But that came at conversation’s end.
Noonan began a career writing corporate and school histories in the Y2K when he founded Heritage Histories of Chapel Hill, N.C. To the work he also brought a training in history at Stanford, Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
His experience and skills help him see Ridgewood in context.
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The “huge ups and downs” the school has endured since its founding on Oct. 20, 1919, puts it in “the company of almost every private school I know,” Noonan said. “There’s lots of schools I didn’t write histories of because they didn’t survive. When they do, it’s a matter of a lot of perseverance.”
Although “The Little School in the Woods” was very much a product of his grandfather Harry Kissell’s Ridgewood development - and was planted on a triangle of land “in the Country Club District” — “it was never very flush (with money) because there weren’t that many students,” Noonan said.
Indeed, the small teacher-to-student ratio the school boasts of as a primary strength always has had its financial costs, a problem solved in the early days with loans and through the Depression and early post-war years (1930-48) through an alliance with then Wittenberg College.
One of the historical knots a frustrated Noonan has been able to untie involves the end of that latter time - one of those times when Ridgewood might have failed.
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Noonan’s research has led him to believe that someone put up half of the $15,000 the school’s board needed to buy itself back from Wittenberg when the college wearied of a lengthy series of leases.
He doubts his own family ponied up the money and lists the Bretney, Wallace-Matthews and Cole families as suspects. But Noonan compares his conclusion with the ruminations of an astronomer who, unable to see a planet, must base claims on its existence on the gravitational force it exerts.
Easier to see and understand are how rising and falling prosperity have shaped the school’s history, including Noonan’s own years, which ended when he completed eighth grade in 1966.
Noonan’s text describes Eric Lindblade, Sr., who led Ridgewood from 1957-69, as “an old world New England school master and a minister with a prematurely gray, flattop haircut.”
“All-business,” Noonan said, Lindblade was “a pure educator” whose detailed vision for the school is captured in the title of the chapter devoted to him: “A Pre-Prep, Independent School.”
Lindblade’s Ridgewood prepared Noonan well for the Deerfield Academy, the Massachusetts prep-school where he and his brother attended after Ridgewood. Noonan also credits Lindblade with an old-school devotion to writing that continued its reign years after the headmaster’s departure.
Lindblade’s academic focus was made possible by a booming post-war economy and a baby boom, which provided the financial wherewithal and strong student population that allowed Ridgewood to thrive and build a new school off St. Paris Pike in 1962.
Leaner times forced other school leaders and Ridgewood boards to be “more fiscally aware,” Noonan said.
In the 1980s - with student enrollment in the 70s and 80s — “I think they needed somebody who was both an educator and a business person to come in,” Noonan said. He gives Andrea Gardner, headmaster from 1982-93, high marks for her leadership.
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While watching the bottom line, “she instituted a huge amount of programs,” not just academic, but extra-curricular, he said, enriching student experiences without busting the budget.
Noonan also addresses how changes in the world and Springfield community influenced the school.
“Once elitist, then upper middle class, then middle class with a wider range of socio-economic diversity,” Noonan writes, “Ridgewood witnessed the beginning of an extraordinary ethnic diversity with the first trickle of Indian and Asian students.”
“We came in the early 1970s,” Ash Ahmed, an alum and two-time board chair says in Noonan’s book. “And more of us came after.”
For Ridgewood, it was the more the merrier.
“We know that 1975 to 1990 were not great years economically in Springfield, so it was a large number of southeast Asian kids from about 50 families that eventually saved Ridgewood,” Ahmed said. “Asian kids kept it afloat. There is no question.”
But Asian families did not keep it afloat just to keep Ridgewood afloat.
For those families, “education is religion,” Ahmed told Noonan. “That is all you talk about at the dinner table. You are not talking about swimming; you are talking about academics. When you have psychologically involved parents, that flows to the school. This group lifted the school up to do these extra things like Science Olympiads.”
For a school that only slowly accepted Jewish students during its earlier years, the influx of Asians of color represented a change. On the other hand, the narrative of professional families of means willing to pay for smaller student-to-teacher ratios for their children to Noonan, the value was the founding and value of Ridgewood.
“That’s the one thing that’s carried it along,” he said.
A $3 million gift from the late Jane Hollenbeck and an additional $1 million raised during a centennial celebration campaign led Ridgewood to remodel its 1962 building and add a preschool named for the donor and her son, Peter, who attended Ridgewood.
And though Noonan does not underestimate the gift’s importance, he says it should not overshadow those moments in which the school was sustained by the decades long toiling of its mother’s club (now parents club); and by the efforts of board members and administrators who struggled to keep it afloat not only during the Great Depression but also during the financial crisis of 2008.
For evidence, one need only look at his Noonan’s table of contents.
The chapter on the Ridgewood’s “new dawn” comes only after the chapter on “persevering.”
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