A Different School of Thought

Harold C. Urey Middle School, named after the 1934 Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered "heavy hydrogen", is located in the town of Walkerton, Indiana, where Mr. Urey was born; and a town of no more than 2,500. The school accommodates the seventh and eighth grade education for Walkerton and the nearby towns of North Liberty, and Tyner, both of which do not exceed a population of 1,500. UMS is nestled snugly between the town park (which consists simply of a baseball diamond, a few picnic tables, and a row of playground equipment), and the parking lots of the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles and a used car lot.

The building was erected in 1939 when the President of the United States was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and was originally the Walkerton High School. Despite the local politics surrounding the idea of building a new middle school or remodeling the current one, that 1939 building would remain identically intact when I would attend middle school 55 years later.

Within the larger school system that contains the middle school, two elementary schools combine at seventh grade. That in mind, seventh grade is no small feat to the student moving from the elementary pond to the junior high ocean. Half of the students are strangers, despite the mere six mile difference between the schools. I recall the frightful lunch line on my first day of seventh grade: the awkwardness of such close proximity, and then the death-gripping terror of where one might sit upon receiving a lunch tray. Small potatoes now, but a world and a lifetime of its own at 13 in that little school building.

Soon enough, however, with mixed classes, assigned lockers, and alphabetized study halls, I soon become acquainted with nearly every single person in that school, including all seven of the Whitmer cousins in my study hall. By eighth grade we had grown into big fat immortal goldfish swimming in a crammed little fish bowl. Our gymnasium doubled as a cafeteria where the janitors assembled and disassembled the double-length, wheeled picnic tables daily. Some of the furniture was original, or close enough. I clearly recall the frosted glass panes that separated the nurse's office from that of the principal's and counselor's. The nurse's office was a blur of aqua sea foam and peach metal surrounding glass containers of cotton balls and tongue depressors. The library or "media center", as perhaps the catalogue of videos certified it to be, was only an extra classroom with bookshelves and a few racks of paperbacks. But it was there in the library that I began to discover the history in which I was partaking. There, framed on the wall, was a black and white photograph of the very science lab class room in which I spent seventh hour. The students with identical black-framed glasses, sat behind neatly stacked books. The girls in long plaid skirts, blouses, sweaters, penny loafers; the boys with shirts tucked in like cotillion gentlemen. The picture of this classroom seemed an entire world away from this one of baggy jeans and concert t-shirts on both boys and girls.

That image remained in my mind at every corner of the school. I tried to imagine these impossible, polite people in my school; the kind of people our grandparents used to be. Suddenly this rotten old school began to seem sacred; a holy ground on which tread many a saddle shoe, platform, and converse sneaker. I imagined all the hairdos examined in the tiny yellow, wooden-stalled bathrooms: the pompadour, and the beehives, to the hippie-straight and punk spiked. Imagining their things in my locker, these classrooms, made them not so much like my parents and grandparents, but more like predecessors of us; the same thirteen and fourteen year-old kids sitting in Mrs. Lyle's math class and wondering why after thirty years of teaching she hadn't learned to not lean up against the blackboard and get a white line of chalk across her rear end. The same students who tested Mr. Brown's nonchalance, who on a hot and boring day would "accidentally" drop pencils and books out the open window, and Mr. Brown, who in an end-of-school-year stupor, unconsciously granted us permission to leave class and retrieve the objects, never noticing until somehow, a chair went out the window.

I imagine some of those wholesome looking girls smoking in the locker room, like my friend Liz, who got caught by Mrs. Groves when the tobacco smells wafted into her Home Economics classroom, as surely they had in the past, making Mrs. Groves exceptionally acute to such a smell.

Such tremendous culture gaps exist amongst the generations spanning Roosevelt's Depression-era politics to Clinton's Lewinsky scandal, and the world that readily awaits the budding adolescents emerging from this three-story brick school building grows more complex with each passing year, yet swimming through seventh grade, and surviving the lunch rooms, locker rooms, and all the drama that comes with it, remains a part of life. That museum of a school that housed the generations simply showcased for me the passage of time, the passage of life.

I returned to Urey Middle School recently as an observer within the classroom for a college project. I was shocked the minute I stepped foot into the door. The main entrance, which once seemed utilitarian was now that of beautifully polished tile. The hallways were decorated in banners, showcased trophies, and motivational artwork. With my mouth gaping open in disbelief, I was obviously a stranger-an outsider who did not know where the main office was. Gone were the frosted glass dividers and Eisenhower-era furniture. Urey Middle School had been transformed into a state-of-the-art, bona fide, modern school building, complete with a cafeteria and a library. I was in a different school. As I sat in the classroom, waiting for class to begin, I asked a student next to me some things about the school, and realized very quickly that there was no longer any trace left of those former students whose footprints were repeated generation after generation. This building had changed to fit the new generation. I suddenly felt inspired to inform my student-friend of what used to be.

"When I went to this school we didn't have telephones in the classroom, the teachers didn't have computers on their desks; we didn't even have a cafeteria."

Well, I guess there is just no way to verbalize nostalgia without sounding "old", as the student's reply certainly proved; "was it like a one-room school house or something?"