John M. Phillips

Phillips Elementary School article

--From the Pittsburgh City Paper, April 12-April 19, 2000

It' s hard to imagine two people who better embodied the principles of urban public education than John MacFarlane Phillips and Harriet Duff Phillips. She was a school board member and community activist; he once maintained a backyard zoo and had extensive experience with firearms. The two were longtime residents of Carrick, where they shared a 17-room mansion called "Impton" ... which come to think of it, wouldn't be a bad name for a school either. 

John Phillips was an industrialist, the president of Phillips Mine and Mill Supply Company, which had a sizeable plant on the South Side. But he was best known as a hunter and conservationist. A woodsman who shared the turn-of-the-century environmental ethics of Theodore Roosevelt, Phillips helped craft Pennsylvania's game laws, which served as a model for similar restrictions adopted in other states. The new rules weren't universally beloved, however, especially by recent immigrants used to living off what they could hunt. And after 11 game wardens were shot while trying to enforce the game laws in 1905, Phillips fought for the passage of the Alien Gun Law, which prohibited non-citizens from packing heat. Phillips fought a constitutional challenge all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won. (It's anyone's guess where this would have gotten Phillips in his current political climate: If you hear a gun-rights supporter talking about an Alien Gun Law today, he's probably worried about losing his rights to defend himself from extraterrestrials.)

Of course, Phillips also killed lots of animals - on one occasion he gave a set of five dead jaguars to the Carnegie Museum - and he also shot a nationally famous prize-winning photograph of a mountain goat. A 1932 article in the Post-Gazette maintains that he once kept a small private zoo of 14 animals behind a house.

He also helped found the Boy Scouts of America, and was known to scouts - I'm going to insist on some decorum here, people - as "Chief Silver Tip." Harriet Phillips was even more devoted to youth. She'd grown up attending the Humboldt school - which the school bearing her own name was built to replace - and served on the city's school board for 14 years. She participated in the civic activities suitable for a woman in her station - she helped raised funds for the South Side Hospital, which her father founded, for example - but was also, a fairly progressive political voice. She agitated for women to have greater opportunity both in business and in public life and was an outspoken advocate - at least for the pre-civil rights era - for better race relations. She also helped lead the fight for a juvenile justice system that would treat young offenders more compassionately.

Such work won her awards ranging from "Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania" to "American Mother of the Year." No doubt Mrs. Phillips' homespun child-rearing wisdom played a part in her success as well: If you're trying to keep the kids at home, she once said, "An easy way to compete with outside places is to have a full refrigerator: ... which might be a solution for Pittsburgh's youth drain right here. "I am convinced that young people want simple home life," she maintained. Well, that and stadiums, presumably.

Appropriately enough, given the couple's mutual success, Phillips School was the first and only city to be named after a husband and wife. But both John and Harriet Phillips had died by the time the school had opened in 1959; Harriet the previous year and her husband in 1953, three years before the school board unanimously decided to grant the proposed new school its name because of the couple's "great contributions to the South Side Community."

Which is too bad: Given the fractious nature of just about every school board debate since the naming of the Phillips School, maybe our system would benefit under the watchful eye of a strong maternal figure. Or an accomplished marksman.

(Potter, Chris "Who was Phillips Elementary School in the South Side named after?" Pittsburgh City Paper, 12 April, 2000, News and Views - You Had to Ask)