High School Requiem 

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I read the news today, oh boy! Highland High School may be going away.

Not like the going-away of Granite High, but like that of East High. Granite was replaced by a sun-washed library. East, bulldozed in 1995, was rebuilt on the same site.

The news that the modernist, red-brick building known as Highland High might soon be razed has given me pause. Thinking about my days there has occupied me more than I would have predicted. However, under interrogation, my memory is unreliable, riddled with more holes than a rural highway sign.

Earlier this month, then, I yielded to an impulse that drew me through the school's unlocked door. I walked the length of an empty hallway, passing the library and the office. As I approached the auditorium—the space recently named Collett Commons for teacher extraordinaire, Dean Collett—I tried to remember where the faculty smoking room was and who, besides Gary Johnston, spent their free time there. Like Paul Simon's Graceland pilgrimage, "my traveling companions are ghosts" as I walked around, testing the spectrality of the locker-lined halls, conjuring memories from the brick and mortar.

Everyone has had a slumbering memory awakened by a nudge from their senses. The Beatles' cover of "Twist and Shout" transports me to a frigid night on skis. A whiff of shoe polish triggers a flashback to an Army barracks.

Landscapes are often suffused with memories, as readers of obituaries will attest. Obituary writers tend to emphasize the deceased's penchant for "making memories" at such places as Lake Powell, Alta, the San Rafael Swell, Hawaii—even Graceland.

I don't have one particular resonant place. And when I try to choose a destination for my cremains, Highland High's grounds never makes the cut.

Nevertheless, I calculate that roughly 8% of my life is associated with Highland's sprawling campus, bordered by 2100 South and 1700 East. That association predates the school's 1956 opening. My brother and I sold lemonade from a red wagon that we dragged through the thick dust of the school's construction site. On weekends, we explored the building as it took shape in the shadow of the hulking penitentiary (where labor organizer Joe Hill was executed in 1915).

In September 1957, I walked through the front door, a nervous seventh grader, carrying a briefcase as was the fashion. I spent the next six years in Highland's classrooms, graduating without distinction in 1963. I returned some years later, by then a veteran of the Vietnam-era Army, for a semester of student teaching.

Since then, the building has been modified many times. The cafeteria has been moved and enlarged. The library is smaller. The smoking room is surely gone. So is the towering, red-brick chimney on which "EAST" was painted one night in an audacious and dangerous act of rivalry.

Unchanged is the view of the south parking lot and the attendant memory of the Presidential Youth Fitness Program of the early 1960s. Intended to address the Kennedy administration's concern that "easy living is sapping the strength and vitality of our children," it elbowed its way into Highland's gym classes years before fitness was fetishized. Our flabby muscles were summarily tested—not toned.

The test had us grunting through sit-ups and push-ups before clumping hellbent around the parking lot in our Converse high-tops. The results were factored into report card grades—unfairly, I still believe.

It's safe to assume that the new cafeteria serves the same social function as did its predecessor: With whom you shared a lunch table signaled your place in a social hierarchy. However, on this recent midsummer day, my memories arose from a rifle range under the old cafeteria where I learned marksmanship willy-nilly. In the fall of 1960, all sophomore boys were dragooned into the National Defense Cadet Corps. There was no advance warning of the militarization of Highland High. I was surprised to find myself wearing a brown Eisenhower jacket, wool pants and a garrison hat one day a week.

Under the supervision of Master Sgt. Hal Hardcastle, we had to master close-order drill and the manual of arms with M-1 rifles. It was an otherworldly experience, all in all, and very few of us took it seriously. I did like shooting the .22 rifles, however.

In the music room, memories swarmed me. They soon led me to the realization that as an institution, Highland High was remarkable, chiefly because of its dedicated faculty. They taught classes in five languages—Latin, Russian, German, French and Spanish—along with journalism, debate, civics, drama and public speaking. We were schooled in literature, woodworking, accounting, mechanical drawing and expository writing.

Paul Christensen and LaVar Krantz skillfully managed a band, two choirs and an orchestra. I recalled student body assemblies in which the orchestra performed classical music by Rachmaninoff, Smetana and Beethoven. I was one of four violists. The lone bassoonist, Lee Richardson, sat just behind me. He was killed in Vietnam. Of the 600-plus graduates in the class of 1963, I believe 117 are dead.

By the end of my solitary ramble, I had decided that the gestalt of a school is less dependent on the building than on the collective memory of its students. Not much is lost if the building is bulldozed.

The once-prominent chimney makes the point. Though the chimney is long gone, those who painted "EAST" on the top of it will be celebrating the daring prank into their last days. If, on the other hand, Highland's replacement building is re-named— prominent alumnus Pat Shea has long advocated "Joe Hill High School"—Highland High School would be nothing more than a spectral dimension of the school spirit invoked by future generations.

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