Maplewood Richmond Heights High School - Maple Leaves Yearbook (Maplewood, MO)

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Who sweeps the floors, shovels the snow, marks the football field for games, sets up for graduation, wres- tling events, assemblies, and takes them down too? Jasper Italiano that's who. And he's done it for thirty years too. He's pictured above with Vic Cillo. The Mapleleaves staff also dedicates the yearbook to Mr. Italiano for his many years of service and dedication. Jasper - Jasper will you please report to the 4th floor? . . . Jasper . . . Nettie Ford has been a secretary at M-RH Senior High School for eighteen years. Mrs. Ford decided to hang up her typewriter and say good-bye to the attend- ance office this year. There probably isn't a student at the school that doesn't know Mrs. Ford, and for that matter, there is probably no student that Mrs. Ford doesn't know. The students and faculty at M-RH will dearly miss Mrs. Ford and the Mapleleaves staff this year dedicates the yearbook to her. Say good-bye to the computer too, Nettie. V ,ggi 'A 3' 5. ik ' All i. 1 f 'la 1 Y, ,. I

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'es ei 4 fi :, FUIREWORD When experiencing a pleasure one does not trouble himself with the contempla tion of that pleasure but later when the original pleasure is gone there comes a second arising from the first perhaps more valuable because it allows number less repetitions the quiet joy of recol lection High School days are among the most active and pleasant in one's life. They therefore afford a great wealth of material for memories cherished in riper years. This annual, it is our prayer, may serve as an adequate reminder in future years of the joys we would not forget of our High School Days. - The Annual Staff. Rh: 1 f .l R 'N 55 Prepared by the yearbook staff of 1928 G 9 J fy 1 i X 1' 1 if lx

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OUR SCHOOL 1907- 1976 Nearly 157 years ago, in 1819, a young man twenty-one years of age, James L. Sutton, Jr., made his way out from New Jersey to St. Louis to help his older brother in his blacksmith shop at Second and Spruce Streets. Seven years later he had saved enough money to buy a 134 acre farm five or six miles southwest of St. Louis. It was part of a three square mile Spanish land grant bought from the heirs of Charles Gratiot for a dollar and a bit per acre. Ten years later he bought another 54 acres, this time paying 57.50 per acre. St. Louis was growing. In the 1830's he moved with his wife and child to a log cabin on the farm. As his children came of school age, he gave an acre of ground for a school house on the Man- chester Road six miles from the St. Louis Court- house near McCausland Avenue. This was the beginning of the Maplewood- Richmond Heights School District. It was called the Washington Institute when it opened in 1840. Later it was known as the Benton Station School. After the first steam locomotive west of the Mis- sissippi River had made its historic five mile run from the Fourteenth Street Station to Chelten- ham Station in ten minutes in the year 1852, Ben- ton Station was soon opened a mile west of Chel- tenham, at the site of the school on Manchester Road. The school nearby was given in time, also the name of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a trus- tee of the St. Louis public school lands and cham- pion of free public education as well as of an intercontinental railroad. This early school district was Township 6, Dis- trict 4. It was three times larger than the size o the present Maplewood-Richmond Height School District. Its limits included a part of th Webster Groves District on the south and south west, a large portion of the City of St. Louis an extended as far north as Clayton Road. Most of i lay within Sutton's farm, as did the City o Maplewood, founded later. The present Maplewood-Richmond Height district boundaries were defined when the City 0 St. Louis seceded from the County in 1877 James Sutton, Jr., who had served on the schoo board for the old district of Township 6, District from 1869, was instrumental in organizing th School District of Maplewood and became Presi dent of the first school board for this county are serving until 1908. During Mr. Sutton's time two story frame building, which stood in th woods west of Big Bend Road and probably o Comfort Avenue, was rented as the first school. School was opened in February of 1877. The school directors purchased the old Valle School site and erected a one room building, which was opened in 1888. Another room was added in 1889. The school became known as the Bartold Valley School, the name later bein shortened to the Valley School. In 1892 these two rooms were replaced by an eight room two story frame building, and one of the two first rooms was moved to 7553 Woodland Avenue. 1901 saw the first brick building - a four room addition in front of the eight frame rooms at Valley School. The fast growing community held an election in March, 1906, and changed from a rural school dis-