Riverside Brookfield High School students long have been involved in service to others. On Oct. 18, the annual RB Day of Service was held when 450 students volunteered to spend the day working for local senior citizens.

According to Assistant Principal Tim Scanlon, students were divided into 35 teams, which made quick work of the requested services. More than 80 senior citizens were helped with various jobs including lawn work, the most requested service.

One of the seniors who signed up for the help was Glenna McKillip Linder, Riverside Brookfield graduate of the class of 1944.

“The students raked my lawn this year, as they did last year,” she said.

Linder and her classmates have been a cohesive group of graduates who have kept in touch for 64 years since their graduation.

“We have had reunions as often as we could over the years, and sent a round-robin newsletter to as many of our classmates as possible. Through our organization, Bulldogs Give Back, we have supported Riverside schools since many of us met in kindergarten,” she said.

“The Bulldogs Give Back have maintained a bank account over the years, but with dwindling membership and with the recent passing of our treasurer, Mary Middaugh Frick, we decided to donate the money remaining in our bank account to support the students who are ‘giving back’ to RB on their annual Day of Service.”

Linder attended RB during World War II.

“We were summoned to the school auditorium. It was December 11, 1941. We assembled in time to hear President Franklin Delano Roosevelt give his ‘Day of Infamy’ speech on the school loud speaker system.”

The 937 students enrolled in the high school that day reacted in various ways. Several of the young men took off for Canada and joined the war effort. Six students volunteered for the Marines right at the beginning of World War II. By the war’s end, more than 100 RB alumni had served, and 42 had lost their lives, including RB tennis champ Burt Krueger, who died a year after he graduated while serving in Gen. George Patton’s army in Africa. Both the 1944 and 1945 editions of “The Rouser,” the school’s yearbook, were dedicated to those brave and patriotic Bulldogs.
Every student joined in supporting the war effort in some way.

“Many of us went to work in offices or factories,” Linder said. “I worked at Western Electric assembling teletype machines, a regular ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ I walked to Harlem Avenue and picked up the Stanley Avenue bus in order to get to Western Electric.”

Burton Frick, who married Mary Middaugh after the war, joined the Submarine Corps. Another RB grad, Robert Miller, class of ’43 recalled, “I spent a year at the University of Detroit with what was called the (Army Specialized Training Program) and because I was good at mathematics, I wound up at Camp Polk, La. Then I was off to Europe with an armored infantry division. We relieved the first wave of men hitting the beach in the Battle of the Bulge and later served in the occupation of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. After the war, Caryl Gannett and I married and became students at Michigan State University and we graduated together.”

The Millers spoke of attending school in the economic depression before the war.

“We had no cars, no gas, no money, but we had house parties and just talked. If someone had a chance to borrow his father’s car, we didn’t just double-date, we triple-dated, with all of us piling into one car. We did walk to the Roxy Theater in Berwyn for a night at the movies.”

Colleen Rooney, one of the RB grads of ’42, lived around the corner from Linder, then Glenna McKillip. She married Gordon Hay, RB class of ’40, who survived the war and lived to toast “The Bloody Eighth” arm of the U.S. Air Force, along with other veterans who also survived the war.

Vivian Voss married a Wisconsin boy, Arne Hovey, who was shot down over Germany in a B-17 bomber. He spent the rest of the war in Stalag 17, a well-known prisoner of war camp in Germany.

Roy Overholt returned from the war to start a Little League baseball tournament. The Kiwanis Park in Brookfield is named after him.

A letter to Scanlon dated Oct. 9, 2008, from Glenna McKillip Linder enclosed a check in the amount of $281.44, closing the class of 1944’s Bulldogs Give Back bank account. Assistant Principal Scanlon thanked the class of 1944 for the donation and it was applied toward the 2008 Day of Service.

According to Betty Sharp, assistant to Scanlon, Veterans Day will be celebrated at the school Tuesday, Nov. 11. The school will honor 100 veterans, who will speak about their service to our country. Each veteran will be assigned to a classroom for one-on-one discussions with RB students.

The ongoing tradition of generosity of the students, their teachers and the involved alumni keep alive the 1944 motto “Bulldogs Give Back.”