FLUSHING — One of the borough's top ranked high schools will add a female alumni to its wall of fame for the first time in its decades-long history.
Townsend Harris High School’s Alumni Association selected Dr. Heather Nash, a psychologist and poet, and David Herszenhorn, a reporter with the New York Times, as its latest inductees to their hall of fame.
Nash graduated in the first class of the reopened, newly coed high school, which opened in 1984 after closing its original location in Manhattan in 1942. Herszenhorn was in the class of 1990.
The school reopened by Queens College and, unlike the original school, allowed girls to attend — and now the school’s Wall of Fame will feature a female for the first time.
"It's high time that we had a woman in the hall of fame," said Craig Slutzkin, class of '91, a venture capitalist and a co-president of the school’s alumni association.
“It's a testament to the student body that the first inductee class from the new school included a woman."
The school traces its history back to 1848, when the New York Free Academy opened in Manhattan with help from Townsend Harris, the country’s first general consul to Japan and a booster of free education.
That school later became City College, and Townsend Harris High School was created from the academy's first year curriculum.
It was closed in 1942 by then Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia, due to budget cuts, according to the alumni website.
Graduates helped reopen the school by Queens College in 1984, and a group of 200 trailblazing students entered that first year and helped build the school from scratch.
They lacked desks those first weeks, Slutzkin said.
But starting something from scratch, and watching it "grow through sheer effort," continues to inspire Nash, the Site Director of Psychological Services and Training at North Central Bronx Hospital, part of the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation.
“Being able to be a part of the first graduating class of Townsend Harris was such a unique and special experience,” she said in an email.
In his nomination email on her behalf, alum Joseph Merino noted Nash's accomplishments as a student — as the editor-in-chief of the school paper, as a freshman — and her accomplishments since.
She has a BA in English and Psychology from Wesleyan University and also two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Connecticut College and St. John’s University.
And, "true to the spirit of the THHS humanities vision," Nash is also a published poet, under her middle name Claudine, he wrote.
Merino said she "embodies the key principles of the Ephebic Oath" which each class takes as freshman.
It states, in part, that the student "shall never bring disgrace to my city, nor shall I ever desert my comrades in the ranks; but I, both alone and with my many comrades, shall fight for the ideals and sacred things of the city...I shall not leave my city any less but rather greater than I found it."
For Nash, who is also involved in the school's alumni association, becoming the school’s first female member of the hall of fame is an “honor which I feel so privileged to be given,” she said.
She joins illustrious alums including one of her heroes, Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine.
The school’s principal, Anthony Baretta, said the new addition is especially significant to the current student body, which is 70 percent female.
“She's the new generation of Townsend Harris,” he said. “We’re very excited and pleased to have her up there.”
