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From the Headmaster
Woodside Priory School may have started small, butthe community clearly didn’t lack imagination. Talking with Roselia and James O’Grady recently, I was struck with how clever our first parents and friends were at combining good work with a really good time. Fortunately, their tradition is still with us today!
Among Roselia’s memorabilia
we found souvenirs from the
fashion shows and home tours at
local estates, the women’s bridge and luncheon afternoons, the Merceces Benz raffles, the Parent Association monthly cocktail parties (“usually up in Hillsborough somewhere, and we always had the Priory Champagne Punch, not mixed drinks”).
Most memorable are the Christmas Fantasies (and the ‘Fantasy Ladies’ who produced them). The Fantasies were the biggest and best event of their kind and hundreds of people came. The gym was aglow with twinkling lights and decorations. Live trees and plants greeted the guests outside. Inside, nearly every one of the several hundred bazaar items was hand made. Guests started at Mrs. Louise Davies’ display of original art in the assembly hall (now the library). Upstairs, luncheon was served. It was an Event and people dressed.
Mrs. Davies’ letter to her artist friends was completely irresistible. It began, in her own handwriting, “My dear artist friend, warmest greetings to you! Always you are most kind, most generous each year giving us your paintings! And your art treasures! Thank you with all my heart! You are a joy!” Who could resist that! Margaret Lee (Mrs. John) Kiely was equally successful with her Antique Attic tucked into a corner of the gym.
Roselia was a “Fantasy Lady” for twelve of the event’s 20 non-stop years, from 1962-82. “We started inlatespring,”Roseliarecalls. “Wehadtworooms(in the guest house) where we set up and stored all our materials. Simone Mitchell was in charge, and, remembering around the room, there was Anamarie
Zabala, Edna Silvera, Callie Cain (the only other family I’m aware of besides ours to graduate four boys from the Priory), Laverne Swan, Phyllis Smith, and Barbara Oswald, and there were others. We’d bring our lunch and stay from 9 or 10 until 2 o’clock. Others also contributed... but our group made almost everything.”
As Roselia remembers it, the fantasies beganwithHortense Fitzgerald.The idea was quickly picked up by Suzanne (Mrs. Edward) Eyre’s landscaping committee. The incomparable Mrs.Eyre had no children at the school but decided nevertheless to do
something about the barren hillside. The story (not in Roselia’s scrapbook, but told to me as one of the school’s “urban legands.”) has it that Suzanne invited the well-known San Francisco landscape designer Thomas Church to lunch here. When he arrived, he found himself seated out in a dry, grassy field. “This is not a free lunch. I invited you here to look over the site we need to design” she told her friend. True or not, Mr. Church volunteered his services over many years. Mrs. Eyre’s personal gardener — and often Mrs. Eyre herself — came weekly to the campus until just a few months ago, when she suffered a stroke.
Long after their last boy graduated, Roselia and Jim were activeinPrioryevents. “ThegreatthingaboutthePrioryis that you feel so welcome, like part of the family. We still go up to visit occasionally,” Roselia said.
Nobody could be more welcome, except perhaps all the other people like the O’Gradys whose lives are intertwined with the school’s.
This issue of Priorities features in every section a contrast of the old and the new, in commemoration of our fortieth year. More of Mrs. O’Grady’s recollections, together with information from the school archives, are in Forty Years At A Glance. “Conversation With” is about our booming music program. The Ruby Ball coverage goes back to the first Emerald Ball. We featured the people and events which, over forty years, have combined to create this place we call a “learning community.” I hope you will enjoy them all.
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