Catherine Harker was born to a pioneer family in Portland, Ore., on March 2, 1865. She was the daughter of James Bartlett Harker and Sarah Ellen Polk. The family was of English, Scotch and Dutch ancestry. Catherine, known as “Cassy” to family and friends, was the oldest of three sisters. Middle sister Sara became Catherine’s right-hand woman at Miss Harker’s School for Girls. Sadly, Caroline, the youngest, became despondent while in her early twenties and ended her own life.
Young Catherine attended Portland Oregon High School. Before she went to Palo Alto to open her school in 1903, she was a substitute at Portland High School, had private students, taught at Curtner Seminary in California (1895-1898) and at Mills College in Oakland, California (1890-1893; 1898-1901).
Catherine opened her school for girls in 1903. It began on the corners of Kingsley and Bryant in the vacated Castilleja Hall. Eighty students were enrolled and seven graduated the first year. In 1907, the school moved to a six-plus acre spot in an old vineyard. Cows, chickens, potato patches and vegetable gardens could be seen from the classrooms. Board and tuition in 1903 was $500; the day school cost was between $50 to $90.
Headmistress Harker, who taught Latin and mathematics in addition to her administrative duties, has been described in a variety of sources as a dignified woman with a strong sense of the importance of academics, who often laced her lessons with humor.
The 1952 edition of the Miss Harker’s School Yearbook, “The Echo,” wrote, “Miss Catherine Harker… was not only a meticulous scholar whose daily lessons were carefully organized in neatly penciled notes, but she was a strongly attractive teacher, usually dressed in the dignity of white shirtwaists and long black skirts of her day, who re-assured her students with a contagiously delightful sense of humor.” The October 1952 edition of local magazine Tall Tree said, “Her faculty of combining humor and scholarliness made her courses a delightful experience.”
The motto of Miss Harker’s School for Girls was non ministrari, sed ministrare: “Not to be served, but to serve.” In 1923, the City of Palo Alto changed its street signs to reflect the school’s presence. Katherine and Central became Melville and Harker, respectively.
Catherine Harker passed away Dec. 12, 1938 at the age of 73 after suffering a heart attack while on the school grounds.
The Harker boarding program, which moved to the Saratoga campus in 1972, officially closed on Thurs., June 6, 2002, due to the growing space needs of Harker’s expanding K-Gr. 12 program. The decision to close the program at the end of the 2001-02 school year was extremely difficult for then president Howard Nichols, who was once a Harker boarding student.
Caring, capable staff took care of the health, academics and social lives of approximately 1,377 school year boarding students and approximately 2,100 summer boarding students when the program was active. Study hall, meals, recreation, shopping, haircuts – all the daily needs – were met by the enthusiastic, dedicated dorm staff.
Staff who have lived and/or worked in the dorm include Terry Walsh, Joe Rosenthal, Pam Dickinson, Pat Walsh, Cindy Kerr, J.R. Del Alto and Andrew Hansen. Many of the dorm staff were coaches, teachers and bus drivers by day, and dorm staff by night. Some started out at the Harker dorm and went on to be teachers.
The dorm provided a family element to the school over the years, and with breakfast and dinner served each day to the boarding students. Harker encouraged faculty to come early or stay late and spend time with the boarders. The boarders always enjoyed seeing teachers outside of the classroom, and many of the teachers developed special bonds with this “extended family.”
As the program ended, former dorm staff members shared some of their favorite memories:
“I remember that we would play capture-the-flag before study hall when daylight savings time commenced in the spring. We had a great time.”—Howard Nichols (1940-2008), former head of school
“Drive-in movies on the lawn where Dobbins is, big pool parties and whale-watching with 24 sick kids and three sick staffers. And I’ve got a million more!” —Pat Walsh, Gr. 5 teacher
“One of my fondest memories when I was a houseparent in the dorm was the Major’s dog, Dutch, a 140-lb. mastiff. Dutch was the unofficial school mascot, and as such, had the run of the dorms and the campus.”—Dan Gelineau, former asst. head of school
“Staying up all night with the kids reading fairy tales after an earthquake; hiking through the hills to cut down the perfect Christmas tree and then having a party to decorate it with handmade ornaments; making bag lunches for the girls so they could have ‘home’ lunch; sewing on untold numbers of patches on sweaters; knowing that kids like Marta, Theresa, Jessica and many others felt like they were ‘home.’” —Cindy Ellis, middle school head
“I’ll never know who really had more fun in the weekend boarding program — me or the kids!”—Pam Dickinson, director of the Office of Communication
“Sitting in the dorm office with a bowl of fruit on my desk and having boarders stop by after school for a snack and a chat. The younger kids would plop down on my lap for a little TLC. It will be strange after 23 years not to have children asking me for a key to their room or a dollar or two to buy snacks.” —Terry Walsh, archivist
“I have the greatest respect for the boarding students. Boarders become independent and self-reliant and remember the kindnesses shown to them and know how important kindness is in their lives. I am a much better person because of what I have seen these children do and the expressions of friendship and kindnesses shown to each other. Only if one lived it would one be able to know how meaningful and important the boarders have been to each other.” —Joe Rosenthal, executive director of advancement
Aneesh Samineni, who enters Gr. 5 this fall, achieved a placing in the top two percentile nationally at the Math Olympiad for Elementary Middle Schools (MOEMS) held by Mathedge, an educational program that focuses on real-world problem solving skills. According to MOEMS, 150,000 students from 6,000 teams worldwide participated in the Olympiads last year. Samineni received a trophy, certificate and gold pin for his achievements. In the competition, he scored a 24 out of a possible 25. The Olympiad was created in 1977 by Dr. George Lenchner, an internationally known math educator.
