Oak Park and River Forest High School, or OPRF, is a public four-year high school located in Oak Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. It is the only school of Oak Park and River Forest District 200.
Founded in 1873, the current school building opened in 1907. A comprehensive college preparatory school, OPRF has had a long history of not only turning out alumni who have made contributions in a wide variety of fields, but have consistently been eminently notable in their fields. Perhaps the most notable is Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway, whose writing career began at the school.
Throughout most of its history, the school has been a centerpiece of the Oak Park community, serving as host to a number of community events. Many of these events included lecturers and performances from many notable people from a variety of fields. Throughout the twentieth century, the school also was on the front lines of students rights issues ranging from fraternity/sorority membership in the early twentieth century, to the rights of homosexuals and African-Americans at the century's end.
Read more about Oak Park And River Forest High School: History, Academics, Notable Staff
Famous quotes containing the words oak, park, river, forest, high and/or school:
“Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)
“It is from quiet places like this all over the world that the forces accumulate which presently will overbear any attempt to accomplish evil on a large scale. Like the rivulets gathering into the river, and the river into the seas, there come from communities like this streams that fertilize the consciences of men, and it is the conscience of the world that we are trying to place upon the throne which others would usurp.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to the New York Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.”
—Woody Guthrie (1912–1967)
“I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high he reached the sky,
And didn’t get back till the Fourth of July.”
—Unknown. I Asked My Mother (l. 1–4)
“...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)