’49 Grad Honors His Class At ‘Old Hawley High’ With A Theater Seat

By Kaaren Valenta

Gilbert Standley really wanted to attend Newtown High School.

“I didn’t want to go to Harding or Bassick high schools,” the Trumbull resident said. “I wanted the agricultural program at Newtown High School.”

The year was 1945. Each morning Gil Standley would walk a quarter mile from his house in Trumbull to catch the Waterbury bus at 7 am to travel to Bridgeport, where he would board a Danbury bus that dropped him, and another student, at the flagpole on Main Street in Newtown about 9 am.

“We’d walk down Church Hill Road to the old Hawley High School,” he said. “Each morning we’d be two, five, eight minutes late so we’d check in at the office before going to class.”

After school, it was the same two-hour plus trip back home.

“I got out at 3 pm and could see the bus go by, so I had to wait for the 4 pm bus. I got home at 6 pm,” he said. “I’d change my clothes and usually work in the six-acre vegetable garden that my parents had.”

Four years later, Mr Standley graduated with the Class of 1949.

“It was a thrill to walk upon the stage at the famous Edmond Town Hall for my diploma,” he said.

So when Mr Standley read in The Bee recently that the Newtown Lions Club was holding a fundraising drive to replace the dilapidated seats in the Edmond Town Hall Theatre, he decided to buy one in honor of the Class of 1949.

The plaque will read “Class of 1949, Old Hawley High School.” All 12 grades were housed at Hawley School at the time. It was not until 1953 that the town built a new high school, now the middle school, on Queen Street.

“There were 29 students in my class,” Mr Standley recalled. “I failed one subject, English, and was in danger of not graduating. There was also a student from Monroe who failed. But Kay Dolan — she was quite a teacher — was determined that we graduate, so she tutored us, and we did.”

Gil Standley served in the military in 1951–53, then joined the Trumbull Parks Department where he retired in 1990 as park superintendent after 38 years.

“When I was drafted, I was supposed to go to Korea three times, but I finally wound up in the Panama Canal Zone where I served for 18 months,” he said. “After I got back I got a job with the parks department, which was just me and a 68-year-old man at that time. I had to buy my own truck and my own tools. [The department] grew a lot over the years and there were eight or nine employees by the time I retired.”

A resident of the Nichols section of Trumbull, he fondly recalled his years and his teachers at “Old Hawley High School,” especially Vincent P. Gaffney, who taught the agricultural program.

“Mr Gaffney was really something,” he said. “Everyone called him Boss. We had regular classes — reading, math, history — and also two agricultural classes each semester. We learned all kinds of skills, like how to cut corn with a corn knife. Once we went to the Platts farm to pick potatoes for four cents a bushel or something like that. Another time we went to the peach orchards on Mt Pleasant Road.”

The Trumbull school district paid tuition for Gil Standley to attend the agricultural program at Newtown High School (Ironically, Trumbull now has an agricultural program; Newtown does not. Newtown students now travel to Woodbury for the ag program at Nonnewaug High School.)

Besides teaching the agricultural program in Newtown, Vincent Gaffney also was in charge of the volunteer fire crew at the high school.

“When the town’s fire alarm would ring, so many of us students would pile in his car and off we went to fight the fire,” Mr Standley recalled.

Mr Standley joined the Nichols Volunteer Fire Department and in 1974-75 served as its fire chief. “My 57th year in the company is coming up,” he said. He also is a 50-year member of the Masonic Lodge in Stratford and a member of the Monroe Grange.

In 1975 he married his wife, Miriam, who worked in the town purchasing department in Trumbull.

“We often drove up to Newtown to go to the movies at Edmond Town Hall,” Mr Standley said.

Miriam Standley died three years ago. These days Gil Standley keeps busy tending the award-winning 40-by-50-foot garden at their home on Oriole Lane and giving away most of the produce. A garden cart at the end of his driveway boasts a big “free veggies” sign. This year he spent $200 on seed alone for the garden.

“I could be sitting in a gin mill spending my money and I wouldn’t enjoy it,” he said. “I love to garden.”

He also is looking forward to attend the reunion of the Newtown High School classes of 1949, ‘50 and ‘51 at the Stony Hill Inn in Bethel on October 8. The reunion committee is working to establishing a memorial to their classes’ physical education instructors, Harold S. DeGroat and Ann M. Anderson. (For information about the reunion, contact Ken Pelletier at 264-2310 or email at pombcoup@earthlink.net.)

Mr Standley said he subscribes to The Bee to keep up with the news in Newtown.

“I’ve always been interested in Newtown — you couldn’t ask for nicer people,” he said.