Shirley Russell Coen Fairview High School Class of 1945 Collection
Content Description
The Shirley Russell Coen Fairview High School Class of 1945 Collection contains information on the Fairview High School graduating class of 1945 and its reunions. The collection consists mainly of scrapbooks, materials covering general information, and issues of the high school newspaper, Tower News.
Series I, General Information, consists of materials dated 1943 to 2015 dealing with the history of the Class of 1945 such as copies of the senior photographs from the senior yearbook, news clippings from the Journal-Herald, and photographs of school sports teams and other extracurricular activities. Of particular note are three panoramic photographs from the reunions, as well as information about the two stained glass windows designed by Robert Metcalf.
Series II, Scrapbooks, is made up of seven numbered volumes dated from 1945 to 2016, containing primarily newspaper clippings and photographs about class members and reunions.
Series III, School Newspapers, consists entirely of issues of the Tower News, the Fairview High School newspaper, dated 1943-1950. There are a number of loose issues, the bulk of which date from 1943-1945. The bound volumes of Tower News date from 1943-1950. The bound volume from 1944-1945 includes a front page article about the stained glass window donation from the Class of 1945.
Dates
- Creation: 1943-2016
Creator
- Coen, Shirley Russell (Person)
Conditions Governing Access
Oversize materials in this collection are stored off-site; therefore, please notify us at least two days in advance if requesting oversize materials (marked as “OS”).
Conditions Governing Use
Copyright restrictions may apply. Unpublished manuscripts are protected by copyright. Permission to publish, quote, or reproduce must be secured from the repository and the copyright holder.
Biographical / Historical
Fairview High School was built in 1929 at the corner of Hillcrest Avenue and Philadelphia Drive in Dayton, Ohio. The class of 1945 attended Colonel White for ninth and tenth grades, and then moved on to attending Fairview High School for eleventh and twelfth grade, a system that lasted until 1957 when Colonel White became a four-year high school. In 1982, Fairview became a middle school. Later it was turned into an elementary school until it was razed in 2010. The name of the ‘Tower’ in the school paper, Tower News, came from the Harrison Township School that was at the corner of Catalpa and Fairview Avenues that was built in 1900.
Shirley Russell Coen, the creator of the collection, was a member of the class of 1945 and a regular attendee of the class reunions. The class reunions took place largely from 1970 onward, the latest having been in 2015, when the class of 1945 celebrated their seventieth reunion.
Of particular note is information in the collection about the stained glass windows designed by Robert Metcalf. One window is from 1938, and another is from 1945. The Class of 1945 gifted the latter to the school in honor of the fallen from World War II, as noted in the Tower News and in a folder containing more recent information on the windows specifically. The windows are now located at the new Fairview Elementary.
Extent
3 linear feet
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
The collection consists of scrapbooks, school newspapers, and materials related to the graduating class of 1945 from Fairview High School in Dayton, Ohio. Fairview High School was built in 1929 and later became a middle school and elementary school before it was eventually demolished in 2010. The Collection also includes information on class reunions.
Arrangement
The collection is arranged into three series: Series I: General Information, 1943-2015; Series II: Scrapbooks, 1945-2016; Series III: School Newspapers, 1943-1965
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The collection was donated to Special Collections and Archives by Shirley Russell Coen in 2016.
General
Newspaper page from Journal-Herald dated 1945 removed from original mounting and encapsulated. Some oversize materials were photocopied from their mounting on poster board. Scrapbook 1 was string-bound and in poor condition; it is now housed, unbound, in Box 2. Scrapbooks 2, 3, and 7 were removed from their original bindings and placed in files in Box 1 due to preservation issues. Photocopies of the covers of scrapbooks 2 and 7 are located in an oversize folder. Scrapbooks 4, 5, and 6 are wrapped individually.
Processing Information
Finding aid written according to DACS standards by Jennifer England, April 2017.
donor
- Coen, Shirley Russell (Person)
Subject
- Longnecker, Theresa Folger (Person)
- Longnecker, Donald (Person)
- Fairview High School (Dayton, Ohio) (Organization)
- Coen, Shirley Russell (Person)
Cultural context
Genre / Form
Geographic
Topical
- Title
- Shirley Russell Coen Fairview High School Class of 1945 Collection (MS-527) Guide
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Jennifer England
- Date
- 2017 Apr 17
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
- Language of description note
- English
Repository Details
Part of the Special Collections Repository
Wright State University Libraries
Special Collections and Archives
3640 Colonel Glenn Hwy
Dayton OH 45435-0001 USA
937-775-2092
library-archives@wright.edu
