The ‘courageous decision’ that links an Arlington Heights high school to the Hiroshima bombing
Bruce Janu admits nuclear proliferation wasn’t on his mind on graduation day 1986 at John Hersey High School, when the Arlington Heights school’s namesake returned for a final time to speak at commencement and take questions from students.
“When I was a senior, I just wanted to graduate. And you know, the fact that John Hersey was there, it didn’t really register too much,” Janu said. “I mean, I shook his hand. He was at the graduation. He spoke. But I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is John Hersey. Oh my gosh.’ Because I was a kid.”
And yet, passages from the author and journalist’s most famous and greatest work — “Hiroshima” — have stuck with Janu ever since it was required reading in one of his high school English classes.
“In the way he writes, it’s so matter of fact. It’s horrifying,” said Janu, who is now the Arlington Heights school’s head librarian and resident expert on all things John Hersey.
Ceremonies and remembrances are being held Wednesday in Hiroshima — the Japanese city where the United States dropped the first atomic bomb 80 years ago. It was there that Hersey traveled after the war to chronicle the stories of survivors.
His groundbreaking piece in the Aug. 31, 1946, edition of “The New Yorker” — later turned into a book — is considered the gold standard in journalism.
It earned the top ranking — above Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate investigations — on a list of the top 100 works of journalism of the 20th century, as judged by a panel assembled by New York University’s journalism department.
It’s an early example of narrative nonfiction and the so-called New Journalism technique in which on-the-ground reporting reads like a novel.
“Instead of inserting himself into the narrative, he just let these people’s stories be told,” Janu said.
How did the name of Hersey — born in China to Christian missionary parents, a Yale graduate who later traveled the world as a war correspondent — end up affixed to a school in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs?
Months before Hersey arrived for the dedication of the new school on Nov. 10, 1968, several other names were floated by students, teachers, residents and members of the Northwest Suburban High School District 214 school board.
Students favored Che-che-pin-qua — a Potawatomi chief who evacuated settlers at Fort Dearborn — but the school board said no.
Board members wanted to honor former Superintendent H.H. Schlickenmeyer, but he declined, fearing chants of “Beat Schlickenmeyer” at sporting events from the opposing team’s fans.
Other names were suggested, including John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover and Winston Churchill.
Naming a school after a person would go against District 214 precedent, so the board settled on Willow High School, after the road that ran along campus. But then the area was annexed into Arlington Heights, and the street was renamed to Thomas.
Leah Cummins — an Elk Grove Village resident who later became a District 214 school board member, plan commission member and Daily Herald freelance columnist — suggested Hersey’s name.
Jack Martin, assistant to the superintendent at the time, endorsed the idea, having just read Hersey’s “The Child Buyer,” a 1960 science fiction satire of the education system.
The school board ultimately voted for Hersey.
A new theory on the selection of Hersey was offered last fall.
Tad Daley, a 1974 Hersey graduate, returned for his 50th reunion and spoke to an assembly of current students about the writer’s legacy. In the speech archived on the school website, Daley — a one-time RAND Corp. think tank planner-turned-nuclear weapons abolitionist — suggests the District 214 board’s decision was a reaction to Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 naming its new school after chemist James B. Conant only four years earlier.
Conant was head of the National Defense Research Committee, which oversaw the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb.
“These two high schools got their names in the middle of the 1960s when debates about the Vietnam War, Cold War and the possibility we all might die in a nuclear war were raging in the halls of Congress, on the lawns of Grant Park in downtown Chicago, and almost every night around almost every dinner table in Arlington Heights, Hoffman Estates, and thousands of other towns across our land,” Daley said. “The naming of these two high schools was a battle — a skirmish, an engagement — in the great culture wars of the 1960s.”
Daley admits he didn’t interview school board members — many of them now gone — or dig into archives of meeting minutes to verify his hypothesis. But he doubts there’d be a record of any such conversation anyway.
On Friday, Hersey High School will welcome its latest freshman class for orientation, and in the ensuing weeks, Janu will give a presentation to each new student in the library’s John Hersey Room. It’s where three of the author’s greatest works — in addition to “Hiroshima,” “The Wall,” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Bell for Adano” — are highlighted through artwork, rare editions and other documents Janu has organized and cataloged from the school archives in recent years.
The display includes artist Theodore Gall’s full-size statue of a man breaking free from the Warsaw Ghetto wall Hersey wrote about.
The school also owns a rare copy of the magazine that ran Hersey’s Hiroshima story. Believed to be the only edition left of some 1,000 copies that had a white band of paper around the cover alerting readers to its contents, the magazine is now on loan through the end of the year for the New York Public Library’s exhibit on 100 years of “The New Yorker.”
Students can check out copies of “Hiroshima” from the school library, and scan a QR code to hear Hersey read the first chapter.
“I appreciate it now as a historian more than as a student,” said Janu, who has been teaching history and social studies in District 214 since 1994. “I think that comes with education, growth and age. … It was a courageous decision to name a school after him.”