Bennett Fairorth, a prolific writer and longtime Council Rock School District teacher, died Thursday, July 9, at a Rydal retirement home after falling in his Abington home of 64 years.
Mr. Fairorth had been looking forward to celebrating his 100th birthday with former students this month, his brother, Leonard Fairorth, said.
A high school English teacher of more than 30 years, Mr. Fairorth regularly heard from students for decades after his retirement, despite never owning a cell phone, a computer, or an answering machine.
His death sparked a flood of remembrances on social media from former students — who recalled reading The Odyssey and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, seeing plays, and attending events for the student newspaper he advised — including several who became teachers and writers themselves.
“Freshman year in college English I was told not to come back to class after handing in my first paper,” one former student wrote. “The professor said I already knew how to write.”
“I have never laughed as hard as I did during those classes,” another wrote.
Mr. Fairorth’s curriculum included books that some considered controversial in the foment of the era, 1967 graduate Allen Hengst said, including The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
“It was a controversial time. A lot was changing,” Hengst said. “Here was a teacher who was on our side.”
Mr. Fairorth was oldest of five children born to a business owner and a homemaker. He and his sister were the only Jewish students at his North Philadelphia elementary school, Mr. Fairorth said in a podcast interview in 2023 with a former student and her husband, and had to switch schools after other kids attacked them.
Mr. Fairorth studied English at Pennsylvania State University, though his education was interrupted when he was drafted into the Navy during World War II and tasked with keeping mechanical records in Manila. He returned and got a master’s degree in business from the University of Pennsylvania, hoping to write for the Wall Street Journal, he said in 2024, but found he could not support a family on a reporter’s salary. Mr. Fairorth raised three children with his wife, Ruth, who ran a uniform store.
Instead of writing, Mr. Fairorth worked for several years putting new rock and roll records into jukeboxes around town and leaving the old ones at home for his youngest brother, Leonard Fairorth said. Bennett Fairorth, who preferred classical music, would drive to New York on Saturdays, squeezing in both a matinee and an evening performance at the opera houses.
He took a pay cut to teach for a few years at Abington Senior High School and struggled financially until the English department at Council Rock heard of his success preparing seniors for college and recruited him in 1964, Mr. Fairorth said in 2024.
Mr. Fairorth was a lifelong fan of newspaper puzzles. He wrote weekly letters to a relative about The Inquirer’s crosswords, his brother said. In 1936, at age 9, he sent in the correct answers to an Inquirer kids’ challenge and won a prize, according to newspaper archives.
In retirement, Mr. Fairorth found more time for hobbies, self-publishing more than a dozen novels, often in a diaristic style chronicling holiday dinners and trips abroad.
As a teacher, Mr. Fairorth was known as a firm but thorough grader, his brother said — a trait that led to conflicts with some parents in the tony suburban district toward the end of his career.
“Parents would come in and [complain] about their kid not getting an A,” Leonard Fairorth said, and go to the principal after Mr. Fairorth refused to change it. “Some of them would be really nasty. … That’s one of the things that really discouraged him at the end.”
Although Mr. Fairorth maintained decades-long correspondence with some students, there was one letter that took more than half a century to arrive, he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Chestnut Hill Local.
In the 1960s, Mr. Fairorth had failed a senior who refused to submit a research paper. Though he was class president, he could not attend graduation and instead went to summer school.
“It was a tense situation,” Mr. Fairorth wrote.
The student, Bill Proser, went on to earn an English degree, become a teacher, and found a charter school in Idaho.
“Yesterday, after 55 years of his getting an F in my class, I received a letter in Bill’s handwriting,” Mr. Fairorth wrote. “‘Thank you for what you did for me.’ I suppose that if you wait long enough, who knows what magic will come to pass?”
In addition to his brother, Mr. Fairorth is survived by children Nancy, Mark, and Laurel, as well as grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.
Services and interment were private, according to a notice by the Philadelphia Cremation Society.
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