Harker is represented on both baseball and softball teams in the All-Mercury lineups announced in late June. Shelby Drabman ’09 made the Mercury News Honorable Mention squad and first team all-league for softball. In baseball, Barrett Glasauer ’09 also made Honorable Mention for the Mercury News as well as being named league player of the year. Congrats to both! Read more about softball and baseball honorable mentions.
Summer Orchestra campers lugging large musical instruments were a common sight around campus in June and July – and some of the instruments were almost as large as the students!
As part of the summer Music Institute, 15 students spent three hours a day practicing on their instruments. Taught by Louis Hoffman, lower school (LS) orchestra teacher; Chris Florio, middle- and upper school (MS and US) orchestra teacher; Toni Woodruff, strings specialist and after-school music teacher; and Alex Osorio, woodwind specialistand after-school music teacher, the workshop culminated in a concert in the Bucknall gym on the last day of the session.
Florio introduced the orchestra, which opened the show with “Harry Potter,” and then played “Barcarolle.” Woodruffconducted the last two pieces, “Over the Rainbow,” and “Ode to Joy,” with Osorio accompanying the orchestra on saxophone. The appreciative audience included parents and family members of the performers, campers, staff and faculty from the K-Gr. 8 academic sessions and Gr. 1-8 Zoom sessions, as well as Sarah Leonard, primary division head.
For 10 days students researched, wrote, edited and took photographs, and finished up designing news pages. Nineteen intrepid, aspiring middle school journalists gathered this summer for the second edition of Harker Summer Program’s Camp Chronicle. And, proof of the fun students had, on the final day of the two-week Zoom course, several mused on how it would be wonderful to have a longer class so that they could put out more issues.
Their two-week course saw the young scribes evolve from novice reporters to putting out two issues of “The Squeaky Pen,” with 10 sections and 18 pages each, in the process learning how to be newspaper reporters, editors, photographers and graphic designers. They learned what kinds of questions to ask, how the “lede’’ and the “kicker’’ (intriguing opening and closing sentences) on stories are vitally important to keep the reader’s interest, why revisions are so crucial, how to fact-check articles to make sure there are no errors, grammatical or in the content, and how to add attribution to stories.
The editors for each section (everything from Harker Summer Program news to local and state to business and tech) were in charge of designing their pages, making sure font size and design meshed with the other sections, and also worked with the reporters to find photos and graphics to go with the articles. Taught by Kate Murphy, Gr. 8 English teacher and former freelance writer, the class was modeled after a course from her college master’s program.
Students saw a professional staff at work when they toured the San Jose Mercury News offices, where they impressed the guide with thoughtful questions and focus as they watched reporters and editors at work. Students saw the massive presses turning out the day’s paper and the “robots’’ that retrieve the massive rolls of newsprint from huge warehouses to keep the presses stocked with paper.
It was a fitting field trip to nourish nascent aspirations and several students who attend Harker during the regular school year said they are motivated to volunteer for the MS newspaper’s staff!
In mid-June, teachers from around the Bay Area attended the fourth annual Harker Teacher Institute held in Nichols Hall. Kicked off with a keynote address titled “Jumping the Education Shark,” by Kyle Brumbaugh, administrative vice principal at Woodside High School, the day-long institute included twelve workshops and two keynote addresses.
This year workshops focused on the instructional use of free – or almost free – software and Web resources. Presenters were primarily Harker teachers from kindergarten through upper school (US), although both keynote speakers and some additional presenters came from the local community.
Workshop titles included “Out of This World Tech Tools,” presented by US physics teacher Eric Nelson,in which teachers learned methods to explore space; “Alice Beyond Wonderland,” presented by Fred Triefenbach, US assistant director of instructional technology, which focused on the Alice programming environment; and “Multimedia Poetry Project,” presented by MS English teachers Patricia Lai Burrows and Mark Gelineau,in which teachers learned how students can analyze poetic imagery and themes and through images and music.
Librarians Kathy Clark, Sue Smith and Lauri Vaughan gave presentations on bibliographic citations and the strengths and failings of electronic information, respectively. In two separate workshops, MS science teacher Scott Kley-Contini and MS technology assistant director Angela Neffpresented the aspects of the Moodle quiz module, which allows teachers to integrate digital content in their classroom.
Hosted by Harker’s instructional technology department, the annual institute has become increasingly popular each year.
