HALLOWEEN OF 1952

It was a year or two after the ’51 freeze and it was Halloween. I was in the eighth grade so was too old to dress up in a costume; some of my friends and I donned jeans and big old flannel shirts (probably our fathers’) and went trick or treating. That was the safe fifties and we didn’t need a chaperone. Those were great times, as I’ve said before from the safety standpoint. Anyway, after an enjoyable evening, I was back home and was in bed when the phone rang.

My room was pretty close to the phone (we only had one, of course --- remember those little niches in the hall wall that held the phone?), and I could tell by the voices that something momentous had occurred. I heard my mother say “Go look out the window; you can see it from here!” So I ran to the window and the sky was aglow; something big was on fire. It turned out to be our neighborhood high school. Some people dressed and drove over to look at it, but we were not one of those lucky ones. Mother and Daddy were not going to let us miss our sleep, nor did they want to miss theirs. So we had to be content to look at it the next day.

At that time MA was already away at college, but BJ was a junior at the high school. And I would be attending the next year. But what in the world would all the students do meanwhile? There was talk of dividing us up between other high schools (I include myself in the “us” because I was to attend there the following year). My future mother-in-law got on the phone immediately and lined up a private school for the genius in the event that he would be sent to another public school. Ironically, the private school is the same one where he teaches now. But another plan was worked out for us --- one that pleased everyone, especially the students.

A year or two before the fire an old girls’ school had closed and sold its property to the Baptist Convention who wished to start a coed college there. Because the college (Belmont, where I later obtained two degrees) was so new, there were plenty of empty buildings on their campus to make room for us to hold classes, etc. The campus was only a few miles closer into town, so it was not so inconvenient as to be out of the question. And it turned out to be a very workable solution to the problem.

So the next year I went to a high school on a college campus and what fun it was! Of course, we could get away with more mischief because we were not all in one building, and I’m sure that’s where I learned the bad habit of cutting classes and not getting caught. Knowing me, though, I would have figured out a way, multiple buildings or not; I did when we moved into our new high school. So, for one year I attended school in this fashion and the next year, in the fall of 1954, we moved into the building that is still used today.

There was a lot of speculation about how the fire started, especially since it happened on Halloween. But Mother, who was president of the PTA at the time and was usually in the “know” about events at the school, always maintained that it began with faulty wiring in a section that was being added to the school at the time. I guess there’s the possibility that she could have been sworn to secrecy not to tell that it was a “prank,” but I don’t know what would have been the purpose of that. I would think the police would have wanted to catch the arsonist, if that were the case. So it is my belief that it was an accident and exactly what the officials said it was.

However it started, we students enjoyed attending high school like we were college students.