La Salle Peru Township High School - Ell Ess Pe Yearbook (La Salle, IL)

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ELL ESS PE H THE SOCIAL CENTER The Township High School Social Center was established as an institution to serve the community when the late Mr. F. W. Matthiessen recognized the need of a recreational center. In IQI3 the main part of the building was erected. Since that time an annex and a story containing five recitation rooms have been added. The building and equipment, for the most part, were gifts of Mr. F. W. Matthiessen. The gymnasium is the most popular and the busiest of all the rooms in the Social Center. During the school days, the High School and Junior College students have their classes for physical training here. In the evenings, numerous groups of the community come for recreation. - On Saturday the students from grade and parochial schools have organized group workunder the supervision of the Social Center stall, Mr. Fellows, Miss Wagner, Mr. Jones, and Mrs. Schalla. An elaborate program enables this stall to accommodate the various large groups that assemble here for exercise and recreation. The gymnasium provides room for entertaining large groups at parties and dances, there are twelve young men's and boys' Social Center clubs organized for social and athletic purposes. Many other clubs make their headquarters at the Social Center. The Reading Room is made attractive with books and periodicals. Playground activities offer boys and girls an excellent opportunity for physical development, while indoor base- ball proves one of the most popular games for boys and men. There are eight teams, representing industries, athleticclubs and localorganizations, which form a league each fall and play a series of games to determine the championship team, every winter a menls league is organized and the enthusiasm in this sport is ex- ceptionally great. Junior athletic activities are organized for boys between the ages of I3 and 17. Boys who are members of the High School teams are not eligible to these Junior teams. Women's gymnasium classes have gained favor so rapidly that it has been necessary to form a regular Monday evening class. At this time the women are instructed in gymnastic work, folk dancing, volley- ball, basketball, indoor baseball and swimming. The great demand for the tennis courts proves the popularity of this sport. Two annual tournaments are held each year, one for the High School students and a later one for adults. The benefits to the community at large of such an organization are innumerable. PAGE ll

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ELL ESS PE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HIGH SCHOOL BUILDINGS The original main high school building was erected in 1897-1898. In 1903 the present manual training building, a gift of the late Mrs. F. VV. Matthiessen, was erected. In 1913 Mr. E. VV. Matthiessen gave to the high school two building lots to the north of the main building and the lots on which the Hygienic Institute now stands. In the same year and on the lots to the north of the present main building the social center building was erected. To the construction of this build- ing, Mr. Matthiessen gave 575,000 and the citizens of the township raised by a bond issue S25,000. In this year the old high school building was remodelled and the little auditorium in the basement built. To his gift of 1913, Mr. Matthiessen also added the building now housing the Hygienic Institute. In 1915 the large athletic grounds to the west of the manual training building were donated by Mr. Matthiessen and in 1916 the outdoor swimming pool also was built by him. In 1918, through a gift of the same donor of S45,000, an annex was added to the social center building, and the main high school building further remodelled. To these donations, in 1920, Mrs. Eda Matthiesen and Mrs. Adele M. Blow added 515,000 for the equipping of a new library. In 1923-24, the Town- ship Board of Education added a new story to the social center building, contain- ing five new recitation rooms, at a cost of about S40,000. Altogether, in the past twenty-seven years, the late Mr. F. VV. Matthiessen and his family have given to the local high school over S203,000, reckoned in values prior to 1918. During the same period, the tax payers of the township contributed for buildings and grounds 5Q5,500. The new gift of Mrs. Matthiessen and Mrs. Blow, together with the new township bond issue will add 2,600,000 to the sum spent for grounds and buildings prior to 1925. PAGE 10

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ELL ESS PE THE LIBRARY Undoubtedly the focus of the academic activities of the LaSalle-Peru Town- ship High School and Junior College is the remarkable library which it has been the good fortune of the school to acquire through the generosity of private patrons and the liberal provision of the township Board of Education. An unusually well- lighted room, twenty feet in height, with a fioor space of fifty-one feet by twenty- two, easily permits the housing of the eight thousand or more volumes. The spacious walls accommodate five large oil paintings. Two of these, The Sacrifice of Abrahamv, and 'fThe Easter Sacrifice , are original oil canvases painted by Solimena fcirca 17403, the son-in-law of Tiepolo, and were presented to the school by Mrs. Adele M. Blow of LaSalle. The third magnificent oil canvas was pre- sented in the autumn of 1925 by Mrs. Eda Matthiessen of LaSalle. This canvas is an oil copy by Van Salk of the famous portrait of an old woman by Rembrandt in the Rijks Gallery, Amsterdam. Two other impressive paintings are the gift of the Class of 1925. They are copies in oil by Edward Salfman of New York, from originals in the New York Public Library: Milton Dictating Paradise Lostz' by M. Munkacsy, and Rudolph II in the Laboratory of His Alchemist, 1576 , by V. Brozik. T But while the paintings and the numerous original etchings and engravings possessed by the school are a conspicuous feature of its aesthetic equipment, yet the school is most proud of its collection of books. The effort has here been made to purchase in every department the great standard classical works. Especially in books of reference is the library rich. Not only does it possess copies, sometimes in duplicate, of works like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Americana, the International Encyclopaedia, the Catholic and Jewish encyclopaedias, but it has acquired the standard encyclopaedias of the different special sciences. It possesses dictionaries of nearly all foreign languages and the standard encyclo- paedias in Germanand French. The object has been to establish a library from which authoritative information in any field can be obtained. The junior College has made necessary the accuisition of books of a type which high school libraries would not ordinarily include and a systematic plan of development has purchased th standard works of reference of higher grade in the fields of sociology, educa- ticih, economics, political science,philosophy, psychology, logic, and all branches of natural science. As a further example of the resources of the library may be cited the fact that although Q the classics, especially Greek, are little emphasized in middle-west schools, yet the library possesses a full collection of the Loeb classics for reference and for the inspiration of teachers and exceptional students. Notable also are the collections in English and American literature and history and of the atlases and gazeteers, not only geographical but historical and cultural. Some thirty odd 'magazines are on file in the racks and include such periodicals as the New York Times, the London Times, L'Illustration, etc. The furnishings of the library which will seat six ty students were supplied by the Library Bureau and include in addition to the usual standard contrivances many filing cabinets for conserving the materials for instruction used in the modern high school: blue prints, photographs, post cards, lantern slides, instructional phonograph records, etc. The fioor is covered with a heavy cork carpet, the windows and doors are of leaded glass, the illuminaticn is semi-indirect and power- ful. The library has been carefully catalogued and is in charge of a professional librarian. fThe excellence of the equipment and the richness of the collection is due to the munificent giftaof fifteen thousand dollars made by Mrs. Adele M. Blow and Mrs. Eda Matthiessen in 1919-1920 as well as to the generous budget which the Township Board of Education has supplied for the purchase of books. PAGE I2