{"id":4248,"date":"2020-04-11T19:05:23","date_gmt":"2020-04-12T01:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/?p=4248"},"modified":"2025-08-03T17:21:43","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T23:21:43","slug":"summerhill-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/11\/summerhill-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Summerhill 2: The Day School"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the fall of 1970 I enrolled my stepdaughter in Summerhill Day School, which was run by Oliver Haskell, who I profiled in Part 1<\/a> with research help from my husband David Hughes. (See Part 1 also for how I came across the school in the first place.) If you’re confused by the Summerhill name, so was I at first. It wasn’t a name Ollie chose himself. We’ll get to that after some more about what led to the school’s founding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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\"Vineland
Entrance to the Vineland Ave. location of the school.\u00a0(Photo by Alisa Pollack, courtesy Larry Wilcox)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

As I mentioned in Part 1, Ollie had begun working with youngsters as a camp counselor in Lake Placid, New York, in the 1920s and early \u201930s. In 1932 he worked with children at the Bulgarian Folk School that his father ran in Pordim. By 1943 in L.A. he was involved in defense-housing recreation and music programs for kids and adults. Ollie’s Haskell’s Raskells day camp in the \u201950s and \u201960s was simply a natural extension of this previous work, but it had an advantage over all the rest: autonomy.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

W<\/span>hen Ollie returned to L.A. in 1952 from a Philly defense-worker housing job from which he was <\/span>forced to resign<\/a> due to being a “left winger” he was in the same boat as his friends and comrades who had lost their jobs during the Red Scare. So he put them to work at Haskell’s Raskells, which he offered during summer vacations and other holidays.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first newspaper ad for the day camp that we found appeared in the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>, mid summer 1956. It mentions a 12-acre ranch on Bluffside Drive at Vineland Ave. in what’s now Studio City. The same ad announces Haskell’s Raskells Farm Camp in a forest, as shown below.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Haskell's<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In 1958 the Haskell’s Raskells day camp and resident farm camp had moved to a 20-acre site in La Tuna Canyon (Sun Valley). It featured a swimming pool, tennis court, ball field, horseback riding, nature trails, arts, crafts, drama, dancing, music, and a lapidary workshop.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The next summer the camp was to receive scholarship attendees following a benefit concert at the Ash Grove<\/a>, Ed Pearl’s roots music club that opened the year before,<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> which would become world famous due to Ed’s lively mix of music, poetry, and theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the late summer of 1961 Haskell’s Raskells hosted a single-parents picnic for kids in Sunland.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Later that fall,\u00a0Ollie\u2014based in North Hollywood\u2014also arranged a series of “Saturday camping trips,” as noted by <\/span>L.A. Times<\/em> columnist Matt Weinstock, who wrote that Ollie’s<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

mimeographed schedule includes a trip to Corriganville, described as follows: “See Ft. Apache, Sherwood Lake, bank holdup, murder, mayhem, lots of people killed\u2014the ultimate in educational experience.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The Corriganville movie ranch was the Universal Parks & Resorts of its day, and for seventy-five cents kids could, well, obtain the ultimate in educational experience.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so the Raskells’\u2014and later Summerhill Day School’s\u2014activities weren’t limited to the site of Ollie’s home and stable, by then on the lot at Vineland and the Los Angeles River in North Hollywood. When I knew him Ollie took the kids on day trips to places like Santa Barbara, Ojai, Disneyland, and the beach. They also had weeklong excursions to Ensenada, Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One excursion anecdote is worth retelling. Ollie took a station-wagonful of kids to Santa Barbara where they took the train to Ojai for some hiking. To round out the day they caught the bus to beach. When it got late Ollie told the kids, “We have to get going because we need to catch the last bus to the train.” Counting heads he found two missing. Ollie and the kids scoured the beach for a couple of hours before they found them, but they had missed that last bus. Ollie was very upset. “Now what are we gonna do?” he asked. “Let’s hitchhike!” they said. And so they stuck out their thumbs, with Ollie standing there exasperated, and immediately got a ride in some gardeners’ pickup to the train station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the spring of \u201963 Haskell’s Ranch hosted the first-ever Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which was a fundraiser for KPFK, a Pacifica station that would turn four years old that summer.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"KPFK
April 29 \u2013 May 12, 1963 KPFK Folio cover art by Ron Patterson. (Image courtesy of RedBarnProductions.org<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

As I wrote last time<\/a>, Haskell’s Raskells<\/p>\n\n\n\n

appears to have flown under the radar of regulators, because Ollie didn\u2019t file an application \u201cto establish a day-care center and recreation day camp for children\u201d until about June of 1962. The application stated the center \u201cwould care for approximately 70 children between 5 and 16 years of age between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. during summer months and approximately 40 children between noon and 6 p.m. during the school year.\u201d<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s probably a good thing that Ollie filed that application, since he’d be in the news a year later. On Wednesday, August 28, 1963\u2014the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom\u2014Haskell’s Raskells kids organized a “sympathy march” on their day camp’s grounds and a short stretch of Vineland Ave. “This was a completely spontaneous movement,” Ollie told\u00a0Valley Times Today<\/em>. “The youngsters decided Tuesday that they wanted to hold their own march to show how they feel about the civil rights situation.” Ollie told the newspaper that the camp looked at current affairs rather than avoiding them and so the kids were “generally” aware.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reminds me that Ollie told me he and his nine brothers and sisters would get up each morning, race to get the newspaper, and fight over it\u2014like my mother and me (I began trying to read the paper at age 3).<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Haskell's
Haskell\u2019s Raskells youngsters demonstrate on Vineland Ave. in sympathy with the March on Washington at which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, August 28, 1963.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Last time, I mentioned that the Haskell’s Raskells kids came from all walks of life. This was borne out by that same newspaper report: “One woman arrived at the day camp as the march got under way and asked that her children be permitted to leave. She told Haskell that the children would return to the camp today, but she did not want them to join in the march.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That mom, had she read Valley Times Today<\/em> ten months before, would have seen Ollie’s name on the front page having been named a member of the Communist Party. Remember my mention last time<\/a> of the 1962 HUAC testimony by a Robert Ronstadt? He testified in executive (closed) session that April but his seventeen-page transcript was released October 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[\u2026] Robert C. Ronstadt stated that [Frank] Wilkinson and he were members of the Altgeld unit of the Communist Party. [\u2026] Among the other members of the Altgeld unit, Ronstadt named:<\/p>\n

Oliver Haskell, former project director of the City Housing authority [\u2026].<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article is under the byline of the Valley Times Today<\/em> Washington Bureau, and the paper’s local staff evidently didn’t know that Oliver Haskell operated a Valley day camp for kids\u2014its clientele and counselors being among those whose names had been named. If the paper’s reporters did<\/em> know, they kept mum. But then the article’s focus was on Wilkinson, with whom Ollie had worked, but who was a much bigger name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summerhill Becomes Summerhill<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A year and a half before, on December 4, 1960, readers of the Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> were introduced to A. S. Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing<\/em>, which had been published the week of John F. Kennedy’s election. “Harold Hart, a publisher in New York, had written to Neill suggesting that a book which drew on four of his earlier works\u2014The Problem Child<\/em> [1926], The Problem Parent<\/em> [1932], That Dreadful School<\/em> [1937] and The Free Child<\/em> [1953]\u2014might find a market in America.”<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below, in a twenty-eight-minute Canadian documentary from 1966, Neill himself explains his objectives. (Thanks to our friend Matthew Kneale for sending this.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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