Kissing Principals

Into the office of Cook County School Superintendent Noble J. Puffer one day last month marched a tight-lipped delegation of three. They were teachers from School District No. 86, on the edge of Chicago's northwest suburbs, who had come to tell Superintendent Puffer what they had just told their school board about Principal Charles O'Hearn. Said Teacher Clarabelle Lindsay, 26: "He keeps putting his hands on me." Said Teacher Laurinda Cleary, 26: "On me, too." Gasped Teacher Mary Hammond, 50: "My, my! He took me in the basement and hugged me."

When this news reached School District No. 86, most of its 125 families bristled with indignation. Well they knew that shy, kindly Principal O'Hearn, since he went to the District in 1923, had wangled a four-room yellow brick schoolhouse for their children, bought lunches and shoes for needy pupils out of his own pocket. Housewives insisted that he was so respectful of women that he colored whenever he met one. When parents last fortnight called a public meeting to "vindicate" him. the three complaining schoolma'ams did not appear. Indignantly the School Board fired all three.

Last week Superintendent Puffer, who hires Cook County's school principals, fired Principal O'Hearn. Said Noble J. Puffer: "Oh, he was just the kind of man who couldn't keep his hands off people." With school about to reopen. District No. 86 thus was without a principal, three of its five teachers.

In Andover Borough, N. J., blonde, 16-year-old high-school sophomore Carolyn McDavit last March ran to her parents with the story that Principal R. Elwin Matteson, a married Scoutmaster of 32, had detained her after class, tried to kiss her. Andover Borough's School Board promptly fired Principal Matteson.

Last week New Jersey's Commissioner of Education Charles H. Elliott upheld the School Board, rejected Principal Matteson's explanation that he had kept Carolyn McDavit after class to ask her to draw for the Scout magazine he edited so that it might win a Golden Quill merit badge.

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