Full Text:

withphotos

Ralph Berkemann, Class Of 1951, Remembers:

The War Years, Leather Football Helmets, And Hawley High

B Y D OROTHY E VANS

When one of the twin maples in the front of Hawley School was struck down by

lightning on July 15, a few longtime Newtown residents might have shed quiet

tears.

To them, the venerable old school just won't look right without that tree.

It has guarded Hawley's front entrance since 1922, the year the school was

built. Dedicated April 5, 1922, Hawley was to be Newtown benefactress Mary

Elizabeth Hawley's first gift to the town.

Originally, Hawley School was intended to house all 12 grades. In fact, Hawley

continued to graduate Newtown seniors until 1953, when the new Queen Street

school was built to hold the upper grades.

From 1953 to the present, therefore, Hawley has been an elementary school,

welcoming Newtown children from kindergarten through the fifth grade.

Beginning this fall with the completion of its second major addition, Hawley

will also welcome approximately 150 Sandy Hook children, due to a recent

redistricting.

One of the last senior classes to graduate from Hawley before it became a

solely elementary school was the Class of 1951. Ralph Berkemann was a member

of that class, having grown up in Newtown on Hanover Springs Road.

Today, Mr Berkemann lives in Brookfield but he remembers those early Hawley

School days from a time when both he and the maple tree were 50 years younger,

during the years between 1939 and 1951.

He and his family moved to Newtown in April 1940 when he was in the middle of

the first grade.

"That was three miles from Hawley School and there was no bus," Mr Berkemann

recalled recently.

"Mrs Beardsley and Mrs MacQuillan drove six of us to school each day in a

Plymouth woodie station wagon," he said, adding "that road wasn't paved until

1945."

"It's a shame," Mr Berkemann said, hearing of the tree's untimely demise.

He spoke July 16 from Branson Ultrasonics Corporation in Danbury, where he has

worked for the past 31 years and where he is now director of product

engineering.

After graduating from Hawley, Mr Berkemann went to UConn for four years and

then joined the army and was stationed in Germany for three years.

In 1964, he and his wife, Sylvia, moved to Brookfield on Cannon Road off Route

133 and their daughter Heidi grew up there.

Hawley's 75th Jogs Memories

Early this spring, Mr Berkemann had read a Newtown Bee article (dated March

21, 1997), that noted the occasion of Hawley's recent 75th birthday.

Past Hawley graduates were urged to come forward with their recollections of

the old school, and Mr Berkemann was persuaded to spend an afternoon in his

Brookfield home, calling up some of those old memories.

Leafing through the pages of his 1951 yearbook was enough to bring back Mr

Berkemann's recollections of growing up in Newtown at the century's midpoint.

His 1951 yearbook photographs show a class of smiling young girls, their silky

long page-boy hairdos held back with barrettes. Many of them wore silk

neckerchiefs, white-collared blouses and full skirts. The boys' hair was as

carefully groomed as the girls', with neat parts and meticulously combed front

waves.

The preferred dress for boys seemed to be V-necked sweaters, plaid shirts and

chino pants. Nobody wore jeans or Levi's - at least, not on picture-taking

day.

School was pretty serious business, Mr Berkemann remembered, but there was

time for fun, too, and a seat at the back of the classroom out of the

immediate view of the teacher was considered a lucky circumstance, indeed.

As one of the tallest boys in his class, Ralph Berkemann was privileged to

have a back seat in Room 6, which he donated in the Class Will "to anyone who

wants to raise Cain without Miss Dolan's seeing it."

Mr Berkemann also recalled that his class was one of the largest in the

school's history, graduating 35 students in 1951.

The annual class picnic was at Sandy Beach at the end of the year. That was a

big event.

"We got our class rings junior year," he said.

"Graduation always happened on Thursday night," because as the years went on,

the classes got so big graduation couldn't be held in Hawley's auditorium.

So, it was moved over to Edmond Town Hall and Thursday was the only night when

there wasn't a movie.

Popovers In The Annex

Though Hawley was built for all 12 grades, the end of the war years saw

Newtown's population growing to the point that over-crowding at Hawley had

become an issue.

In 1948-49, therefore, a major two-story, brick addition was constructed on

the north side, adding several classrooms, a cafeteria and a gymnasium.

Before the addition, however, Ralph Berkemann remembers a white wooden annex

that was attached to the back of the old building. The annex was where the

eighth graders took home economics.

"We cooked the best puff pastries and popovers you can imagine," he said and

closed his eyes, remembering how delicious they were.

Then he reeled off a list of teachers and administrators from the years he had

attended Hawley School, beginning with the elementary years.

"Miss Coffee was our first grade teacher. Second and third was taught by Mrs

Hayes and Miss Mulvaney. The principal was Carl LeGrow."

When Ralph Berkemann entered high school, Mr LeGrow was still principal but

there were other teachers who spent time with the Class of 1951.

"Walter Los for science, Mrs [Frances] Goodsell for math, Mr [Irving] Hall for

biology. Joseph Ozanne was the French teacher who later became principal of

Newtown High School. It was just this last spring that Mr Ozanne died," Mr

Berkemann said with regret.

Then there was Mr [Charles] Reed who taught history and Miss [Kathleen] Dolan

who taught English. The school music teacher was William Jones.

"He was Spike Jones' brother," Mr Berkemann pointed out, adding, "We had a

marching band and uniforms, and the orchestra always played for graduation -

only underclassmen, of course."

