Good Citizen Farley
It is obvious that serving others was extremely important to Mabel Farley; she constantly found ways to help people. Although earning her degrees at NYU had served her own purposes well, she also used her experience there as an opportunity to help other alumni, and to assist needy students. Perhaps it was inevitable that she would extend her obligation to oversee the education of Hicksville's new young adults into career guidance and job placement. The Teachers Club, born out of the need to live affordably, evolved into a way of sharing knowledge with, and mentoring, her peers.
Reading about the many "extra" things she did to help people, one accomplishment in particular struck me, because everyone whom I knew in High School took it for granted: the National Honor Society.
Surely, that is just one more part of high school, right? Well, it was not always. When Hicksville High was new, and a graduate wished to enroll in a college, the Admissions people at the college might be skeptical. They had never seen any Hicksville grads before; they knew nothing about the school; they might not trust that the student's good grades accurately represented her/his performance.
To help address this skepticism, Farley began lobbying people associated with the National Honor Society whenever she attended an educators' conference anywhere in the Northeast (which happened a lot). She wanted her graduates to be given fair consideration for a slot in college, not dismissed out of hand. It took years, but she finally succeeded; Hicksville was among the first Long Island high schools authorized to recognize its graduates as NHS members.
All this work was a gift to her students. At that time, an NHS affiliation might make the critical difference in awarding a college seat to one applicant or another.
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In her seamless view of the world, being Principal was only part of her greater work, especially where the village was concerned. She became part of the fabric of Hicksville. One can only imagine the pride and concern she must have felt in the 1940s, when her former students went off to fight.
Fred Fluckiger (Class of 1938, and now deceased) wrote a moving letter about having to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade during combat, which appeared in the September 2009 edition of Hixnews. This is a slightly edited excerpt from that letter:
I waited until nightfall, organized a four-man patrol, and under cover of darkness led the patrol to a point near the victim's foxhole.
We were very close to the enemy, so we could hear their voices; I dared not risk forward movement of the patrol. Motioning to the others in the patrol to stop and lay down, I crawled on my belly, hands and knees, to the foxhole. From the prone position I reached down to pull up the body. As I did so, the stern teaching voice of Ms. Farley rang out in my brain: "Good job".
It is doubtful that she had expected the lessons she instilled in her students to be with them in combat - but she could do something, even if it was only a small thing, to honor her students who were going to war. Hence, at Mitchel Field, and at the Hicksville Canteen (the location of which is not known to me), ex-students in uniform were served sandwiches and cake by their devoted former Principal. I find that quite a touching image.
Nassau Daily Review-Star, April 12, 1944
End of this Installment
Note that the picture of Miss Farley used at the beginning of this article was taken from the 1956 Comet Yearbook. The other items shown refer to some of her personal travels: a postcard of the luxurious RMS Berengaria, on which she sailed to Europe in 1930, and a 1939 Bolivian airline schedule, representing the trip that she and fellow Hicksville Principal Nina Plantz made to Bolivia around that time. Clearly, Miss Farley's love of learning was matched by a fondness for adventure.
