June 23rd Visit

We start at the bottom! My second return visit to the school was on Tuesday June 23, 2015. A different sort of summer vacation this year as everything is being packed up to be moved into the new building in a few weeks.

Note the sloping roof of the band room, above us is the seating section of the auditorium.

A generally unknown rest room inside the band room. The only other rest rooms in the basement were the inaccessible locker rooms. Otherwise you had to walk up to the first floor and almost to Cottage Street for the lone men's or women's rest room on each floor. Good thing we all had youthful bladders in those days.

The handful of basement classrooms on the east side of the school were the bleakest in the whole building.

This entrance to the auditorium seating would have been my first ever look inside the school when our 5th grade class came to see "Oklahoma" one afternoon. That would have been in 1961. Little did I imagine that I would be standing on this same spot over 50 years later on the eve of the school's demolition.

Room 221, the first classroom after leaving the north side balcony exit, history class.

Room 218 in the north wing, the room before the library. I had Bob McFarlin's 8th grade math class here, or maybe next door in 219. He was a teacher I respected and one of the few people in my life I made a real effort to please. Unfortunately for me I never met many like him. In the "even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut" department, the school bungled its way to success by placing an underachiever in a second tier math class where he really connected with a instructor and became better prepared for high school math than he would have been goofing off in the advanced class. It evened out the next year when I was placed in a second tier science class and responded with a year-long yawn.

Rooms 119 and 120, which had combined into one large room with two doors. This was the Mrs. Johnson's art room and sometime refuge for me. It was next to that strange storage room that had once been a boys' rest room. That room had a closed off fire escape onto 4th Street. The black steel platform was still there although it was rusted into a state of near collapse. I spent a lot of my life standing on it waiting for my bus to arrive.

View out the 3rd floor cafeteria window at the soon to be torn down Myers Plant.

It was quite simply the worst institutional food in the Western Hemisphere.

Third floor chemistry classroom, about the middle of the Cottage Street section of the building. I distinctly recall a tiered classroom in this location with the elevated rows of seats looking down at this table and the blackboard. Either that was taken out over the past 50 years or my mind is showing yet more signs of Mad Cow Disease.

An attic is what was behind the always locked "Alice In Wonderland Door" in the wall of the third floor hallway.

Another illusion shattered, there are far too few!

Room 301, southeast corner of the building. My 9th grade advanced English classroom, 25 girls and two boys, and my mother as a substitute teacher for five weeks. Welcome to hell. Bonnie Paisley had the desk beside me - thanks for being protective of a guy approaching shyness level Mach-5!