Life is full of serendipitous moments, the kind that surprise you and remind you of why you work so hard and why you continue to strive for more. The story behind the recently published book “Classroom 15: How the Hoover FBI Censored the Dreams of Innocent Oregon Fourth Graders” is laced with unforeseen moments of chance that weave together into a story 60 years in the making.
In 1960, Ray “Bud” McFetridge was in the midst of a geography unit on people working together in his fourth grade class at Riverside Elementary School in Roseburg. The lesson sparked an idea: a pen pal project with schoolchildren in another country. The class chose Russia — then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — because it was as far away as this small Oregon class could imagine. Unsure how to connect with a Russian classroom, McFetridge and his class sent a letter to Congressman Charles Porter asking for help.
Ten-year-old Janice Boyle became the face of this story. Janice was the Riverside Elementary School class secretary and was selected to write the letter to Congressman Porter. Then, the class promptly forgot about the assignment, until they received a reply. In his response, Porter explained how he supported the class’s efforts, but had referred their request to the United States Department of State.
America was in the midst of the Cold War. Tensions between the empire-building USSR and the United States were rising. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a small class project anymore. The State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation became involved. An assignment that had become all but forgotten by those that started it suddenly became first local, then national and even world news.
Nearly 60 years later, University of Oregon James Wallace Chair Professor in Journalism Peter Laufer gave his advanced reporting class a short in-class assignment. He had found an “On This Day” column from The New York Times about an event that had occurred in 1960 featuring 10-year-old Janice Boyle of Roseburg and the rest of her fourth grade class. The assignment: find that girl.
By the end of that class period, Janice (Boyle) Hall had been located. A week later, the class was able to connect with Hall on the phone. But that class wasn’t done with her story just yet.
“They realized that they had stumbled on an untold story that was not just history but a parable for their own generation and its crises,” Laufer says in the book’s introduction.
There was so much more to Hall’s story that these newshounds wanted to know. The hunt sent reporting teams throughout the world. One traveled to Roseburg to learn about where this story all began. Another traveled to Sisters, Oregon, to learn more about the teacher who had started it all. Yet another traveled to Las Vegas to learn more about Hall’s story and her life following her 15 minutes of fame. One reporter even traveled to Russia in the middle of winter in order to help complete what Hall and her class had started 60 years before.
A one-term class turned into over a year’s worth of work. This was no longer a short classroom assignment. These reporters had so much more than just an article’s worth of information to share. They had first-hand interviews, documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and mountains of research.
“All of this developed, week by week, until we got deeper into the story and saw how rich it was, how much it related to contemporary events and by the end of the term we were talking about something more. Maybe a featured article for a magazine,” Laufer said. “We had grandiose thoughts on what it could be, but I kept telling them, ‘We are not writing a book,’ because the thing was getting book-sized.”
But no matter how much Laufer protested, a book was the only logical way to go about sharing what they had learned.
“A lot of the project was one thing leading to another, kind of these serendipitous jumps from one person to talk to, to the next person to talk to, to a set of documents to the next corner of the story and we just kept turning corners in the process to find other corners to turn until eventually we had a book,” lead author Zack Demars said.
Each author brought a piece of the story together through different chapters, which detailed what they found and how they found it. Demars invited a former classmate, Julia Mueller, to join the project as the managing editor.
“I was brought in to bring all these ideas and chapters into something that was pitchable,” Mueller said. “We weren’t sure what that form was going to be but as we worked on it, we discovered that we could push it towards the direction of a book. When I stepped on to the project, everyone had finished their final works, but it seemed like there was still so much information that had yet to be pursued.”
With all the parts weaving together through these disparate chapters, the authors realized they were missing one final piece: a modern day touch. It was decided that Demars, as lead author, should make a trip to Russia.
To bring the story full circle, one of the authors approached a fourth grade teacher in Yoncalla about reviving the pen pal project Hall’s class had attempted decades before.
“I took those letters with me to a school in Rostov-on-Don, which is about a 14-hour train ride south of Moscow,” Demars said.
When he returned home a week later, he brought letters from a Russian classroom back to that Yoncalla class. It took 60 years, but McFetridge’s idea of connecting Roseburg students to others around the world finally became a reality.
“I don’t really know at what point we realized we had something worth sharing, worth publishing. Even at this point, I’m not sure. There were just so many serendipitous things along the way that it all just sort of fell into place,” Demars said. “But I think also at the very beginning we realized that this was something, that this was cool and that people might like just because it was purely an interesting story about this little girl who was engaging in global politics for a few minutes of her fourth grade life.”
“Classroom 15: How the Hoover FBI Censored the Dreams of Innocent Oregon Fourth Graders” was released Dec. 20 and is available at www.amzn.to/30uQOcs and other online retailers.
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