Houses are popping up like Whack-a-Moles all over my hometown but none break my heart like the ones covering the grounds of my Alma Mater, Fort Mill High. That hallowed ground from the blue and gold painted rock at the corner of Banks Street to the “new” band room, which became the Community Playhouse, will soon be somebody’s micro-lawn.
Okay, these landmarks only exist when we point out where they aren’t anymore and live only in our memories and dusty yearbook photos. We talk about how the town has grown but let me put things in perspective. My graduating class of 1966 had fewer than 110 students. Even when I was teaching at Fort Mill High in the early 1980’s, after integration and the influx of students from Tega Cay, graduation classes numbered under 140 students. Anyone who suggested we would ever need a second high school would have been avoided on the street. Three high schools? Crazy talk.
Progress is progress and the old school buildings had to go, their useful days behind them. I only hope the new residents realize they live on ground consecrated by homecoming celebrations, chemistry classes, teachers living and dead and students, thousands of students wearing the clothes of their generations. Saddle oxfords, Weejuns, Birkinstocks and a million tennis shoes scuffed the concrete walkways. Pimple-faced boys dressed like James Bond or James Brown escorted their dates to prom night in the old gym. Girls wore the newest fashions from long formals to the mini-skirts that sometimes got them sent home and couples struck fashionable poses as their parents took the photos that their children laugh at now.
The Fort Mill High School on the corner of Banks Street and Academy Street was where my generation of baby boomers grew up. For those who are clueless as to why we are called “Boomers”, when World War II ended, hundreds of thousands of troops came back from overseas with loving on their minds. The same happened after the Korean War and the birth rate, well, spiked. Since then, birth control methods have improved.
Our high school was an interesting set of buildings laid out not unlike a WWII POW camp. Originally there was a main building which held the Principals’ offices, the Teachers’ Lounge and the Cafetorium. Classrooms were located in five parallel buildings. Everything was one story. To move from one class to another, students had to go outside and walk under covered walkways between rooms and wings. If the weather was cold, same thing.
The buildings were not air-conditioned, a situation exacerbated by the single row of push-out windows topped by a solid wall of glass bricks. On some scorching late-summer days, when the sun was focused through all that glass, I was afraid a student might burst into flames.
Heat for each wing was the long-abandoned bad idea of using a series of steam pipes running under the floor. The system was feeble, at best, and could not cope with ten minutes of open doors when classes changed. I have seen students standing around a hot spot on the floor like scouts around a campfire.
My view of the school is from two perspectives. Bursting with idealism and energy and stuffed full of literature, I felt the altar call to teaching and in the 1975, left the world of business and returned to Fort Mill High to teach ninth grade English. It was a good move for me and for the world of business.
It was so hot one day that I installed a thermometer in my classroom. I was not surprised that temperatures in my classroom ranged from to a sizzling 97 degrees Fahrenheit in August down to a brisk 47 degrees in February.
My own class appeared on campus as freshmen in the late summer of 1962 and after four years of classes and sports and growing up, found ourselves at graduation in a long line of blue robes and mortarboards with gold tassels. In between those unforgettable markers we faced success and failure, love and loss, childishness and maturity. We didn’t foresee the ugliness that desegregation would bring out in some people and we would never have dreamed that a small country in Asia away could take away many of our friends.
My generation had survived the spinning wood and metal death trap we called a “merry-go round” in elementary school and the hormone spurred changes to our bodies in middle school. We were facing our first attempts at driving as we turned the magic 14 and now we left the prestige of 8thgrade to become the lowest of the low. This was high school. Instead of chasing each other around the playground, boys and girls were sitting together on the lawn during lunch break. There were teachers who expected us to think about our lives and our futures. There was a smoking area and there were cheerleaders…so many cheerleaders. It was culture shock before anybody used the term.
On those sacred grounds, we sweated through our first serious crushes and felt the crushing heartache of break-ups and rejection. We began to discover the skills that would lead us to our adult jobs and the weaknesses that would limit us. It took me two weeks of algebra to realize that I would not be going to Harvard. Some of us found our strengths in music or agriculture or sports. Some of us floundered while others seemed destined for greatness. As the sports metaphor goes, we left it all on that field. We finished our senior year hopeful and wiser and a little sad.
The only remining artifact of our high school is the Fort Mill Community Center, the cube-shaped red brick gymnasium at the bottom of the hill across from the Fort Mill Golf Course. Inside that gym, decades of athletes wearing blue and gold crossed the polished basketball court with its Fighting Jacket painted under the layers of varnish and wax. The bleachers, as in many gyms of the time, accordioned back against the wall for gym classes and dances. Dances in the gym were the old-fashioned sock hops, not because students liked to take off shoes but because of the coaches’ apoplectic behavior when street shoes were scuffed across their perfect floors. The rule was broken only for Prom.
To write this episode, I pulled out my yearbooks from my time as a student and as a teacher. I looked through every page. I studied all the photos of younger us and read the advertisements for stores long gone. I smiled at all the funny and warm and downright silly comments from friends who signed when we passed the yearbook around our classes. I don’t recommend it. I saw who I was from year to year and realized that I was a blip on the radar and not much to be concerned with. We are so self-conscious in our teens that it seems the world is watching our every move. We worried about not wearing the right brand or having bad breath or bad hair. The truth is, and this might sting, that we were liked by a few, disliked by a few and mostly ignored. It is the way of high school and it is the way of the world.
I have complained about the building and the temperature but don’t get me wrong. A school, like a church, is not about the building. The Fort Mill community has always believed in its schools. As a consequence, the system had and still has a lineup of strong, capable educators. Good teachers and supportive parents are the formula for producing good students. We had both.
My class showed up on the campus on that August of 1962, when John Kennedy made the Presidency cool, the “Space Race” was in full swing, and most Americans had never heard of Viet Nam. From our limited viewpoint, everything seemed to be going just fine. Our high school years were the culmination of an isolated world. We watched integration and cultural revolution coming at us like an ocean swell but only through TV coverage and music. We were an island waiting to become part of the mainland.
Now, let me think back. What did I start to write about? The students? The gym? The high school experience? Bad hair? No, Wait. I remember, the old high school building. Yeah, I guess I’ll miss that too.
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