Oak Park and River Forest High School

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:

    “I could lecture on dry oak leaves; I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Borrow a child and get on welfare.
    Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
    or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
    to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
    be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
    back ...”
    —Susan Griffin (b. 1943)

    “You scour the Bowery, ransack the Bronx,
    Through funeral parlors and honky-tonks.
    From river to river you comb the town
    For a place to lay your family down.”
    —Ogden Nash (1902–1971)

    “The moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns ... to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
    —Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)

    “[How] the young . . . can grow from the primitive to the civilized, from emotional anarchy to the disciplined freedom of maturity without losing the joy of spontaneity and the peace of self-honesty is a problem of education that no school and no culture have ever solved.”
    —Leontine Young (20th century)