Spelling bees…

Basketball games…

Rhythm band or glee club performances…

Miss CHS competitions…

Picture day…

Farm produce displays…

Singing contests…

Stabs at drama in school plays…

Even dog and pony shows…

All of it and more happened in the old Clarkson High School gym.

Anything considered the best of the best was in the gym, and on April 11 graduates will gather there to take memory cues from what was the busiest and noisiest place in Clarkson from 1942 to 1974, the last year graduation ceremonies were held in the gym.

The old school will be torn down before a new $12.5 million 2-story elementary school opens in August 2010. The old gym will be transformed into a parking lot for buses, since the new school will face Millerstown Street, a move that gets classrooms farther from the railroad tracks.

It won’t be an easy school to demolish (Many students have tried.). It is gray concrete, erected by the WPA in the fall of 1941-spring of 1942, with minimal decorative elements, but it has served as a teen anchor for 32 sets of high school graduates. Aside from the echo chamber interior full of ricocheting yelling, screaming and laughing by 12 grades of 6- to 18-year-olds, there were the rumbling and whistling of nearby trains.  A lot of teachers have had to stop class instruction as long, heavy coal trains struggled past, but when the school was built, the builders were friendly toward trains. Many students had ridden the trains to classes in the old school.

It is doubtful that graduates from the original 2-story Clarkson High School, a frame building on North Patterson Street, will be at the final banquet, but east Grayson students paid tuition to attend the independent school, built in 1911. It was the first school in the county to have a good-sized gym, built in 1923-24 from lumber taken from WW I barracks at Camp Taylor in Louisville.

The auditorium-gym had a stage at one end built over a coal-burning furnace, giving meaning to being on the hot stage. The school had a 5-man basketball team, Jess Legg being one player, and there was a girl’s basketball team called the Black Bloomer Girls. The name came from their uniforms – over-the-knee black full-cut pants. Later, the building would be a cucumber sales warehouse for Hirsh Brothers of Louisville (later bought by Paramount Pickles). It burned to the ground nearly 60 years ago.

Clarkson Independent joined the county public school system in 1938, and high school was tuition-free.

It was shortly after the gym was built that an Oak Grove Community student named Ed Hale did a drawing of a red diving hawk and gave it to the school. The drawing was adopted immediately as the school’s mascot, and the Red Hawks have used it on almost every uniform provided by the school. School colors, still used, were red and black. Tracks of the red hawk can still be found in the current school’s hallway, leading to the lunchroom, the gym and the principal’s office. Alumni attending the last banquet in the old gym won’t get lost, and they will be able to buy a coffee mug with the same red hawk on the side.

One of the original stockholders in the Clarkson Independent School District was this writer’s maternal grandmother’s brother, Reuben Cave. He was a preacher on Sundays, who had an odd saying for preachers: “It’s just as important to work six days as it is to rest on Sunday!” The old school was the only one in the county that went debt-free into the Great Depression.

By today, the stories about CHS are those that stay lodged in heads that had hair in the 1950s, and some of them are as mysterious as they were when they were discovered. Take the bullet holes in the high windows between the old library and the hallway.

The late Dr. Eugene Cain pointed them out to Russell Hackley (1959), who lives in the house he was born in on Downs School Road. From home ground, Hackley has become an expert on beef cattle pasture and has shared the knowledge with farmers on nearly every continent.

“I don’t know why the windows were there ‘way up high near the ceiling,” he recalled, “but they were matched by holes in the big windows facing U.S. 62 and the railroad tracks.”

The front windows were replaced, he said, but “given the trajectory, Dr. Cain figured someone on a train, a hobo maybe, had shot the windows with a .22 caliber rifle as the train went by. Anyway, it was a mystery, and since the windows were so high, hardly anyone ever noticed the small round holes.”

It could be something to check at the last banquet if conversation should lag.

Hackley’s memory is much clearer on Ag Teacher Marion Higgs’ inch-thick oak paddle with holes in the business end that raised blisters, the memory lasting a lot longer than the blisters.

“You got two licks with the thing just for sitting on one of the polished tables in the Ag room,” he said. Both Hackley and I remembered how Higgs could be coaxed to leave the Ag or Biology lessons on some Fridays and entertain us with his mandolin playing. We still have an appreciation of mandolin music, and we know when its good.

And there were the initiation “ceremonies” for freshmen Ag students. Hackley still can’t bring himself to tell all of it, but he remembers when the rougher portions of it ended. James Woods was the brand new principal, and “he shamed us so much in front of the whole school that we stopped the rough stuff.”

“Until Woods got there,” he said, “we didn’t know it was wrong; it was just something that had always been done….”

New initiates still had to wear their pants inside-out for a day and drape a string of corncobs around their necks, but those sessions in bathrooms involving blindfolds and eating bananas came to an abrupt halt. “Any of it today would bring some long jail terms,” he said.

While past generations of CHS teachers could swing a paddle when necessary, Ed Williams (1955) remembers the more subtle ways teachers bounced a kid back onto the straight and narrow.

“Frances Gibson was my favorite teacher,” he said. “I’m not sure why she took a special interest in me, but she did.”

“And it wasn’t just her,” he continued. “Her husband Johnny Gibson and his friends Claude Cain and Riley Downs also kept an eye on me, razzed me about every mistake of youth.”

They never let Williams forget the flying pig, the beginning of his high school agriculture project.

“I bought this pig from Condy Whitten, put a rope around its leg and loaded it into the back of our old farm truck, but I forgot to put the top rack on the truck bed,” he said. “The pig jumped out of the truck and broke its leg, and through my time at CHS, these adults commented constantly about how important it was that I was the first in the county to raise flying pigs! They would ask about every new litter – ‘learned to fly yet?’”

