Another Generation Set for Carnival

From Maypoles to Moon Bounces, Westbrook Elementary's Event Makes Memories

The white-pillared, red-brick Westbrook Elementary School looks more like an elegant university campus building than a place to start kindergarten.

Yet the Georgian-style schoolhouse has witnessed the budding of young students for generations: children whose lessons were affected by the attack on Pearl Harbor, kids who were peeved to have their "Sesame Street" viewing schedule interrupted by the Watergate hearings. Now, the school is home to students of the Internet generation, as the campus celebrates its 70th anniversary and its highly anticipated 65th annual community carnival.

Alumni of all ages, the school's 300-plus students, parents, staff members and residents of the surrounding Bethesda community flock each May to the carnival, which is the Westbrook PTA's big event of the year, raises more than $10,000 and requires volunteer contributions from nearly all of the school's families.

The carnival, set for tomorrow at the school, will have a Space Odyssey theme and feature a climbing wall, moon bounces, karaoke, a dunk tank, food, games and other activities. Past carnivals have centered on pirate, Western, fiesta and countless other themes.

"The first year I was here, I was taken aback and amazed," said Principal John Ewald. "The alumni presence at carnival is just as strong and committed as our students, staff and families."

Co-Chairman Kristin Wardour said of the event: "It's your old-time carnival, probably not that different from the first one. It's very homegrown."

Among those with the longest memories of the school is 78-year-old Marie Walter (nee Willett), who was elected queen of the Westbrook May Day festival in 1942, before the carnival tradition began.

"Children danced around the maypole, and we recited poetry," recalled Walter, whose grandchildren, Morgan, Rees and Cory, are former or current Westbrook students.

Walter said she remembers continuing her sixth-grade education in the wake of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Her fondest Westbrook memory, she said, is of traveling through the surrounding neighborhoods with friends on bicycles, collecting things for the war effort.

"We collected grease, rubber tires, metals . . . and newspapers, including The Washington Post, but everybody read the Star then," Walter said of the newspaper that ceased publication in 1981.

Alumna Carolyn Bou, now a Westbrook parent, remembers the good and bad of being a student in the late 1960s.

She recalls how, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, riots and fires erupted in the District.