ASP Master Teacher Richard E. Schade, SPS 1962, has put together a multifaceted display in Ohrstrom Library on the subject of the Berlin Wall. The main level of the library in the Baker Reading Room features a display of books gathered from Ohrstrom’s own collection, accented with easel displays of photographs of the Berlin Wall taken by Schade. He has also printed a bibliography of the books in the display that is available as a handout.

The lower level of the library features a display wall with reproductions of periodical articles from the Library’s collection. Articles from Life, Newsweek, and other publications from the time of the wall’s creation provide a contemporary perspective of the world’s response to the division of East and West Berlin.

Schade has this to say of his display, titled “BERLIN STORIES: The Response of American Magazines To the Building of the Berlin Wall (1961)”:

The Berlin Wall came into being on August 13, 1961 and was breached on November 9, 1989. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, it is fitting to look back, even as its fall is commemorated.

Not only does the Ohrstrom Library have pertinent books on the history of the Berlin Wall, but its magazines provide reports with a sense of immediacy. In the same year as Maris and Mantle were locked in a home-run duel, Berlin was at the center of a major Cold War showdown; it at the brink of war between the United States and the Soviet Union over the status of Berlin.

Be sure to take in the displays in the Baker Reading Room and the lower level lobby on your next visit to Ohrstrom Library.

Photo of the Berlin Wall by Richard Schade.

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Lisa Laughy -Archives Assistant

Forty eight years ago tonight The Big Study mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground.  The Big Study was located across from the Rectory between the Old and New Chapels, and was connected to the New Chapel by a cloister walkway.  It was built in 1872-1873 and was enlarged in 1888, making it one of the older buildings still in existence on School grounds at that time.

The following description of the event is from August Heckscher’s book, A Brief History of St. Paul’s School (pgs. 134-135; Ohrstrom Call # 373 Sa2HB):

“The night of January 21, 1961, was one of the coldest in New Hampshire’s twentieth century history, twenty-five degrees below zero.  That evening the school was gathered in Memorial Hall, absorbed in a film, Shake Hands with the Devil.  In the Big Study a lone master, the art teacher Bill Abbe, was in his apartment.  He noticed smoke rising through the hall outside.  He knocked at the doors of the few apartments carved from the labyrinth of old classrooms; finding no one there, nor anywhere else in the building, he called the fire department, gathered a few of his belongings, and made for the outdoors . . .

It was already too late to save the building.  Firemen battled against the insuperable odds of sub-zero temperatures, the water from their hoses freezing into grotesquely-formed icicles, while the interior became an inferno.  Late in the night, flames creeping unseen through a vault of the adjacent cloister were discovered by one of the boys, who, by giving the alarm, undoubtedly saved the chapel.  Awed by the fury of the conflagration, students, faculty, and all the school community stood silently in the arctic cold.”

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