Saturday, June 07, 2008

End of an Era

Forty-five years ago this spring, before any of the young whippersnappers reading this were born, I was a college senior. I was on track to get a B.A. in English, with a teaching certificate. One of the requirements for the teaching certificate was a semester of student teaching. I was assigned to the practically new Johnston High School in East Austin. I still remember a number of the students in the class I taught. I even remember the names of a few of them: Ronald Swank, Robert Medrano, a couple more. And now JHS is no more.

Johnston High School's Final Graduation | Homeroom: "Gabriela Camarilla had scribbled the words across her Columbia blue graduation cap in red paint, a final tribute to her fallen alma mater.

“The school is being renamed and reopened as something new, so Johnston High School is no more, but it will always continue on in the hearts of the students who went there,” she said.

Camarilla began to cry as she mourned the moments that will never be for the troubled school, which was closed down Wednesday for failing to meet state accountability standards for a fifth consecutive year."

7 comments:

Doc Quatermass said...

Better it than you. :-)

The problem with our past is that it isn't always permanent, save for our memories.

Cap'n Bob said...

Last year my high school was torn down. I only wish they'd done it when I was there (on one of my many days playing hooky). Lousy school.

Doc Quatermass said...

Priming the pump of my fading memories:

Not sure what type of establishment now is in my old elementary school, Steenrod. It was about a mile from my house in a small neighborhood at the top of a hill with a steep wooded embankment behind that dropped to another closed in neighborhood that ran along the creek.

It was a three story (not counting the basement) red brick rectangular-shaped building with big windows and the classrooms painted institutional green and at the front of which were the chalkboards, the teachers desk and chairs, the big old round face (Bulova?) clock, the speaker from which announcements came from the principals office, and the copies of unfinished Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington and a portrait of Lincoln (to my first grade mind I thought they were the first and second Presidents of these United States; it wasn't until years later I realized the significance of why we revered these two above the others). The season and holidays determined what student-made construction paper or xeroxed and colored decorations were taped to the windows facing the outside world, Autumn, Winter and Spring; Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines Day, Presidents Day and Washington and Lincoln's natal days and Easter. Halloween was my favorite. Jack o' lanterns and witches flying on broomsticks in front of pale yellow full moons in the school windows and the Halloween parade around the school grounds in costume, our moms would come to watch.

Off to the side of each classroom were cloakrooms where we stashed our coats and jackets, hats, gloves and scarves if it was cold, and boots, if it had snowed, and our lunches in either paper sacks or metal lunch boxes with thermos – either red plaid or adorned with characters from some TV show or pop culture theme popular at the time. Life was a lot like it was in “Leave It To Beaver”. I was in love with Miss Cupp, my first grade teacher who was a knockout. Except for a sweet older lady, who now reminds me of Margaret Rutherford who played Miss Marple in some British films in the 1960s that I love, who traveled around to the various schools to teach music and a guy from Cuba who taught us Spanish in first and second grade. All our subjects were taught by our homeroom teacher. Occassionally a TV might be wheeled in the classroom to watch a program on, PBS, the educational channel (WQED out of Pittsburgh, the first public broadcast station in the country).

I use to have to walk across the bridge over the relatively new section of Interstate that separated my “side of the tracks” neighborhood from most “my” outer world (train tracks ran along beside the Interstate). It was often windy and I would abandon the sidewalk to walk the traffic lane near the curb as I was afraid I'd be blown over the low railing.

Our junior high school, Woodsdale was about a mile and a half or so as the crow flies (we always had to walk to and from school up until my senior year of high school when the school district decided that being just shy of two miles was good enough to justify our being able to avail ourselves of county funded transportation – most of us still opted to walk unless it was pouring down rain or bitter cold). After I was no longer a part of the school scene it was torn down and an elementary school built in its place. Across from the school was a drugstore where I use to occasionally buy comic books. At first they were ten cents a piece and then later twelve cents. The proprietor only allowed three students at a time in the store. Shoplifting wasn’t uncommon among some of students who would have fit in with the JDs in the movie, “Blackboard Jungle”. The store likewise is no longer there. The one high point in junior high was Mrs. Neville, who I had for both art and history. I was smitten by her.

Some years later our junior high principal, Mr. Ed Gahn, now retired was murdered by a young man in his neighborhood he befriended. He was a great guy and fair. He looked like Edward G. Robinson and was a lot like Eddie G. in his softer role films.

