In “Ending the Season with a Loss” on March 1st, I posted that the boys and girls basketball teams at Norwalk High School had played their last extramural games of the season with losses to Fremont and Clyde teams. It turns out I was wrong–at least about the Norwalk boys team. They had at least one more loss to go–this time an away game against an Elyria squad they had defeated the month before.

According to The Norwalk Daily Reflector, the match on this day, one-hundred ten years ago, was hotly contested, Norwalk led through most of the second half. But Elyria rallied, and when the whistle blew at the end of the game, they had won, 20 to 16.

As in the previous game against Elyria, the Norwalk High School Class of 1907 was represented by Arthur Young and Sheldon Laning. Look at the images of these young men that I cropped from their class commencement photo. Well-dressed and intelligent looking boys, were they not? But were these young men, and their classmates, representative of all of Norwalk’s youth?

The population of Norwalk in 1907 was around 9,000. [1] Twenty-eight students were in the class of 1907, fewer than I would have expected from a city that size, and almost all of them came from the “upper class” of the city. Sheldon Laning’s father had a successful

publishing company, and had recently been elected to be a U.S. Congressman. Arthur Young’s father was also a leader in the community, and Harriott Wickham, who is often featured in these posts, was a descendant of the founder of the town, and her father was editor of The Norwalk Daily Reflector.

Surely, not all young people in Norwalk had such fortunate backgrounds. By this time, the town had become a modest manufacturing center, employing hundreds of workers in factories around the city. What kind of education did the children of those men and women receive? From my research so far, I’ve found that in 1907 few, if any, sons and daughters of factory workers were in the public high school. Did they mix at all with those who were fortunate enough to attend? We’ll look further into those questions in later posts.

#

The same issue of The Norwalk Daily Reflector that reported about the basketball game, also carried an article that told of another young man, not much older than the students in the Class of 1907, who was in a very different place: a state penitentiary. More about him in my next post.

Sources:

“Exciting Contest,” The Norwalk Daily Reflector, March 9, 1907, page 1, column 7.

“High School Stung Again,” The Norwalk Evening Herald, March 9, 1907, page 4, column 4.

[1] 14th U.S. Census: Summary for the United States by Divisions and States, page 18. (https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/06229686v32-37ch3.pdf).

Please like this post and let me know what you think in the comments. Thank you.