In the end, reality beats nostalgia

Now it gets personal.

Reporting on the efforts by Jay Schools to get its fiscal house in order over the past couple of years, I’ve sympathized with students and parents and faculty who have witnessed the closing of their schools.

The fact that inexorable and undeniable forces are at work didn’t make it any easier.

It wasn’t easy for school board members, and it wasn’t easy for the administrators who advise them.

But as someone whose kids are grown and whose grandchildren reside in the Boston area, not Pennville, it was inevitable that I’d feel a little bit detached from all that was going on. It didn’t affect my kids’ lives or the lives of our grandchildren.

Now, with the closing of Judge Haynes Elementary School on the spring horizon, it gets personal.

How personal? The building that’s going to be closed was built precisely for my generation. Judge Haynes was the ultimate Baby Boom school.

Opening its doors in the early years of the 1950s, it was specifically intended to be the educational home of those kids born immediately in the aftermath of World War II, kids born in 1947 or 1948 or 1949.

When it opened, nothing could have been more modern. And when it opened, nothing could have been more outdated than the three-story, brick firetrap of a building that it replaced.

The old building, which was still standing when I first went to school, was gothic, dark, and more than a little scary. Like many school buildings that dated from the turn of the century, it was essentially a wood frame structure sheathed in brick.

In other words, if it had ever caught fire it would quickly be the equivalent of a three-story chimney.

The new Judge Haynes building was something else entirely: Steel, concrete, terrazzo and bright lights.

Very cool, except for one thing. From the day it opened its doors, the school’s classrooms were overloaded.

Baby Boomers well remember elementary classes with 40-plus students, all under the direction of a single teacher. There wasn’t an aide in sight.

The biggest bulge in the boom was in the year ahead of mine, the students who would go on to become the Class of 1965. 

They were the offspring of the first troops to become demobilized after the end of the war. The troops came home and grabbed their spouses, and the nursery wards of the hospital were busy nine months later.

My classes were only marginally smaller, pushing against the 40 mark but not surpassing it very often.

The faculty must have been astonished by what was coming at them.

My memory is getting fuzzy, but here’s my best recollection of the line-up: Mrs. Glentzer, Mrs. Hunt, Mrs. Steiner, Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Corle, Mr. Macklin, Miss Miller, Mrs. Chandler, Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Ogborn, Mrs. Morehouse and crusty old Mardy Logan as principal. (My apologies if I’ve missed a couple.)

These were folks who had graduated from high school in the 1920s and 1930s, and suddenly they were having to deal with kids obsessed with Davy Crockett and the Mickey Mouse Club and television.

It must have felt like an invasion by an alien species.

The nostalgia is hard to resist: 

•PTA chili suppers.

•An Indiana history pageant put on by fourth graders and written by teacher Madonna Miller.

•Custodian Homer Hummer using a fire extinguisher to put out the flames of a model volcano that some buddies built as science fair project.

•One of my best friends scurrying down the hall in a futile attempt to escape the wrath of Principal Logan.

•Endless games of group tag on The Battlefield, a patch of playground that seems to have shrunk with every passing year.

So, as I said, this one is personal. Any of my friends from Pennville could recite their own memories, and those memories would be just as meaningful and just as valid as my scribblings here.

But nostalgia is no match for reality.

And, in the end, it’s reality that wins out. Doggone it.