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How'd those propane tanks work out last week?
Uh, things didn't go according to plan. Who knew propane was so explosive?
April 19, 2016 - 50 years ago this coming August we moved to Strongsville, I had just turned 16.
I drove up from Ashland this afternoon to tour Center Middle School which was holding an open house prior to its summer demo. Before heading back I stopped by the high school and was able to spend a bit of time inside.
"Sweet 16 ain't that peachy keen"
I have a bit of history with Strongsville Ohio and by an odd coincidence they are tearing down Strongsville's ancient Junior High - Middle School and Ashland's ancient Junior High - Middle School buildings within months of each other. Strongsville's building is in much better shape.
I am actually a Strongsville High School graduate, a school I joyfully walked away from many years ago. In fact since graduation night I have only had contact with six Class of 1968 classmates, which is something I now find astonishing but which probably would not have surprised me in June 1968.
And although I am not embracing it I am at least looking back - something almost in the category of miraculous.
Click here for Strongsville Ohio Middle School Page
Speed skating Fish sisters, Jenny and Debbie.
Jenny medaled in the 1968 Winter Olympics.
Strongsville's Town n' Country was my introduction to ice skating and hockey, a positive takeaway which I was still doing 20 years later with The St. Moritz Skating Club and the NNHL at Berkeley's Iceland in California.
It doesn't look like this anymore.
The front entrance hallway, the wooden gym doors are visible in the distant background.
As I recall the 1968 entrance was about halfway between this arch and the gym doors. This part of the hallway was an outdoor walkway with the front wings of the building on each side; this walkway can be seen outside the window of the black & white photo below.
The tables have been replaced by a different style but the chairs are the same.
“It happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting.
No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.”
My first resurfaced memory during the visit was how without exception entering the cafeteria for lunch or study hall would bring me down, as I was guaranteed to flash on how much I wanted to instead be entering my old school's cafeteria. This was ground zero of my depression, far worse than in any other room in the school.
Technically this is the same cafeteria , looking east toward the serving line on the far wall, some walls have been blown out but it is the same place.
Here I am, once again
Feeling lost but now and then
I breathe it in to let it go
This is the first room you see after navigating the seemingly endless entrance corridor. At this point of the visit my reaction was complete and total disorientation. I roamed around waiting for something to click into place and provide a sudden rush of clarity. But it never happened. There have been so many design changes and new additions that even when I recognized a room the sense of familiarity would vanish when I left it. In part this reflected my long ago status as a reluctant incoming transfer student. Strongsville High School during my two years there had effectively been a world without me in it, even as an interested observer. For two years I simply stacked time in the manner of a well-adjusted prison inmate.
" I Don't Like Mondays" was not contemporary to 1966-68 but it nicely captures my state-of-mind during that time.
The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's gonna make them stay at home
I don't like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oot the whole day down
Friday On My Mind (appropriately placed here after "I Don't Like Mondays") was probably the best song during my two years at Strongsville High School, although I never realized how much Steve Wright's dancing added to the incredible energy level.
My disorientation problem during this return visit was not just from the changes that have taken place in the almost 50 years since I was in this building, but the changes that took place "during" my two years in the building. And the fact that I was able to absent myself most afternoons of my senior year, cutting sheet metal as part of a guidance office work release program at Safety Sign Company. During my first year a large addition to the building was under construction. This was the little theater area which included a second corridor running north of the main corridor (the one that ran in front of the gym doors up to the student lounge on the west side of the building). During my second year a library addition was opened to the west of the student lounge, somewhat later than expected because the walls had fallen down midway through the project; at the time this struck us as perversely humorous. So on my return visit my recall was trying to hit a moving target.
The above photo is looking east, the below photo is looking west - back toward the main entrance.
A definite change. Our student lounge had one tiny Coke machine - which dispensed a small cup of Coke and ice. That pathetic Coke machine was the only thing about Strongsville High School that I liked better than Ashland High School. So for me "feeding the right wolf" meant spending an inordinate amount of time being thankful for that Coke machine.
