Friends' Jubilee

The 1800 block on I Street N. W. used to be one of Washington's most social. Nicholas Longworth brought his bride there; Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes still lives nearby in a red brick house. The Friends' Meeting House, one of three where Herbert Hoover worshipped, has been there 125 years, and beside it are two red brick dwellings which house the Friends' School. Other Washington schools are more progressive, more expensive, but none is more sedately aristocratic than Friends', a nonsectarian, co-educational kindergarten-through-high school for which social as well as financial references are always required. Last week Friends' School celebrated its 50th anniversary--not in I Street but in a new Recreation Hall further out, on Massachusetts Avenue, where the first five grades are taught and where there are playgrounds and a gymnasium. For the Friends' jubilee the kindergarteners played lustily on drum, cymbal, triangle and xylophone, while a teacher accompanied on the piano. The primary pupils furnished a 30-piece orchestra. High school students strutted in the costumes of the past 50 years. Parents looked over exhibits of school work. None was happier than the stout, genial. soft-spoken old Quaker for whom the celebration was held--Thomas Watson Sidwell who founded Friends' School, taught there until ten years ago, is still its principal.

Principal Sidwell is a robust, alert pedagog at 74. He putters at his two farms in Maryland, admires the domestic allotment plan of Secretary of Agriculture Wallace who has a boy and girl in the school. Some other Friends' parents: Newton D. Baker, Herbert Hoover, President Raymond Allen Pearson of the University of Maryland. Representative Samuel Billingsley Hill of Washington. Mr. Justice George Sutherland has a grandson at Friends'. Charles Augustus Lindbergh used to play in the gravel yard of the schoolhouse on I Street and Archibald Roosevelt, Princess Chichibu of Japan and Minister to China Nelson Trusler Johnson all went there.

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