Lighting the Lamp of Knowledge

It was 1947 when Kip Patterson and Bob Butche persuaded their 5th grade teacher, Mary Jane Loomis, that they could build a weather observation station just outside their classroom. The proposed location was directly over University School's  main entrance and rotunda. More in tribute to Miss Loomis' confidence in her students, than evidence of meteorological skill on the parts of 11 year olds Kip and Bob, she agreed.

Before long, visitors to University School saw weather monitoring equipment appear on and around the lamp of knowledge just above the building's main entrance.  That winter, the boys recorded temperature, dew point, cloud cover, wind direction and speed. It was a marvelous achievement of progressive education--one that required almost daily trips outside the window to attend to equipment or to read instruments. The University School weather station proved to be a joyful adventure that year--and one that foretold much of what those boys would do in their adult lives as well.

By the next year, Miss Loomis' class had moved to the 2nd floor oval room thus ending the weather experiment.  But1948 proved even more exciting when Phil Tinsky explained how something called the coaxial cable was coming to Columbus and that soon we could come to Phil's house to see the first flickering images of the new age of television.

Those were wonderful years in our lives -- so warmly remembered today  that images dance in our heads with clarity and even in our mid 60's we feel a certain yearning for the innocence and wonder of being Miss Loomis' student at University School.

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University School photo by David A. Parsons
From the AAUS Collection