One thing that pops into my head as I write this was that during my time in Strongsville I got my hair cut in the student union at Baldwin Wallace College. Pat and Joe's (Cirigliano) College Union Barber Shop. Perhaps to give myself regular reminders to stay focused on the future. Although it could have been quite the opposite - with me trying to replicate the time I spent in the student union at Ashland College prior to our moving.
This is from my brother's 1970 yearbook. Carol Thwaite was a talented ballet dancer, a sophomore when I was a senior. Sam Tepic was a foreign exchange student from Yugoslavia (I spelled that without looking it up) and probably had several arcane talents that were big in Europe. 48 years after leaving the building at the conclusion of graduation ceremonies I slipped back inside for the first time this past week to look around. Carol popped into my head as I wandered the oversize rabbit warren of lockers and hallways, probably because the lockers in the above yearbook photo are still in place. And if a mostly forgotten building causes you to recall only one person, Carol is not a bad choice.
The main corridor looking east (above) and west (below). My lens compresses the depth of field, the distance between outside exit doors is over 200 yards. The school has expanded to the west over the former student parking lot and over much of the intramural field.
Returning to the locker and shower rooms was truly scary, unlike the other parts of the school they are virtually unchanged from 50 years ago other than a bit of wear. This was the only place in the entire school where I was effortlessly transplanted back to my high school days. While I found this disconcerting, it was a relief to finally establish an orientation because until then I had been stumbling around between the entirely new and the vaguely familiar. On the drive home I tried to imagine someone from the class of 1916 visiting their school in 1966. It seems unlikely that they would find rooms in daily usage as frozen in time as these.
A nice auxiliary gym (above) has been constructed in recent years.
Walking into the old gym my first thought was that I had stumbled into the wrong room, I did not remember those upper bleachers - just a cinderblock wall above a few rows of wooden bleachers. Apparently the original builders provided for the eventual expansion of the gym. The area behind that wall had been the Art Room. At some point they just opened up the wall and installed the old wooden bleachers inside.
Well, I like art, I work in a gas station, my best friend is a tomboy.
These things don't fly too well in the American high school.
I was tempted to sit down on the gym floor and stare up at the ceiling like I used to do during the endless games of crab soccer we played on that floor, that would have helped me feel like I was in the same room. Do they still inflict that stupid game on people?
Another of my favorite songs released during my SHS days. I got my drivers' license shortly after our move and my best memories are of cruising the west side of Cleveland listening to such songs on CKLB and WIXY radio. My first solo drive was to Parmatown Mall one night to pick up a copy of "Heart of Darkness" for English class.
CKLW was an internationally known Top 40 station in the 1960s and 1970s. During this era, CKLW used a tight Top 40 format known as Boss Radio, devised by radio programmer Bill Drake. However, CKLW never actually used the handle "boss" on the air, just the style. Rather than a Boss 30, CKLW's weekly music survey was known as a Big 30. And instead of calling itself Boss Radio, CKLW called itself The Big 8.
During this period it was the top-rated radio station not only in Windsor, but across the river in Detroit, and even in cities as far away as Toledo and Cleveland.
And who can forget the promos for:
"Thompson Drag Raceway - Drag Racing Capital of Mid-America".
The area with the brown bleachers was originally the music department.
This golf team photo was taken on the wooden bleachers at the east side of the gym (I'm the serious guy on the far right of the back row). It is interesting because while I have only had contact (or even a hint of contact) with ten Strongsville students since my graduation, four of them (Dan, Rick, Nick, and Bob) are sitting with me in this photo.
Our home course was Skyland Golf Course in Hinckley, Ohio, 6,337 yards of golf from the longest tees for a par of 72. Designed by James Rhodes (no relation to Ohio's now roasting-in-hell former governor), the Skyland golf course opened in 1928.
It was sold in 2017 and the property has become an upscale housing development.
I also have scorecards from nearby Pine Hills Country Club so we must have played that course as well, although my memories of both courses are rather vague.
After graduation I spent only one other summer in Strongsville, living at home and working for the Cuyahoga County Engineer (road maintenance) the summer after the Kent State shootings. My parents did not move away until my mother's 1977 retirement from teaching Junior High English.
I suppose my badge of honor was being kicked out of this gym for the offense of wearing blue jeans to a basketball game - true story.
