On Tuesday, March 24, Tom Shaffer of Rutgers Avenue in Swarthmore started feeling sick. This is an account of his illness and subsequent recovery, edited from near daily Facebook posts by his wife, Virginia Thompson, while she was at home in Swarthmore with their two kids, both in their twenties. At first she called her posts “Update on Tom,” but after a while, she started titling them “The Tom Report.”
June 19 is Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas finally learned that, two and a half years earlier, the Emancipation Proclamation had legally set them free. If regular Juneteenth commemorations have been held in Swarthmore, they have not been announced in the pages of this newspaper, which record observances and public celebrations of Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa. I would like to change that.
The Strath Haven High School Class of 2020 had a senior year like no other, and they had a graduation ceremony like no other. Class members never expected to finish their last high school classes remotely, and they never imagined watching their own graduation on a computer screen at home. But the one-hour commencement video produced by the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District is full of joy, energy, music, and humor. The video was released at 5 p.m. on June 5, after a slow stream of graduates, each accompanied by two family members or friends, received their diplomas one at a time in the SHHS auditorium.
The Swarthmore College website proclaims that its community “thrives on open dialogue, shoulder-to-shoulder discovery, face-to-face exploration.” This approach, as well as the 8-to-1 student to faculty ratio, has helped the college garner a reputation as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. But its hands-on, intimate learning had to be modified once the college transitioned to remote learning.
Swarthmore has been home to at least eight Guggenheim winners over the years. The distinguished fellowships have been awarded since 1926 in the humanities, sciences, and arts. In 2020, 175 people, out of an applicant pool of about 3,000, were granted fellowships. Author and Swarthmore resident Ben Yagoda is one of the award recipients.
The Swarthmorean is seeking an associate editor to work part-time (20 hours/week) assisting with many aspects of writing and producing the paper, which has been published every week since 1893.
Wallingford-Swarthmore School District Superintendent Lisa Palmer reported in an email to WSSD families on Sunday that “a hurtful and disturbing video...is circulating within our community.” School district officials forwarded the video to the Nether Providence Police Department on Thursday, May 28. The department is investigating. Chief David Splain said that the results of the investigation will be presented to the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office to determine if a crime was committed and whether to file charges.
The Swarthmore Farmers Market is opening on Saturday, June 6. There will be strawberries and scallions, cheese and chickens, peanut butter cookies and portobello mushrooms, just as there are every June. Other things will be different.
A marathon plus five: That’s how many miles you have to run to cover all the streets in Swarthmore. Will Starr did just that earlier this month, embarking a journey that he named “Swarthmore in a Day.”
If you walk down Bowdoin Avenue in Swarthmore, it might escape your notice that number 232 is not a residential house. This is Wesley African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The building opened its doors in 1927, to serve the small black neighborhood that had grown up at the end of the nineteenth century around Bowdoin, Brighton, Kenyon, and Union avenues. We wanted to share a bit of the church’s story as it approaches its 100th anniversary.
Looking back on the last weeks of normalcy before the coronavirus pandemic took hold is surreal, to say the least. The shift was sudden: a day off from school, then a full-blown lockdown. At the time, no one could fully grasp the magnitude of what was coming. But people had to adjust and accept it — quickly. When I look back on the 2019-2020 school year, as any bored but reflective teenager would, I recall conversations where a friend would say something like, “I would do anything for a break.” Or, “I wish everything would just pause.” In a sense, we got that, but it shouldn’t take a global pandemic for students to feel like they can take a break or prioritize their mental health.
Several years ago, I dipped my toe into reporting youth sports by covering Chester Panther youth football. Back then, there was one 8-year-old on the Chester Panthers peewee team who stood out. Every game this kid played, he was the highlight reel. As he grew up and moved into the upper divisions of the football program, he continued to dominate. He kept growing, and he kept getting better. I was looking forward to seeing him play this fall as a 13-year-old. And then I got the text that this 13-year-old boy was shot in the head. He died the next day.
Adjusting to remote learning was the focus of the Wallingford-Swarthmore School Board meeting on Monday, April 27. Also, proposal to lease 1,300 Google Chromebooks — one for every student at Strath Haven Middle School (SHMS) — was unanimously approved by the board. The board also voted unanimously to appoint Gregory Hilden principal of SHHS, starting July 1.
This spring has been one of the coolest in memory. Cool days without excessively cold nights have extended the blooming seasons for many plants. These include Swarthmore’s profusion of magnolia trees, especially the incredibly floriferous saucer magnolia, Magnolia x soulangeana. Some saucer magnolias have bloomed for three to four weeks this spring! Likewise, tulip season has seldom been better.
I remember my last day of in-person school. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that we would be heading into a seemingly endless quarantine. As I was getting ready for school, I stopped myself. I wondered, “What if this is the last day I will go to school?” Later, as I was giving a friend a ride home, I asked, “What if we just had our last day of school?” “That would be crazy,” he said. I interviewed a few Swarthmore residents to learn about their last regular days.
Although the award ceremony is put off until September, the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia recently announced its Preservation Achievement Award winners, which include the renovation of the “Lazaretto” in nearby Tinicum. Bill and Carol Menke, of Ogden Avenue, were landscape architects for the project. Bill notes that this was one of the last projects they undertook before closing their business, Menke & Menke, LLC, after a nearly 35-year run.
Swarthmore Borough and the Children and Adult Disability and Educational Services (CADES) reached an agreement on Sunday allowing for the continued use of the Rutgers Avenue school as a quarantine location for CADES clients with COVID-19 who normally live in group homes in the community. Swarthmore Borough had filed an injunction in the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas on Tuesday, April 14, seeking to remove patients diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Swarthmore Borough Council held a Zoom legislative session on Monday. Approximately 14 people, including borough council members and staff, attended. Much of the evening’s business consisted of ratifying resolutions related to the pandemic. The council ratified Mayor Marty Spiegel’s March 12 declaration of a state of emergency in the borough, as well as the council’s decision to hold meetings virtually as long as the emergency declaration remains in place.
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While the sequestration imposed by the coronavirus has isolated us from one another in many ways, it has also united us through a range of shared experiences, as we all get through this departure from normal life, together (and at least six feet apart). Here is a glossary of the new lingo you’d be picking up in the world, if your friends and neighbors were speaking loudly enough to be heard in the social distance.
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