.June 19, 2015

60 years (1955 to 2015) after the first time I climbed these steps to enroll in kindergarten.

At the auction I would buy the door to the reader cabinet of my first grade classroom; the red trimmed door on the left in the next photo. And I would then carry it home to Hale Ave., stopping briefly across the street from the school near the former site of The Station - where I bought my first baseball card in 1957. Wondering what I would have thought back then of the idea that 60 years in the future I would be standing there with that door.

Terrazzo Floors!!!

Take that small stairway up half a flight and you are in the old teachers' lounge and PA room from which school announcements were broadcast. Most of the old wood veneer speakers are still high on a wall in each classroom, and I was told still functional. Until this visit I did not know that the teachers even had their own water closet in that room.

Looking out at Main Street from the middle floor lounge. In the 50's and 60's this was a busy crosswalk manned by the School Safety Patrol. The advantage of this patrol location was that you could leave your books inside the school and pick them up at the end of your duty. It also was easy to return your AAA raincoat on a bad day. We may have been allowed to wear those home as long as we returned them to the school early the next morning.

As I recall it from the old K-8 days, they separated the grades by putting 3rd through 6th on the third floor. Grades 1-7 each had two classrooms. Kindergarten was all in one bottom floor room and the 1st and 2nd grade rooms were at the far end of this middle floor hallway. The older kids in 7th and 8th grade had the four remaining rooms on this floor for regular classes. I believe that they also had the classroom below this one and one on the top floor dedicated to their vocational classes.

For my money the greatest architectural detail in all of Ashland. For a detailed discussion and more photos of this wonderful staircase click on the link below:

https://sites.google.com/site/osbornschoolashlandohio/osborn-home/1949-addition