The women for whom The Harker School is named came from strong pioneer stock. Catherine and Sarah Harker, who founded and ran Miss Harker’s School for several decades, were the maternal grandchildren of Otelia Winchell Cullen Polk De Witt, a pioneer who joined the Oregon Trail in 1847. In 1909, De Witt was elected “first Mother Queen” of the Oregon Pioneer Association at 95 years of age. The ribbons she was awarded are still stored at the Harker archives.
De Witt died in 1911, and the obituary (probably written by her daughter, Sarah Ellen Harker, and published in a San Francisco newspaper) also sits in Harker’s archives.
According to the obituary, Otelia Winchel (sic) was born on Jan. 14, 1814, in Brookville, Ind. She married John Cullen in 1835 and produced a boy, John W. Cullen, the following year. John Sr. died shortly after. In 1842 she married Adam Guthrie Polk.
Otelia and Adam had two daughters, Caroline and Sarah Ellen. Both sisters eventually moved from Indiana to Portland, traveling along the famous Oregon Trail. The head of their wagon train was Samuel Markham, whose wife, Elizabeth, was Otelia’s cousin. According to Linda Markham Curry, a descendant of the Markham family, Elizabeth was the mother of noted Bay Area-based poet Edwin Markham.
Adam Polk died while crossing the Columbia River, leaving his widow and children to survive the harsh winter alone. They arrived at Oregon City, Ore., sometime in November or December 1847. Upon their arrival, they moved into a cabin on First and Morrison Streets. The family later moved to Portland, into a frame house built by Captain Nathaniel Crosby, the great-grandfather of singer and actor Bing Crosby.
Otelia married cargo ship officer Francis G. De Witt 1848. They had three children together: Marie B., Francis M. and Otelia V. Caroline and Sarah Ellen eventually arrived in Palo Alto, where they joined the staff at Miss Harker’s School. Sarah Ellen was the mother of Catherine and Sara Harker.
On March 23, 2002, Miss Harker’s alumna Gloria Brown sat down for an interview at a Harker gala event. Brown, a Palo Alto resident, graduated from Miss Harker’s School as a high school senior in 1945. The interview was held to honor the 100th anniversary of the founding of Miss Harker’s School in 1902.
Brown answered questions about life in the Palo Alto boarding school during World War II. She described how Miss Sara Harker went shopping armed with over 50 ration books. There was little help in the kitchen and on the grounds, but the small, devoted staff worked very hard to make life comfortable for the students. Brown spoke about the war efforts of Miss Sara and the students. For her efforts, Miss Harker received a letter from General Douglas MacArthur, thanking the headmistress for her work to improve the life for underprivileged children of Japanese leper parents.
Brown went on to describe the delightful Sunday dinners and the parties with boys (from schools approved by Miss Sara, of course). She spoke about her admiration for Sara Harker, calling her the “most influential person” in her life. This, in spite of nearly being expelled for tossing her Latin book out of the bus window as she left for summer vacation.
Brown closed the interview with an explanation of the school’s motto: “To serve, not to be served,” and a recital of the school’s anthem. She also told the appreciative audience that she “will always be a Harker girl.”
Morning and afternoon on the Bucknall campus, Harker’s youngest summer campers are energetically enjoying toys, climbing on play equipment and getting to know each other. Little do they know that this playground interaction is also helping to prepare them for their first year of school –Harker or other– this fall.
Kindercamp is part of the Harker K-Gr. 8 summer program. All children have morning academic classes and afternoon activity groups; however, the youngest children do things a little differently than older campers. They have their own play area and they spend time practicing school routines like following directions, sitting in a chair, walking in a line and raising one’s hand before speaking.
The youngest campers participate in the same afternoon activities as the older ones, but some, like the “color clash,” the all-camp opening event of the afternoon program, are attended by Kindercampers just once a week. Harker Kindercampers participate in afternoon art, swimming, field games, circus arts, dance and archery.
One recent afternoon, the campers overwhelmingly voted swimming as their favorite activity; Andrei Yang also likes “playing archery,” and “I always like to do reading. And I like math and subtraction, addition, and writing and all those things.” He added, “Most of all my favorite thing is swimming!” Kaden Kapadia also enjoys camp, and says the best thing he’s done is “playing games in the gym.”
Teachers, aides and coaches in Harker’s Kindercamp are specially selected for this group for their understanding of this young group of campers. Harker kindergarten teachers Gerry-louise Robinson and Grace Wallace both taught in the morning academic session this summer; Matt Heinlein, one of Harker’s afternoon coaches, is back for his second year with the kindergartners.
Heinlein’s understanding of the needs of this group of children was demonstrated when he pointed out that, with the physical differences between first graders and kindergartners, “they don’t yet have the coordination or balance of older kids, or the ability to take in all the rules and follow them at one time. So if we were to do a relay race we would have to do just one thing at a time.” He takes this into consideration as he plans each afternoon activity. He really enjoys getting to know the kids. “They’re such sweethearts, and say the most adorable things ever.”
Clearly, Harker’s Kindercampers are in good hands!