Remembering RHS

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories about Jay County’s consolidation to a single high school. The series will a look at each of the five high schools that merged, the teachers, athletics and the first graduating class at JCHS. It will run on Saturdays through mid-August.

Hour-long lunches, failed graduation songs, stealing strawberry pies, a memorable trip and trying to avoid the paddle.
They all played a role in the life of the Redkey High School class of 1975, the last group to earn diplomas as Wolves before the facility closed its doors.
Those students originally thought they would be the first graduating class from the new single-county high school, merging with those from Portland, Dunkirk, Pennville and Bryant. But construction delays pushed the change back a year.
“I think somewhat we were kind of like relieved that we didn’t have to go,” said Lea Selvey, who has taught at Jay County High School since the early 1980s and been the Patriots’ baseball coach for nearly three decades. “We liked our school. We had pride in our school there at Redkey.”
“I think that most of the students … were glad to be the last because we thought we were just the best anyway,” said Nancy (Rathbun) Kertz. “That was just in our own minds of course.”
Because of the expectation that the school would no longer exist, Selvey, Kertz and their classmates were allowed to go on a class trip to Washington, D.C., and New York during their junior year.
Janet Bales, who was a cheerleader, became a nurse at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis and now teaches at Marian University in the Circle City, remembers a classmate played guitar and the bus ride for the trip was full of singing.
“It was just great,” she said. “Just hanging out with them was pretty special. It’s a good group.”
Music is also involved in one of the favorite memories for Kertz, who was among the group of students who merged into the classes at Redkey in third grade after Gray was closed.
The seniors had decided about a day before graduation that they wanted to compose their own song for the ceremony. So they used the tune to “To Sir With Love” by Lulu, wrote their own lyrics and practiced.
“And the following day we graduated, and the music starts, and none of us remember the lyrics,” said Kertz. “So here we are as a group of graduates, trying to sing the song that we were so impressed with ourselves that we composed, and it was just a total embarrassment. But it really was hysterically funny.”
Bill Vinson and Selvey tell stories of mischievous moments, from the basketball team raiding the home economics classroom and scarfing down strawberry pies (a deed for which they allowed the cheerleaders to take the blame), to throwing spitballs during a gym class when a teacher left them unattended, to flinging firecrackers out of a second-story window and attempting to land them inside a first-story window in order to get other students in trouble.
One of Selvey’s goals during his senior year was to avoid “getting boarded” — spanked with a paddle.
“Let’s just say I had a 12-year streak,” said Selvey.
One such instance involved getting winter revenge on the occupants of a passing car who had heckled them. When the group drove by again, Selvey said, he fired a snowball through the car’s open window.
“No sooner than we had celebrated — Mr. Anderson’s window was right above that door area — his window opened and he yells out, ‘Selvey, get to my office, now,’” he remembers.
He didn’t get the board that day, as Bob Anderson, then the Redkey principal and later dean of students at JCHS, agreed to use just his hand.
Those antics occurred during Redkey’s hour-long lunch period, which was required because the school didn’t have a cafeteria. Students would walk to the elementary school, the pool hall uptown or their homes to eat before returning to classes.
It was a more open time, said Vinson, who recalls needing a new string in order to line the baseball field. While picking up attendance slips, he mentioned the problem to baseball coach Terry Day.
“So he handed me a $5 bill and he says, ‘Well, go get some,’” said Vinson, who lives south of Muncie in the Cowan school district and has worked for the state board of accounts for more than 35 years. “So I took the absence slips up to the office and I walked uptown to the dime store and I bought some string.
“Nobody seemed to have a problem with it at all.”
Colleen (Grady) Bicknell, Debbie (Champ) Kummer and Selvey are among those who stayed in or returned to Jay County and had children attend the high school that opened just months after their graduation. They said one of the biggest differences, it seemed, is that the new school could offer students a wider range of options.
“I feel like there was a lot of opportunity for my daughter,” said Bicknell, who lives west of Como, spent 35 years working for Jay Emergency Medical Service and now works part time for Jay County Hospital.
But while the athletic facilities weren’t quite as nice and there was no planetarium or TV studio, what the class of 1975 values most about its time in Redkey is the tight-knit setting. The former students remember not just close relationships with classmates, but with the faculty as well.
“You kind of felt close to your teachers too,” said Kummer, who lives on Indiana 1 a couple of miles north of Redkey and has worked at First Merchants Bank in Portland for nearly 30 years. “They were there for you if you had a problem.”
Since their time at RHS, the 1975 graduates have gone in a variety of different directions.
Several have had military careers, with Roy Rathbun and Kent Abernathy both spending time working in the Pentagon. Mark Lash served in the Navy. Kertz, who has a Ph.D. in nursing and is now an assistant dean at Rockford University in Illinois, spent about a decade working and teaching in South Dakota. Careena (Smith) Scott moved to Oregon.
But their closeness has remained. Diane (Littleton) Bahler, Vinson and Bales went to an Indianapolis Indians game together last week to watch Abernathy throw out the first pitch.
And Vinson has hosted annual cookouts in recent years. He’s expecting about two-thirds of the class to show up at his home in July.
“Even now when we get together, the personalities are there — the playful ones, the jokesters, the naughty kids — we’re all still the same at heart,” said Kertz.
And still proud to be the final graduating class from Redkey High School.