The last time I was in the school was for my evening graduation ceremony in this gym, after the ceremony our entire class was locked (also a true story) in the ice arena a few blocks south of the school until dawn, to keep us out of trouble - so there was no chance for sex with Stifler's mom. It was supposed to be the class graduation party but I had more fun waiting in line for my induction physical. As I recalled that horrible evening during this week's visit, I realized that my biggest regret about high school was that I had not dodged the chaperones, secretly left that "party", and walked home at 2AM. We lived about as far away as possible from the ice arena, just off Prospect at the Berea line; but a clandestine escape and predawn walk past the high school would have been a gutsy, symbolic, and inspirational way to top off my "commencement".
Why don't girls look this good anymore?
ClickForBillboard-100-Hits---1967
There was one remarkable thing that I do recall from my two years at SHS. Gym classes were divided into four squads at the beginning of the school year, with the four squad leaders choosing boys much like the NFL drafts players. My first SHS gym class was taken up by this process and as a not all that physically imposing transfer student I was one of the last guys selected; something I would make sure the other three squads regretted that year.
Then in my last SHS gym class two years later we were playing slow pitch softball. I was out in left field when some right-handed batter really jacked a pitch deep into left. There was a large sand pile just inside the foul line, but so far out that it rarely interfered with the left fielder. But this ball was hit so deep that I had to sprint back, turn around, find the ball, and then backpedal all the way to the sand pile. I stretched out as I jumped and just managed to reach the ball. Then as I came down I tumbled backward onto the sand pile. Thankfully I was able to hold onto the ball. It was the last out of the last gym class and I recall thinking on my way to the locker room how representative it was of my time at AHS, moments of grace and triumph juxtaposed with jarring moments of awkward reality.
My brother and I blamed my mother for inflicting Strongsville on us and we never tired of guilt-tripping our parents about it. In my case, with just two years of high school remaining, making me change schools was an especially brutal thing. At times it seemed like they had stolen my destiny. But today as I roamed the now almost forgotten halls of the school I realized that (like it or not) it has somehow become my high school, it is a part of me. I was broken and my identity shattered well before I came. Strongsville High School did not fix me but the moments of malignancy were just moments; while not well-meaning they helped prepare me for much of what was to come.
It was the wrong place at the wrong time as my only academic interests at age 16 were Journalism and Art. I had even attended a television news workshop at Kent State the spring before we moved from Ashland.
Click Here For My Kent State Visit
Strongsville was too small back then to offer Journalism. And the Art Program was at about a 7th grade level. So I was permanently alienated before I walked through the front door. Rather than participate in the school newspaper or yearbook I spent the two years in my well-practiced "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" mode. Depression was combated by seething anger. I wasted so much energy hating the new school that the school I had left behind was transformed into an idyllic paradise; an illusion I am only now confronting with reality.
In Ashland I had made a lot of progress getting squared away the year before we moved, in easing my mind out of a really bad place; and I was determined to not slide back. In retrospect the revelation for me has been that I did not particularly obsess over the absence of courses I had intended to take or even over the girl left behind, I completely repressed the two things that were by far the most traumatic about the move - apparently burying them in a dim recess of my mind. So much so that much was "literally" forgotten until just recently.
At some point during my miserable two years at Strongsville High our family visited Ashland and ended up having dinner at the Surrey Inn. By an especially cruel coincidence Debbie was also having dinner there that night. We spotted each other, she introduced me to her date, and we all talked for a while. The drive back to Strongsville that night still qualifies as the single most depressing moment of my life.
Somehow my subconscious mind understood that I simply did have the the coping skills, that I was on a dangerous depression overload and would be tipped over the edge by dwelling even briefly on those things. One of Charles Darwin's biographers described a similar distanced reaction by Darwin to his favorite daughter Annie's lingering death at the age of ten: "The bare facts make him sound callous. He wasn't. His emotions were dark and deep. But .... he had a strong instinct of self-protection. And he was closing himself up like a barnacle."
