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“The Big House is gone, yes, but our spirits are not gone with it. We are regaining a happy life again… With this in mind, and the constructive spirit that is always a part of this school, I am sure we will always go forward rapidly in whatever we might have to do.” – Joyce, 6th Grade, 1946
It was late July 2014, around 8 pm in the evening, and I was driving with my family near Bend, Oregon. As was often the case back then, we were enthusiastically belting out a Taylor Swift song – “Welcome to New York,” if I remember correctly – when our evening was interrupted by a call.
“Hey, is this Mark Silver?” someone said somewhat breathlessly. “I’m one of the school’s neighbors on the Longmeadow side. There is a fire on your campus and the fire department is on the way.”
Over the next few hours, I learned the full update from 500+ miles away. The outdoor stage, which had been built in the 1940s, had completely burned to the ground. Several of our oldest oak trees – trees that towered over the stage area – had been damaged. Thanks to the quick action of our neighbors, the fire department had been dispatched quickly and the fire had not spread. The overall campus was safe.
Over the next two years, we turned this tragic moment into an opportunity and, ultimately, emerged with our campus better than ever. The stage’s destruction inspired us to imagine a new amphitheater in the middle of campus, a space that has become the home for Flag each week and feels like the beating heart of the Los Gatos campus. Where the stage had been, we created the new Hub Classroom, the site of 5th and 6th grade science with Ms. Benefiel today.
It was not the first time that our community had rebounded from a fire. Nearly 80 years ago, in one of the most dramatic moments in our school’s history, the Parker House or “Big House” as it was informally called burned to the ground late in the evening of January 3, 1946. Unlike during the 2014 fire when no person was on campus, the Parker House was full of sleeping children – we were a boarding school at that time – and so the fire involved a full evacuation and dramatic stories of how older students and adults, along with the neighbors and the Fire Department, managed to bring everyone to safety and keep the fire from spreading to other parts of campus. Indeed, the February issue of The Happy Times, a newspaper created by the children, included a wide array of stories from both adults and children highlighting how people stepped up in ways both big and small to support the school in its moment of need.
Foreshadowing our response many years later in 2014, the school used the moment to envision a new building to house the children. As one of the 6th grade students, Joyce, wrote, “Since there is such a shortage of lumber and it costs so much and we want something that won’t burn, we are going to replace it with adobe! We are getting the clay from our own school grounds.” She went on to describe how children would make the bricks for the new building – a project that did, indeed, happen – although in the end represented only a small portion of the bricks that were ultimately used to build what became the Adobe, a historic building on campus that lasted until the early 2000s.
Ultimately, the new construction would be finished in large part because of the school’s first fundraising campaign, a campaign that brought in $40,000, an amount that represents a little under $700,000 in today’s dollars. For a small little country school in Los Gatos right at the end of World War II, it was quite an accomplishment and showcased the strength of our community to respond to even the most challenging setbacks.
Evidence of our more recent response to the 2014 fire can be seen not only in the new spaces – the amphitheater, the Hub and the Hub Classroom- but by spending a few minutes perusing the donor wall that sits along the pathway as you enter the Hub. The school raised just under $7 million for the Being Our Best campaign, the largest campaign in the school’s history to that point, with gifts coming from throughout our community. Just like in 1946, we responded to a challenge by coming together as a community and making things better.
Returning to the words of 6th grader Joyce in 1946, “The Big House is gone, yes, but our spirits are not gone with it. We are regaining a happy life again… With this in mind, and the constructive spirit that is always a part of this school, I am sure we will always go forward rapidly in whatever we might have to do.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.