Stroll brings back school memories

Somehow, I missed the last day of school.

So it was on a day later that I made my way through the halls of Judge Haynes Elementary School.

I also managed to miss a nostalgic evening at the school when former students and staffers reminisced about the place. Too much on my plate at the time, I suspect.

But when I did finally, belatedly — tardy again! — walk those halls, the place spoke to me.

A few staff members were around, packing things up, stifling tears and getting things ready to move to new buildings. I could hear principal Erica Tomano on the phone in her office, still attending to business although the students were long gone.

But they left me alone with my thoughts.

I headed first down the hallway running east to west, where back in the day you’d find grades three through six.

Those designations had changed over the years, so when I stopped in what had been my sixth grade classroom under the stern eye of Mardy Logan, I also remembered it more recently as a third grade classroom, one that Doug Inman and I had visited many times as we passed out dictionaries to the kids.

My eyes searched for things that were the same and mostly noticed things that were different. The doors to the “cloak room,” the closet with hooks for kids’ coats, had been removed.

But I instantly remembered standing at that door, gathering stuff up on the last day of school, when one of my classmates lost his temper. Grade card in hand, he started flailing at the teacher. Those seconds of violence shocked at the time; today, they seem innocent.

Another classroom and another image struck a chord: The public address speakers appear to be the same ones installed when the school opened in the early 1950s. The clocks, of course, had been replaced. The old ones never worked — keeping recess perpetually at bay — and my guess is the replacements were no better

Back in the hallway, gloomy now in the afternoon, I found myself back in an instant when two of us had been relegated to a spot outside the door to study for a spelling bee.

She was a better speller than I was, that I know for sure. But we both were stunned when a door down the hall banged open and the principal hauled another fifth grader out of the room and started driving him toward the office for discipline. The kid survived, but it couldn’t be classified as a great moment in public education.

A few more steps down the hall and I found some happier memories: Fourth grade.

Paul Macklin taught one section, mine, and Madonna Miller taught the other. Miss Miller, a dedicated historian, at some point wrote a script for an Indiana history pageant to be performed by the combined classes.

The two students best at reading aloud were the narrators. The students best at memorization and with the most outgoing personalities were given plum parts like Mad Anthony Wayne. The best singers made it into the chorus.

The rest of us — including this scribbler — were relegated to the background. We were, at various times, playing the role of Indians, settlers, explorers, townspeople and who knows what else. I was, as I recall, alternatively a settler and an Indian.

And I loved it.

No lines to memorize. No spotlight. And plenty of time to goof around backstage while my fellow Indians and settlers and I waited to go on.

Standing on the stage in the Judge Haynes “multi-purpose room” brought that back vividly.

Seconds later, I ran into a staffer clearing things out of a room in the east wing of the school.

“This is the new wing,” I told her.

She was stunned.

The old Haynes building — a three-story gothic monstrosity of a firetrap — stood on this space before the building was enlarged, I told her. It was torn down about 1960, nearly 60 years ago

She seemed impressed.

Then again, maybe she was surprised such an old guy could still summon up some memories.