I graduated two years before my high school’s final graduating class (of which my next youngest brother was a member) as the school, Triadelphia became defunct when a consolidated high school was opened consolidating my old alma mater with the other two public high schools in the county, Warwood and Wheeling. The building for my old high school became a junior high school for the county so it still stands. Most of the JD’s that made 9th grade a bit of a tormented experience either dropped out of school or went off to “Pruneytown” (Pruntytown Correctional Center, formerly known as the West Virginia Industrial School for Boys) near Grafton, WV (also home of Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother's Day, and Clair Bee - basketball coach for Long Island University and of the Chip Hilton book series).

Ironically although I never had a problem crossing the bridge over the Interstate highway in junior and senior high, I often, like several of my neighborhood chums, shaved some mileage off of the two mile walk home by jumping the fence and crossing both the West and East lanes of traffic, running up the embankment to jump the fence on my neighborhood side of the highway, duck through the underpass that ran under the railroad tracks and walk the block and a half to my house. Amazingly none of us never were run down.

I pretty much got along with all the various cliques while on campus (and was so popular that everyone hated me- Snark!), although I socialized more with the kids from the Catholic high school doing drugs and alcohol, hitting bars and football games, and sadly they had a propensity for vandalism that I never understood but I had little influence in being able to stem their need to be destructive. Not the prettiest memories of adolescence but they’re all I have.

I still see old friends and classmates from time to time but after going to my five year high school reunion I never went to another. My best memories come from time away from school in my old neighborhood, especially summers – playing cowboys and Indians, fighting WW II, swimming at a friends grandmother’s pool, roaming field and forest, swimming in the creek, or fishing in it or gigging frogs, reading super hero and horror and scifi comics (scrounging pop bottles to buy them) and Doc Savage and Shadow paperback reprints, and mysteries and sci fi and horror, the bookmobile from the library that always stopped at the neighbor ladies house across the alley behind my house, the milk man. Mr. Moo Cow (Bob Orr, whose dairy farm was adjacent to my aunt and uncles place out in the country where I spents weeks and weekends) giving us chunks of ice off of his truck used to keep the glass quart milk bottle and other dairy products cold to suck on to stay cool, TV shows of the time period and the re-emergence of the Universal Monsters and other horror and sci fi movies, basketball and whiffle ball at the playground down at the end of the alley, sandlot baseball and football at the Army Quartermaster unit (and that great food when they’d have weekend duty and set up a mess tent and invited us to eat with them) and Coke plant fields. Good times.

I didn’t hate the school experience but didn’t really love it, I had some nice teachers, but they were trained to do a job. Other than teach me some skills that made possible my own efforts to understand what it is, and to cultivate, an “educated climate of mind” (JDM) I can’t think of a soul in my educational experiences that had a clue what it was like to do so. And like the buildings that no longer exist or have been reclaimed for other uses, they are ghost memories of my past.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Hilton

Unknown said...

My graduating class meets every year, and in fact I'll be going to the old hometown next weekend to see who shows up. What can I say? I'm a nostalgia kind of guy.

Doc Quatermass said...

I'm into nostalgia, too. If I had graduated when you did in the late '50s, Bill, I'd probably feel a lot different. Elvis, Buddy Holly, etc, '57 Chevys, the movies and books and comicbooks, etc. beat the early- to mid-70s for memories. My time had some good parts and I don't mind occasionally hearing a rock song from the '70s and I think Disco is unfairly maligned as it's the cliché and heedlessly acquiring and parroting clichés is what passes as thinking for the majority of people (esp. negative criticism of most things), and I had some good times getting high, as did a number of friends, but we're the lucky ones because I've seen lives ruined and even ended by the recreational drugs we used and the quarts of Black Label and $1 pitchers of beer we score with fake ids and quaffed ourselves into oblivion with.

(If I could do a "Ground Hog Day" movie kind of thing with my life and live it over and over, I'd pick living from the late 20's to the late '60s over and over.) The thing is now I can pick what aspects of the past I wish to embrace and which I wish to ignore.

Unknown said...

There was good disco and bad disco, but while I like Donna Summer, there's a lot I'd rather forget.

Doc Quatermass said...

But that can be said of any type of music. Also it depends on whether one's making an informed judgment based on standards they've mastered (Admirable Beauty) or in terms of personal taste (enjoyable beauty).


George: If you were dancing with your wife, or girlfriend you knew in high school, and you said to her, Darling, they're playing our song, do you know what they'd be playing?
Don: What?
George: Why Don't We Do It In The Road. Fuckin' hell kind of era is that?


Dudley Moore (George) to Bartender Don (Brian Dennehy) in Blake Edwards' "10".

*****

Exchange between Detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) and Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) in the 1973 dystopian film, Soylent Green:

Det. Thorn: I know, I know. When you were young, people were better.

Sol: Aw, nuts. People were always rotten. But the world 'was' beautiful.