Nevertheless I did good things that I would not have done had we remained in Ashland. I made one close lifelong friend. I had my all-time best teacher (Fred Matheny) who opened up the possibility that the future would not totally suck. The isolation limited distractions so that by simple default I studied hard enough to get the grades and test scores needed to attend and graduate from an Ivy League University. I drank a lot of 3.2 beer at the Lorain County Speedway. I got two years of free golf including transportation. I overcame five years of alienation from organized baseball to catch-up with my peers and become a competitive player again - even playing summers on an 18U team with guys I knew at Valley Forge High School and Parma High School. I was one of Strongsville's delegates to Boys' State (it's prestigious) which included an all-expenses paid week at Ohio University. I pulled a lot of entertaining shifts as a Hall Monitor, flirting with the slightly bent girls (see above image which I absolutely love) who inhabited the hallways when classes were "in" session.
Perhaps I should not have complained so much to my parents.
Anger and resentment can stop you in your tracks. That's what I know now. It needs nothing to burn but the air and the life that it swallows and smothers. It's real, though - the fury, even when it isn't. It can change you... turn you... mold you and shape you into something you're not. The only upside to anger, then... is the person you become. Hopefully someone that wakes up one day and realizes they're not afraid to take the journey, someone that knows that the truth is, at best, a partially told story. That anger, like growth, comes in spurts and fits, and in its wake, leaves a new chance at acceptance, and the promise of calm.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
Jeff's 2024 Christmas Newsletter
Well we are approaching the end of another quiet year and I find myself a bit weary of my annual newsletter writing exercise, detailing much the same things each year about my uneventful life. So this newsletter will be a little different and maybe a little more entertaining.
In late June I found myself back in Ohio and sitting in a shady area outside good old Strongsville High School, a place that I joyfully exited 56 years ago. I suppose that a negative feeling is not unusual for someone switching to a new school just two years before graduation. I've long felt the experience had left me short-changed both socially and academically.
But looking at the school that day I began to mellow in my assessment. In part because I had discovered a relatively new veterans' memorial next to the football stadium, the only such memorial in the past 50 years that gave me a feeling of personal connection to my own time in the service. That there was such a memorial was a surprise and it put me in the mood to objectively reflect back, arriving at the realization that my seemingly inferior SHS education had to some degree been responsible for about two thirds of my accumulated wisdom. Who knew? Not that I had fully processed any of this in 1968 but the seeds had been planted during those two years.
There really were three seminal things. The first occurred when our English class saw Thornton Wilder's “The Skin of Our Teeth” at nearby Baldwin-Wallace College. The play's title sparked my first real visualization of the human condition; that the human race had faced disasters in the past, overcome more disasters during the course of the play, and was ready to engage in further struggles at the performance's end. I was absolutely blown away by the unique ending, with Sabina turning to us and sending us on our way with the instruction:
“This is where you came in. We have to go on for ages and ages yet. You go home.
The end of this play isn't written yet”.
The second was the high school's performance of “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. Although it is a play about love it revealed to me a more universal theme about wishful thinking and embracing life. And Helena became my favorite Shakespeare character (at least until I saw Viola in “Twelfth Night”). Helena sees her dream come true but is too insecure to embrace the moment and instead tortures herself with doubt. I think that this is Shakespeare's most challenging role for an actress. In time this basic theme also found expression for me in Rilke's “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”.
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Finally there was Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”, which we read in English class. And no doubt guided by a copy of Cliff's Notes my takeaway was the need to resist presumptuousness in ourselves and in others whenever we find it. It may have helped that at the time I was well aware of this sort of nonsense as it was my brother's defining characteristic. Presumptuousness and God-like ambitions being no more than the pursuit of death, in that such folly means that you kill the person who is with you when you are alone.
Combine these lessons with Clint Eastwood's “Unforgiven” line “We all got it coming kid” and you pretty much have a complete philosophy for living.
I worked at a "sign shop" my entire senior year at Strongsville High School, with a break during golf season. The company was just two miles from the school on Prospect. I got the job through the school's guidance office which allowed me to skip the last two periods of school and go to work at 1 in the afternoon. Attached is a clipping that the women working in the sign shop's front office put on the bulletin board one day, making fun of us guys who worked back in the shop making industrial signs with silk screen printing.
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