BFS
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100 Years of BFS – The 1967 Centennial

BFS Centennial in the
New York Daily News,
September 10, 1967
Click for the full PDF

Celebrating our school’s 100th anniversary proved an incredible start to  the 1967-1968 school year at Brooklyn Friends School. An item related to our Centennial emerged while I was recently hand-scanning the tattered scrapbook from the late 1940s about the fight to save Brooklyn Friends School and the Brooklyn Meeting House from becoming the site of the Brooklyn House of Detention. This newspaper clipping from the New York Daily News, dated September 10, 1967, was likely placed in the 1940s scrapbook for safekeeping.

Other items related to the school’s Centennial survive in the BFS Archives, including the reception book and the original Proclamation of September 9, 1967 as Brooklyn Friends School Day by Brooklyn Borough President Abe Stark. Additionally, many donations to the school that year went to a special fund established to honor the Centennial, and that fund seems to have been used entirely in the early 1970s to help our school move from Schermerhorn to Pearl Street.

BFS Centennial in The Life
October 10, 1967, page 3
Click for the full PDF

We are grateful to alumna Nada Davies Barry ’48 who had kept her own small file on the fight to save the school and Meeting House, from her work as a member of the Student Council during her senior year. Nada kindly gave her file to BFS in 2009, and her file ironically included an item related to the school’s Centennial celebration as well, the third and fourth pages from the October 10, 1967 edition of The Life, our student newspaper of many years. Thank you again, Nada!

Mark your calendars for Brooklyn Friends School’s sesquicentennial in 2017. Brooklyn Friends School’s 150th anniversary is something we all look forward to celebrating.