Mystery solved: A ‘war baby’ goes to school
Homer Denning and his daughter, Diann, are shown in front of the elementary school in Buffalo Village in late August 1947 with teacher Mary Stack.
The building that once housed Hopewell Township Consolidated School is still standing.
On the morning of Sept. 2, 1947, the first day of school, Diann Denning had her picture taken with her father and first-grade teacher in front of Hopewell Township Consolidated School in Buffalo Village by a photographer working for the Washington Observer. The photo appeared on the front page of the newspaper the following day.
Sixty-eight years later, Diann Denning Coen was surprised to see nearly the same photo on the front page of the Observer-Reporter again. And it’s fortunate that she did see it; otherwise, the current Mystery Photo never would have been solved. No other readers were able to identify all three people. The school in Buffalo Village “was just a little four-room schoolhouse,” Coen said. “There were four teachers, and three of them were named Mary.”
The teacher in the photo was Mary Stack, who worked for Avella Area School District for 36 years, retiring from the Buffalo school in 1975. Joyce Anderson emailed us late last week and also identified the teacher and the location of the school.
Homer Denning, Diann’s father, was a local farmer and veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.
The caption under the photo in the 1947 paper stated: “County school enrollments were swelled yesterday, opening day of school, by hundreds of ‘war babies,’ those youngsters born during the year the United States entered World War II.”
Homer Denning was also tax collector for Hopewell Township and a school bus driver who retired as transportation director for the Avella schools. He died in 2000 from injuries suffered in a traffic accident.
“In those days, there was no high school in our area, so we had the choice of going to Trinity, Washington or East Washington,” Coen said, adding that she graduated from Wash High in 1959. She married and had two children before returning to school, graduating from Washington & Jefferson College with a bachelor’s degree in education.
“I taught seventh grade in Washington, and at an open house for parents, my first-grade teacher, Mary Stack, came to see me,” Coen said. “I don’t know how she found me. I cried like a baby.”
Stack died in 2008 at the age of 99.
The old school building is still standing. It was at one time converted to apartments but has since been used for other purposes. The doors have been replaced and the window above them is now glass blocks, but the iron railing remains, and there are holes in the brick where the light fixtures once were.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.