‘Past is Prologue’ captured PDS history during pivotal time During Reunion weekend in spring 2020, four members of the Class of 1970, Jim Coddington, Bruce Davis, Ann Schoggen Hammonds, and Julie Reichman, talked with Archivist Jenny Winston about creating “The Past is Prologue,” our school’s first history book written 50 years ago in Leland Johnson’s American Problems elective. She shares an account here.
By Jenny Winston, Archivist
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first read “The Past is Prologue” when I came to USN in the summer of 2014, on the occasion of our year-long Centennial celebration. It quickly became my go-to source of timeline events in the school’s early history and a constant companion guide in my mission to understand the story of Peabody Demonstration School. What immediately struck me about this book was the fact that it was written by students – seniors, at that – and over the course of just one school year, 1969-1970. How and why did 12 students, with their minds set on post-high school plans, during a pivotal time of social and political change, decide to write a 55-year history of their school? The whole pursuit just sounded unlikely, even as the red-bound proof of its ultimate success sat open daily on my desk. In reflecting on the experience with us 50 years later during our virtual Reunion in May, members of that class recalled that their new history teacher, Leland Johnson, was the real impetus for the idea. “An ‘American Problems’ course in 1969? [The history of PDS] wasn’t really what was on our minds. I’m surprised that this was the project,” said Jim Coddington, as we opened our discussion. “Mr. Johnson obviously was very convinced that we would get something relevant to our day out of this.” Ann Schoggen Hammonds agreed, “He was quietly persuasive.” Bruce Davis remembered hoping the elective promised an excuse to do something outside the norm of typical classes. “American Problems – this might be a good opportunity to protest somewhere or to go out and sit in the grass … this will be kind of fun,” he said.
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“The Past is Prologue,” often referred to as “the red book.”
2000 EDGEHILL
