1950's Osborn

Steve Fair's brother just sent me this battered but extremely high quality photo hoping that I could identify the kids. It was taken in their basement rec room, by my estimate in early 1962. It is absolutely fantastic! Osborn Elementary School's Hale Avenue area 6th graders. Yes it is me reading the comic book, obviously unimpressed with the dancing. I lived roughly a block from Hale, on Edgehill to the west until age six and on Duff to the east until I was 16 and moved to Strongsville.

Kip Kiste and Chris Callison are dancing. Sue Martin is the smiling blonde in the background. Steve's brother says that the girl facing away from the camera is Cheryl Peters, who went to St. Ed's and lived at 704 Hale. The guy behind Kip is probably Dave Repp based only on his blonde hair. Steve is the guy on his knees in the chair . Can't tell about the person behind him.

The photo is significant for several reasons besides all the white socks. First, although Chris was new in 5th grade most of us in this Osborn 6th grade group had already been together for seven (K-6th) of the twelve years of our lives (well technically I was still eleven when this was taken), and are just a few weeks away from being absorbed into a much larger junior high consolidated 7th grade. This will shatter and scatter us forever, in retrospect one of the saddest things about growing up. Second, as can be seen by the interactions at the party, we are starting to move into the minefield of adolescence which will rock our world in both good and bad ways. And clearly some of us (guilty) are already more resistant to that development than others. In Never-Never Land the adventures continued because Peter Pan never grew up physically, obviously at this point I need a Wendy to inspire me to get my head out of that comic book.

And for anyone worried about my socialization I had my first kiss (another Hale Avenue girl from our class) and went to my first dance around this time, but my heart probably still belonged to Jane Dunlap from 4th grade. Relationships were far simpler in 4th grade.

This magazine photo was from five years before the rec room picture, Cheryl & Lonnie are dressed a little different than our group and are a little older 13-14 vs our 11-12. I suspect that we were starting to see a little of the Gidget surf culture influence by 1962.

Courtesy of Cheryl Feasel

Jeff says the Brownie on the far left of the top row is Marti Bennett, who lived on the corner of Hale & Hillcrest, in the only house in the neighborhood at that time with a swimming pool in the back yard.

ClickHereForOsbornElementaryIndividualStudentPhotos

Every other year Osborn students would have individual photos made and we would exchange them with each other (I found the above envelop with my photo in one of our family albums). Click on the above to link to see some surviving photos. If anyone has some please send jpg's to me and I will add them to this collection.

These photos were posed on the gym bleachers which were under the glass block windows, on sunny days the gym did not really need any additional light. Sometime between the 60's and the 2015 demo the bleachers were removed and the glass block windows bricked over. A rock wall for climbing was eventually built on the wall.

28 January 2016 (updated June 17, 2018)

Don Reinhart & Janet Klingensmith

I went to the Ashland University women's basketball game last night and they had a moment of silence for Don Reinhart, a professor who passed away this week at age 78. The name seemed familiar but it was not until I got home and read his obit that I realized that he and his wife had done their student teaching at Osborn when I was in second or third grade. They were a very attractive and charismatic couple and all the third grade girls were crushing on Don and all the boys on Janet. I'm sure we had student teachers every year but they were the memorable role models. My mother knew them from several education classes she had taken at AC.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries

He attended Ashland College, graduating with a degree in education in 1959.

https://www.janrinehart.com/updates/2018/6/14/a-good-and-faithful-servant

On a nice day almost 100 bicycles would be parked in the grove of pines on the west side of the school. Almost all 26" boy's bicycles, a few girls might have ridden to school but I don't specifically recall it.

I had a lock with bars long to fit through the spokes of the rear wheel and around the frame. Those with newer bikes locked them but not everyone bothered to do so - I don't recall any being stolen. In the early grades I looked forward to being allowed to ride to school like the older kids.

Mystery solved!

This photo and the photo of today's armory were actually taken from the same spot, all that is visible of the armory in the over exposed background of the old photo is the side door and the four narrow basement windows (they appear as columns) on the left margin behind the pipe fence between the school and the armory east entrance drive.

Note the blue jeans most of us wore to school in the late 1950's.

In the late 60's I was kicked out of a high school basketball game for wearing blue jeans, and they were a new pair. Reactionary forces were already engaged in a political backlash, little realizing that blue jeans were school attire well before any counter-culture.

The one remaining pine tree can just be seen at the left edge of the above photo - it did not survive the demolition although almost all the other trees were saved.In kindergarten I used to play in a sandbox at about the spot I am standing to take the above photo. We had a bucket of cheap brightly colored unbreakable plastic airplanes that I would haul out there with me at recess.

Posing on the Osborn playground. The back of the armory garage is visible as are many trees and some grass. The playground was not paved, just gravel; and there was a grassy area on the north side before the line of trees along the town creek.

My best friend Craig Martin with his metal Wild Bill Hickok lunch box on the sidewalk beside Holbrook, 1957 or 1958. Note the store on the point between Liberty & Main, it was called "The Station" and was an early version of a convenience store. This is where I bought my first baseball card. It was at 547 East Main and was officially named Lewis Market (Joseph and Pauline Lewis who had lived near us on Lilac Lane).

A couple years later it was torn down and replaced by Art's Sohio Station (Arthur Poland).

