1968.........and now.

It was my senior year.  It was 1968 and I was sent outside to take some shots of our school building.  I was on the yearbook staff and a coeditor. The Murray High School sits on a hill and I went out to see if I could take anything interesting. This photo I took ended up on the front and back in papers of the book. I snapped about six of them and this was the only good one for us to use.

All the years I attended there the front yard always seemed to be a neglected area.  At the bottom of the hill from the school were soft maple trees. Big and bulky keeping one from seeing the school. A few weathered barberry bushes barely survived.  To the right of the school were two very old weathered cedar trees.    They shaded out the grass so it was bare dirt all around them and if you tried to run under them during wet weather you got you shoes very muddy.

The going trend at the time was to take out the very high set of windows, full of fixed window panes.  The glass block thing seemed to be an improvement as the windows were very cold. I believe I was in third grade when they changed them.  My dad was on the school board the year they decided to do it.  I remember going with my parents to see the work in progress during the summer. If you were in a building with all the glass blocks, it actually was just as cold and in the winter frost developed on the blocks.

2013

When I returned for a thirtieth class reunion back in '98 , I noticed that the windows had been replaced again with insulated panels and probably modern double paned glass windows.

The last time I was on the site of the school, I was pleased to see that someone down there figured out how to landscape the building. It is a great improvement.

Strange memories that I remember from going to school while being outside the front of the building are diverse.  One memory is a girl named Sandy Jones, who proceeded to pick the red berries off of the barberry bushes and place them neatly in a box.  She did strange things like that as one day she brought to school a neatly arranged box of maple leave seeds that she had collected at home.

Another memory that remains was that I saw for the first time, pictures of the bodies in the Jewish concentration camps.  Gary Dugger brought his dad's war photos to school and shared them out on that sidewalk during recess.

One other memory, on a more pleasant note, was being when younger friends and I  watched three teen aged girls that were dancing the jitterbug out on the sidewalk.  The  must have been in sixth grade and those of us watching them do that strange dance were third graders.  They had the can  cans on and that seemed like a strange thing to wear under your skirt and also wearing them to school.  It was really strange because there was no music to dance to as transistor radios had not been invented yet.

It was another non-working day for me today.  The teachers can't be gone the day before a vacation so there was perfect attendance of the staff and an absence of the substitute teachers.  We will take a drive tomorrow and I will report back on our wonderful adventure.  Thanks for stopping by today.