Mentioning the physical education teachers, Harold DeGroat and Miss [Ann]

Anderson, brought back memories of sports at Hawley School.

Clearly, Mr Berkemann was an enthusiastic fan of everything from football to

women's basketball, which he recalled was "excellent and undefeated. Just like

the UConn women."

Last Of The Leather Football Helmets

"We had championship teams," Mr Berkemann said proudly of his school football

team, which he said played "six-man" tackle football.

It wasn't touch football and there was no junior varsity.

"When I was a freshman on the team in 1947, we wore leather helmets, shoulder

pads and hip pads. It was a tough game. There were a lot of injuries. Broken

arms and legs," Mr Berkemann remembered.

But he didn't want to give the impression he was the star on the football team

or anything like that.

"If I said that, the other guys on the team, guys that live around here like

Jack Watkins and Johnny Lorenzo, they would hear about it and come after me,"

he joked.

In 1948, the football team changed to plastic helmets, which were supposed to

be safer.

The regional football league that Hawley belonged to played schools from other

towns such as Bethel, always "a big rival," as well as New Milford and

Washington and the regional meets were held in Falls Village, Guilford, Mr

Berkemann said.

Night Lights At Taylor Field

"We had the first night football games in the state," Mr Berkemann remembered.

They used rented lights with towers that came in on a big truck, and the cost

was borne largely by the members of the Newtown Lions Club.

"The town really got into that!" Mr Berkemann said. "Everyone in town showed

up and supported us."

"There were about 5,000 people in Newtown in those days," he said, and several

hundred would regularly come out for the night games under the lights.

"It was exciting. Better than the normal games on Friday afternoon," he said.

No student could start playing football at Hawley until freshman year, he

said, and mostly it was the juniors and seniors who played in the games.

"But coach De Groat had to get anyone he could, to come out."

In junior high, the boys played soccer and the women played softball and

basketball. There was also field and track, the broad jump and the high jump.

Hopi Indian Assembly

During World War II in the mid-1940s, when Mr Berkemann was in his elementary

years at Hawley, he remembers going to special assemblies in the school

auditorium.

There was one assembly, in particular, that made a strong impression upon him.

A family of Native-American Hopi Indians had been transferred from their

reservation in Arizona to Newtown because the US Government was doing some

bomb testing on their tribal lands.

"There must have been half a dozen families. They lived right where Sand Hill

Plaza is now. They put their tepees up in a gravel pit nearby a stretch of

road we called Dead Man's Curve," Mr Berkemann remembers.

One Hopi Indian, Myron Sicayuma, was attending Hawley the same time that Mr

Berkemann was in school, and Myron helped the other Hopis during the assembly,

putting on a rodeo show of rope twirling and dancing.

"Whatever happened to those people after the war?" Mr Berkemann wondered.

He mentioned that he and his wife, Sylvia, had driven over to the Hopis' home

town, Moenkopti, Ariz., a few years ago and "it was still there."

Air Raid Alerts

And Surveillance

"We had air raid alerts in school. When the siren went off at the firehouse,

we packed up our stuff and went to a neighbor's home. Our class went to the

Beers' house on the corner of Church Hill Road and the Boulevard," Mr

Berkemann said.

"Inside, we spread out in the living room until it was over. They gave us

cookies and milk and had games like Pick-Up Sticks for us."

Apparently the students in Mr Berkemann's class, then in the third, fourth and

fifth grades, stayed about an hour until the siren went off again, telling

them it was OK to go back to school.

During this time, Mr Berkemann also remembers that a lot of residents joined

the Air Raid Warning Service and went through intensive training so they could

identify enemy aircraft in the skies over Newtown.

His mother, Gretchen Berkemann, was a member of the volunteer corps and

sometimes he would accompany her to her observation post.

"First they went to Fairfield Hills, then later they moved it halfway up Mount

Pleasant Road," he said.

Observers were assigned times and had to climb a two-story tower that had a

balcony all around, carrying binoculars and notes showing the silhouettes of

different kinds of German and Japanese planes.

"Some of the airplanes we actually saw were US military ones, hedge-hopping,

flying close to the ground and practicing. We'd call up Mitchell Air Force

Base on Long Island and report what we'd sighted," he said.

His father was a local air raid warden for the Hanover Road district and

during drills it was his job to see that residents blacked out their car

headlights by painting over the top half.

"He would drive up and down blowing his siren. We were supposed to pull down

our shades and turn off lights," Mr Berkemann said.

At 16, Scouts Went Camping

Paul Cullens was the scoutmaster of Pine Tree Patrol, Ralph Berkemann's Boy

Scout troop while he was growing up in Newtown.

"When you turned 16, you could take a two-week camping and canoeing trip to

the Canadian woods north of Quebec," Mr Berkemann recalled.

"It was a great privilege."

There were eight boys, plus Mr Cullens and the assistant scoutmaster, all

riding up in two vehicles, he said.

Mr Berkemann went three years in a row, and he remembers seeing bear and

moose, going fishing, doing the cooking and baking and picking blueberries.

"Half the team would set up camp and half would cook the dinner," he said.

Once, he used too much baking powder in the biscuits and they turned out so

heavy they were "like lead sinkers. We fed a few to the sea gulls and joked

that those gulls would never be seen again. They would just disappear. Sink to

the bottom of the lake and drown."