Bennett Fairorth, a prolific writer and beloved Council Rock teacher, has died at 99
Prolific writer and veteran teacher Bennett Fairorth was looking forward to a 100th birthday party with former students, his brother said.
Prolific writer and longtime Council Rock School District teacher Bennett Fairorth died at a Rydal retirement home July 9 after falling in his Abington home of 64 years.
Fairorth was looking forward to his 100th birthday celebration with former students this month, his brother Leonard Fairorth said.
A high school English teacher of more than 30 years, Fairorth regularly heard from students for decades after his retirement, despite never owning a cell phone, computer, or answering machine.
His passing 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.
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.”
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, 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.
Fairorth studied English at Penn 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 couldn’t support a family on a reporter’s salary. Fairorth raised three children with his wife, Ruth, who ran a uniform store.
Instead of writing, 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 said. 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 Council Rock English department heard of his success preparing seniors for college and recruited him in 1964, Fairorth said in 2024.
Fairorth was a lifelong fan of newspaper puzzles. He wrote weekly letters to a relative about The Inquirer crosswords, Leonard 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, 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, Fairorth was known as a firm but thorough grader, Leonard 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 said, and go to the principal after 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 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 Chestnut Hill Local.
In the 1960s, Fairorth failed a senior who refused to submit a research paper. Though he was class president, he couldn’t attend graduation and instead went to summer school.
“It was a tense situation,” 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,” 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?”
Inquirer Greater Abington
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
