. Harvey Croze, photographer. Cranbrook Archives, Center for Collections and Research.
Ancient tellers of the myth include Plato and Virgil, but perhaps the best-known and longest version is from Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE) in books X and XI of his Metamorphoses. Ovid is renowned for relishing the lugubrious and not sparing the gory details in lightly tripping dactylic hexameters. He also gives us a rare glimpse into the how and why of tales which were well-known to his readers.
Ovid skips the early part of the myth where Apollo may or not be Orpheus’ father and how Orpheus plays his lyre and sings to the Argonauts to drown out the Sirens; he cuts to the chase, as it were.
Cranbrook Kitchen Sink 