saturdays column on thursday: They come. They go. Along with them exit pieces of our hearts. Still, we smile when we think of them. They are not our relatives. Yet we shed tears when they crumble. They are not our parents. But they taught us the strictest of lessons. They are our friends. They are our schools. They went away long ago, the buildings where I matriculated. All of them: Frances Willard and Eugene Field elementaries — still standing but not educating — Hobart Junior High, Hobart High School. The antiquated two-story high school burned decades past. It remains shrouded in mystery. The middle school — nee “junior high” — of late lost out to the wrecking ball. A piece of me fell among the last bricks. Schools with names seemed to vanish decades past. Instead of Frances Willard or Eugene Field or Stuart Roosa, we get Central or Westside or Northeast. It’s one of the reasons I love the current Cushing elementaries: Sunnyside, Deep Rock, Harmony and Harrison. Yes, two are named after streets and another after an oil company. But at least they have names. I wonder if such will remain next fall when the new middle school building — it will house Grades 5-8 — opens off Harmony Road. Not that I mind Westside. Forever it will be a place buried deeply into my children’s very souls. A place of their matriculation. A place that branded their hearts with its signature logo, the happy face. It was, as all in Claremore knew, “the happy school.” Built in 1941 — the Masonic Lodge was involved somehow — at the intersection of North Davis Avenue and Cherokee Park Drive. On what was, at the time, the west side of Claremore. The west side moved, of course, as Claremore grew. In November 1991, so did Westside. The daughter was a first-grader there and moved, one muddy Thanksgiving weekend, along with her classroom, her teacher and all her friends. Her Class of 2004 is among the handful who twice changed schools. She attended Westside in two places — the second was walking distance from our house — and Will Rogers Junior High in two of the three places it has been. Note: Will Rogers, Rogers County’s and Oklahoma’s favorite son, is among the few who still gets naming rights. Many school are skittish, at best, when it comes to naming school buildings or athletic facilities. Few know the Cushing Public Schools superintendent and his mates are housed in the Dr. Billy D. Childress Administration Building. The William D. Carr Gymnasium? It’s the ridiculously loud round building on the campus of Cushing Middle School. The current middle school. Back to the school at the bottom of the hill. It was a cramped, antiquated school in the fall of 1991, when the daughter took her first baby steps into it. She was in a family friend’s class a year later, when she left for the “new” Westside. And, thanks to people like Principal Joe Newell, it truly was the “happy school.” Both kids graduated from there. Both have fond memories of it. What is it about those places? They are edifices, nothing more. Brick and mortar. And yet they crawl into our gray matters and lodge there for eternity. Tell me you don’t remember your first school. Tell me you remember its intricacies. Tell me you remember its quirks. The old Hobart High School had a musty, small, upstairs auditorium. As student body president, I hosted assemblies there. The coolest part was the fire escape from it. A tin, slick cylinder off the north side of the building. I don’t know if anybody ever went down it from the inside but vividly recall climbing to its apex from the outside. You could sit at the top for hours, developin’ your powers, figurin’ how flowers got tall. Pardon me. I momentarily lapsed into my Li’l Abner mode. I’d druther see the old Westside School standing the next time I visit C’more. If I had my druthers. Sadly, I don’t. A friend in the development world bought the school site and plans to develop commercial and multi-family. “In other words: strip mall and duplexes. Ugh,” said one of the women who taught my children at Westside. More Abner: “Progress is the root of all evil.” It is gone forever. Soon, single-family dwellings will sprout from its soil. It will be remembered. By educators. Former students. And patrons who once lived on the western edge of Claremore. By my daughter. Hopefully. The Masons created the building’s cornerstone. It will be saved, as will the stoneware letters — “Westside” — that greeted guests and the plaque telling members of the school board in 1941. A time capsule buried in 1976 has been recovered. Westside became part of the fiber of my children’s lives. I am sad to see her go. Claremore mourns her loss. As I mourned the closings of Frances Willard and Eugene Field. The demolition of Hobart Junior High. To this day, on my rare visits to Smallville, I drive past the site and deeply sigh. My alma mater — loyal old Hobart High — is gone. Forever. I hope the children of Westside will learn to embrace the same feelings.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 15:46:25 +0000