Lots of changes to this intersection over the past 60 years but the front steps to the white house still line up with Holbrook's sidewalk, the street was widened to the sidewalk edge. The Sohio station was eventually replaced with a pizza joint. These businesses kept getting pushed west along Main Street. Liberty Street used to merge with Main Street well east of Holbrook, it was the most challenging of the five safety patrol crossings as cars were coming from four different directions and you had to walk out in the middle of the road and hope an inattentive driver did not drive through the intersection. There was a motel to the left of the larger white house and Mrs. Scott's mansion and carriage house was between the motel and the Luray Lanes parking lot. We pretended her dilapidated house was haunted but were afraid to venture into its overgrown grounds.

Craig is carrying his metal Wild Bill Hickock & Jingles lunch box. I had Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Note the metal handle on my lunch box and the plastic handle on Craig's. In the mid to late 1950's toys were slowly transitioning (often piece by piece) from metal and wood to plastic.

My Roy Rogers lunch box. It had a metal handle, my parents got this for me just before the switch to plastic handles.

My first baseball card was a 1957 Curt Simmons. One of those mystery memories. I have always known that this was true and even now can visualize buying it. There was a small wood-sided store (see the Craig Martin photo above) across the street from Osborn School; nicknamed "The Station" because they had a pair of Standard Oil gas pumps out front. And I recall going in there one day with my mother (must have been the spring or summer of 1957) and spotting baseball cards for sale. They were a penny a pack for one card and a piece of gum (there were also nickel packs with five cards and a big slab of gum). And my mother bought me a penny pack that day which contained the Curt Simmons card (probably a minor disappointment that it was not a Cleveland Indians player or perhaps I was too young to care).

This is a photo of a mystical tree that stood in the Osborn playground near the sidewalk next to Holbrook - there was once a line of these trees along Holbrook extending from the bridge to the end of the playground. This one merited a photo as it was a source of fascination to many of us, the base of that cavity on the side would fill up with water and a strange black mush. We would dig it out with twigs during recess and lunch. I don't think it fascinated anyone enough to stay after school for that purpose. I'm not sure when the tree died and was cut down but it probably happened while we were in Junior High. The playground in those days was unpaved and several feet below street level as it fell away toward the creek bank.

This was the approximate spot in 2015, the gable of the white house can be seen in both photos.

Pre-1962 each of Ashland's larger elementary schools had their own 7th and 8th grade football programs, with their own uniforms and school colors. Osborn's were red and white. When the junior high was created the uniforms from all the schools were deposited in a mixed heap inside the field house in back of the YMCA. On the first day of 7th grade football I rooted around in that pile and assembled an entire red and white Osborn uniform, including the helmet.

Although a year too late to actually play for Osborn, I managed to satisfy my aspirations to one-day take the Redwood Stadium field in an Osborn uniform.

These are the only photos I have of Peter Hamilton, my best friend in Kindergarten at Osborn. He lived on Diamond Street. In 1st Grade, after we had moved from Edgehill to Duff, I would go to his house after school and my parents would pick me up there. His family moved from Ashland shortly after we completed 1st Grade, an educated guess because I do not have a second grade photo of him. That is my brother and Mary Strine standing with him in our back yard - with Dave Sale's new house off in the distance.

The NE corner of my (Mrs. Sackett's) third grade classroom, Room 322, then and now, this photo comparison confirmed that we were on the 3rd floor and not the 2nd floor (there had been some doubt in my mind) which does not have this same corner blackboard configuration. That's Toby Strickling on the left and ???? on the right. Anybody out there recognize him or the partially hidden girl? The blackboards have been replaced with whiteboards but the framing is still there as are the floors. My awareness of the horizon line has improved over the past 56 years.

Osborn Elementary School did not have a "pop" machine (NE Ohio talk for a Coke or other soft drink). But we did have a large blue milk machine in the hallway outside the cafeteria. It dispensed milk in small glass bottles, I think it cost three cents for a bottle. It had four big red buttons, one for regular milk and three for chocolate milk; which was a bigger seller. For a brief period you could get a bottle of orange drink but I think the PTA made them remove that option.

The school milk machine was stocked by a local dairy, the same one that delivered to our house. Even though our house was built in 1956 it was constructed with a milk chute, a little door which the milkman could open and set your bottles inside. In our case the door opened into the garage but some houses had doors that opened into the house. Housewives would leave a note for the milkman on delivery days specifying which and how much of the range of offered dairy products she wanted.

On Saturday mornings in the late 1950's the local radio station (WNCO) would hold on-air auctions for toys, a promotion sponsored by Ashland Sanitary Dairy. The bidding was done in milk caps, which at that time were metal foil with the Dairy's logo. It occurred to me as I listened to the auction one Saturday that there were plenty of caps for the taking at school, kids did not remove the caps - we just punched our straws through them. And from the numbers being bid for really good items it was obvious that none of the bidders had access to that many caps.

So for several weeks I stripped the caps off the empty bottles stacked on racks beside the school's milk vending machine, before the dairy came to take the empties away. I had a large bag of rather bad smelling metal caps and a lot of tiny cuts on my fingers where the sharp edge of the crimped foil had cut me. The next Saturday I stood by the phone listening to the radio auction. My mother had refused to make a call for me and at age nine I was extremely nervous about going on the air. I was also concerned because the printing on my caps was a different color than those on a quart bottle; with visions of an embarrassing on-the-air disqualification and my picture in the newspaper the next week captioned "delinquent kid". I had enough to win some very good toys but I was too scared to do anything more than dial the phone and then hang-up after the first ring (much the feeling one has working up the nerve to call up and ask a girl out on a first date).

The closest I got to actually bidding was when they offered a 16" toy boat with an electric motor. To this day I don't know if the caps I had worked so hard to pry off those tiny milk bottles would have been valid, but I suspect that they would have been.