John Fitch Elementary - Levittown’s First School

The story of the beginnings and endings of Levittown's first school.

As I looked out the large picture window of my house at 129 Farmbrook Drive in the winter and spring of 1953, I could see my school being built. The bulldozers were leveling the land, the concrete workers were pouring the concrete, the carpenters were building the wooden framework. Soon the plasterers, and masons and plumbers and electricians would appear. The mushroom-like growth of houses in Levittown meant families, and families meant children, and children meant schools. My mother warned us to stay away from the construction site, but it was tempting to see where my future classroom might be.

The building was to be called John Fitch Elementary. In time I would learn that John Fitch was the inventor of the steamboat. In 1786, he had run the first ever steamboat on the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Burlington and lived in Warminster, Bucks County for a while. You may think, as most of the world does, that Robert Fulton invented the steamboat. Most history books would agree, but if you read carefully, you will note that Fulton is credited with inventing the first “commercially successful” steamboat in 1807. Fitch was not successful, not because his steamboat design did not work, but because he lost financial backing for the project. As they say, the winners write the history, so today we remember Fulton and not Fitch.

Unless you went to John Fitch School. Anybody who attended there could tell you Fitch actually invented the steamboat. A picture of the steamboat adorned the lobby of the school.

Mr. Fitch’s Steamboat

Fitch’s story was quite a sad one. Unhappily married, he had abandoned his pregnant wife and young son in Connecticut to pursue his fortune but met failure upon failure in his inventing and land speculation schemes. Eventually, he turned to drink and died at age 55 of an opium overdose that was likely a suicide. I am not sure that the members of the Bristol Township School Board knew all this when they chose to name Levittown’s first school after the erstwhile inventor, but in any case, John Fitch Elementary School it was to be.

The school was to have two wings extending at right angles from the central core. Each wing would contain nine classrooms, the central core would contain administrative offices, an all-purpose room, dining hall, kitchen, and two additional classrooms. Every classroom had a wardrobe, its own toilet facility, and its own door directly to the outside. Superintendent of Bucks County Schools, Dr. Charles H. Boehm, said

The John Fitch School is an expression of the most advanced and progressive educational principles. It was designed for the practical needs of the modern curriculum and embodies every accepted advance that educators have been talking about for the last 25 years. Each self-contained classroom is designed to be a home away from home. (from The Bristol Courier, April 16, 1952).

Artist’s Rendering of John Fitch Elementary School

Home away from home it would eventually become for me and hundreds of other Levittown kids, but first there were some struggles. In May of 1953, construction on the building stopped because of a carpenter’s union strike. The project was already behind schedule due to a shortage of building materials. It soon became clear that the school would not open in time for the beginning of the school year in September. By August, construction had resumed, but parents were getting concerned.

A group of parents, led by Mrs. Henry Lotto of Farmbrook, mother of Amy Lotto who would become one of my first classmates, appealed to the Bristol Township Civic Association to get action from the school board because she said, “We still don’t know for sure where our children will be attending school this fall.” It was clear the school board was having difficulty accommodating the huge influx of new students that the construction of Levittown had brought to the township.

Finally, under pressure from parents, a plan was announced. Kids who were scheduled to attend John Fitch School would be distributed amongst New Edgely School, Old Edgely School, and The Wistar Institute on Red Cedar Hill. Double sessions would be necessary. Students would be divided into AM and PM sessions. Children would be bussed to these schools.

On August 27, a week before school was to open, the newspaper listed our classroom assignments. My mom told me that I would be going to Old Edgely School and that my teacher’s name was Mrs. Rickles. Mom might as well have told me I was going to the moon. I had no idea where Old Edgely School was. I would be attending the afternoon session. None of the kids that I knew from the neighborhood were in my class.

For me, it was a bit of a disappointment to not start the year at the school I was watching being built. For my mother I know it was disappointing that I would have to take a bus to school. I was the oldest child. My mother was going through this experience for the first time, too. Having the school close by was one reason my parents had bought the Levittown house. Mostly, though, I was just excited to get started going to school.

When the first day of school arrived, my mother walked me down to the bus stop at the intersection of Farmbrook Drive and Field Lane. I climbed into the bus and saw my mother wave and then turn away as the bus rode off. Was she crying?

My classroom at Old Edgely looked exactly like the classrooms in the old Our Gang comedies I liked to watch on TV. Mrs. Rickles was nothing like Miss Crabtree in those movies though. She was an older woman, or at least that was how she appeared to six-year-old me. She was stern but was not unkind. The first thing I remember about class was that I had to get used to being called Russell. At home, I was “Buddy.” When Mrs. Rickles called the roll, I heard my name as Russell Walsh. It sounded weird, but mom had warned me this would happen. I raised my hand. “Present,” I said.

I remember exactly two things about my time at Old Edgely school. Number one was that I couldn’t make a number 3. We were given paper with dotted guidelines on it to help us as we practiced writing letters and numbers. For whatever reason, I could do all the letters and numbers just fine, except for the 3. Each time I would make the first curve correctly, but every time I would follow by making a 2. I couldn’t seem to get the second curve in the 3. This was extremely frustrating, but eventually I mastered it and the rest of what we were expected to learn came to me without as much struggle.

Secondly, I remember clearly an older boy fell off the jungle gym in the schoolyard playground and hit his head, knocking himself unconscious. We all got shooed back into the classroom as the school nurse came out to attend to the boy and an ambulance arrived. I noted the concern on all the teacher’s faces and this worried me. Happily, we learned the next day that Harry (I think his name was Harry) was going to be okay, but he had to rest at home due to a concussion.

Finally, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, John Fitch School was completed, and we moved in. The first thing I noticed was how new everything was. At Old Edgely everything looked old, the walls, the blackboards, the blinds on the windows, the desks. At John Fitch all these things were new. Our classroom windows looked out on where the playground would be when it was finished. Our room had a built-in screen behind the blackboard for showing movies. The desks and chairs were shiny and new. We had our own coat room and bathroom.

One of our first tasks at Fitch was to write our name on a paper that was to be put in the cornerstone of the building to document that we were in the first-grade class of the very first school to open in Levittown. I took this task very seriously and wrote my full name in my very best block printing: RUSSELL WALSH.

At John Fitch School I learned to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. More importantly I learned that I could be a successful learner. I learned that teachers could, mostly, be kind and supportive and helpful. I learned to work together with others on common goals like creating a huge classroom mural. Every Fitch classroom had a wall specifically designed for painting those large murals. I learned how to make friends, and I made some lifelong friends in that first-grade classroom. I learned I loved to read about history and geography. I learned how to play on a team. I learned I had strong opinions, but they were not always welcome when shouted out in class. I even learned how to do the hula!

Even in the summers, John Fitch School was central to my life. Mr. Olin, a Bristol Township teacher who lived in Stonybrook, ran a summer recreation program out of the all-purpose room at the school. Each summer I would spend my mornings there playing baseball, basketball, ping pong, wall ball, or shuffleboard. On rainy days we would make crafts like Plaster of Paris molds of various animals or cotton loop potholders or copper foil art. Outside the all-purpose room all summer was a Coke machine. For a nickel it would dispense an ice-cold glass bottle of Coke. What a treat that was on a hot summer day.

Copper Foil Pressing

Recently, I drove past the site of John Fitch School. The school is gone now; torn down and replaced by housing for the over-55 set. It was a strange feeling seeing how much that patch of land had changed. I had lived long enough to see my first school get built, host nearly 70 years’ worth of students, get torn down, and then get replaced by a housing project that was specifically designed for old people like the current me. Oh, the irony.