THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 22, 1996 TAG: 9607200012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: 58 lines
Looming large near the intersection of Shirley and Llewellyn avenues in Norfolk, Maury High School is hard to miss if you travel that way.
The four-story building, in architectural terms, is high-profile, in keeping with its longtime (starting in 1911) educational and athletic reputation.
But the historic school has also been pretty hard to identify, visually, except for those with some tie to it (a good part of the area's population, granted) or with some other home-grown reason for recognition.
For visitors and the otherwise uninformed who might cast a curious eye at the big building while passing by (and even for many who have known quite well what they were looking at), the absence of an eye-catching institutional sign has been a puzzling vexation, to say the least.
Of course, ``Maury High School'' does appear on the front of the building, but high up, the words separated by tall, imposing pillars and somehow lost among the structural ornamentation. I rarely, if ever, noticed them during my three Maury years, and it has been the same with others, I gather.
To many, the school (named after the great oceanographer Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury) just has not had a visible label.
At least that was the case up until the recent completion of a project kicked off by the graduating class of 1938 at its 55th reunion in 1993.
Now there is a sturdy, shoulder-high masonry marker at the corner of Shirley and Llewellyn, where the name of the school is spelled out in large, heavily incised letters.
But there is more to it than that.
When the class of '38 - which was my class - decided to collect funds for a ground-level structure that would proclaim the school's identity more clearly, a companion objective was to make the project a memorial to the class's sponsor, the late Virginia Arthur Rorer. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of William and Mary, the then Miss Arthur began her fruitful career of teacher and adviser at Maury in 1931, took time out for a while starting in 1942 (she married fellow history teacher Henry Rorer), returned to Maury later for more teaching (English and journalism) and retired in 1973.
All of this, including her death just three years past, was recalled in affectionate remarks by retired Vice Adm. Gresham Bayne and Class Reunion Co-Chairman Dorothy Beale Jones at a simple dedication ceremony on the Maury grounds a few days ago - with a number of class members (in their mid-70s now) on hand to hear and applaud.
A metal plaque notes that the new marker was conceived and built in Mrs. Rorer's memory.
So up close, for those down the years who may be drawn close, the small letters molded in brass pay permanent tribute to one of those who helped Maury become what it is.
For others who may happen to read from a distance (or up close), the outsize ``Maury High School'' letters solve a practical problem while, paradoxically, paying tribute to a school that really needed no markers at all to make its mark. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk. by CNB