West Philadelphia Catholic Girls' High School

This formerly all-female, all-white high school was one of the two primary sources of dancers for Bob Horn’s Bandstand and later Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Aperusal of the girls’ school’s 1956 yearbook, The Gleam, shows picture after picture of white girls, depicted in one activity after another, dressed in neat uniforms replete with stiff Peter Pan collars--nothing to suggest any connection with WFIL’s Studio B or teenagers on the verge of discovering rock ‘n’ roll. This school, shown in this image as it appeared in 1953, opened in 1927 on the 4500 block of Chestnut Street. In 1989, it expanded and merged with West Philadelphia Catholic Boys’ High School when the Archdiocese closed the latter building. Today it is the racially and ethnically diverse co-educational West Philadelphia Catholic Preparatory High School.