It was the community network making sure I wasn’t getting too full of myself, getting a big head, he said.

“You never know how important people in small communities are when you’re growing up,” he said. They correct you in these gentle, teasing ways and it seems like a nuisance at the time, “but its only when you’re grown up that you realize how important that was, how they were prodding you in the right direction.”

The network was at work, too, when Williams and his classmate and future wife Janice Line (1955) were dating. (The ?-ton black farm truck wasn’t hard to spot.)

“Somehow, Mrs. Gibson knew where we parked,” he recalled, “and word got around quickly in the network. I’d be stopped by State Trooper J.T. Patterson for something like a dirty tail light, but it was just the community’s way of saying it had its eye on me and I’d better not let it down!”

Besides his pigs, Williams raised cucumbers, corn and tobacco. He was on the Red Hawks basketball team, and Principal Howard P. Lindsey hired him as school janitor when he was a senior.

“I can still see those piles of coal and the piles of cinders that I shoveled in and out of the old furnace in the school cellar!” he said. He and Janice now live in Florida.

Community support also is important to former home-economics teacher Valeria Anderson, who is 85 and lives now in Caneyville.

“I loved my 11 and a half years there,” she recalled in an e-mail. “Teaching an elective subject is easy because the people in it chose to be there. Only two girls failed to register in the whole time I taught there.”

Her son, Barry Anderson, current school superintendent, has promised to take her to the Saturday night banquet, something she’s looking forward to partly because she doesn’t have to plan this one.

“I had to be in charge of food for every single banquet!” she said. Anderson was pregnant with four of her six children while at CHS, “and I decided one year that I wouldn’t do the FFA banquet.”

But Scotty Harrison and another FFA member “knocked on my door, got down on their knees and said they had lunchroom food every day, and it just wasn’t special enough for their banquet.”

“They were the last two students I’d ever have thought would be that interested in who cooked the food served, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no,” she said.

Anderson kept her students busy with summer projects, “so I made home visits to check on those, and met so many good friends that way.” She also had night classes in home-ec for adults, “and my room would be packed. These same women would come in and help me with my banquets, especially the junior and senior banquets held every year.”

“The mother I saw most often was Gladys M. Duvall, Victor and Ben’s mother,” she said. “Gladys was always there to help with any school function.”

And how could she forget the current president of the CHS Alumni Association, Houston Elmore (1955)?

“That boy left his name on something in any room he was ever in!” she recalled. “I’m sure I could go to the location of any state tournament Clarkson players traveled to watch and find Houston’s name on a chair. That name was even in my home-ec room on the cover of the ironing board!”

There was no need for the name prominently displayed. In the 1950s CHS was a small school, and the students who were there during that decade look back on it as the best of their lives. Although teachers were strict, they were also friends. In interviews for this article, several students from the ‘50s commented that the time was perfect for being a kid.

This writer graduated from CHS in 1959, and little that I experienced there prepared me for the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Instantaneous media brought the world to the community in the hippie era, and old community ties were eroded. The invasion, led by Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and Buddy Holly, put students in uniforms of white sport coats and pink carnations, and on our black pants, we wore belts so narrow they could fill in for a broken shoelace. We kept flat-top haircuts but let the sides grow into ducktails.

Fewer graduates from the 1960s and early ‘70s attend annual alumni banquets. It is perhaps fitting that the last banquet at the old CHS gym will give special recognition to the last graduates of the golden decade, those from the Class of 1959.

Martha Jean (Hart) Elmore (1955) remembers all 27 students from her graduating class, stays in touch with many of them, including former teachers. For the past nearly 53 years, Houston Elmore has left his name with her, too. Just a Mrs. in front of it. 

“We had so many friends at school,” she said. “We spent time in their homes and knew most of their parents. Some were cousins and some were married to each other, and the marriages have lasted all these many years, a rarity today.”

On schools in general, she says big isn’t always better, and “going to Clarkson High School was a privilege.”

“To get from George H. Goodman School in Big Clifty,” she said, “we had to take a test at the Courthouse in Leitchfield, and daddy told me he’d buy me an Elgin wristwatch if I passed the test. I still have the watch.”

Martha was a Red Hawks cheerleader, which wasn’t just easy and fun. “You had to win the votes of the student body, plus you had to pass an interview with all your teachers.”

“You had to keep your grades up, and the boys on the team had to do the same,” she said. “You had to earn special assignments at CHS, and you couldn’t coast once in; you had to keep those grades up.”

Houston would leave his name at Asheville-Biltmore College, where he got a basketball scholarship. He would leave his name, too, in several states were mining was the major job producer. Today his name is on the mailbox at the house on Anneta Road where he grew up.

Sometimes stopping by the house was his old CHS Red Hawks coach, the late Bowman (Bobo) Davenport. Elmore credits “the Coach” with playing a huge role in preparing him for life as a responsible adult.

“I remember once when I was a sophomore and Darrell Perry and I got ourselves into a shoving match, as boys will sometimes do,” he recalls. “Coach pulled out the boxing gloves, something he did whenever there was a fight on the team, expecting the two boys to punch out their ill-will, get past it.”

“I weighed about 130 pounds, and Darrell was a lot bigger than that, nearly the same size as Coach,” he said. “I didn’t want to get creamed by this guy, so we just did this little dance, and that made Coach really mad.”

“He put on the gloves,” Elmore continues, “and he and Darrell stood toe to toe and punched each other for about five minutes before Coach said put Darrell’s gloves on me.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to punch Coach,” he said, “and that just made him madder, so he chased me around the gym throwing basketballs at me until he cooled off.”

In the next two years, there were no serious fights on the team involving Elmore; he understood what team meant. The lessons stood him in good stead later as he negotiated disputes between miners and mine owners.

Up until 1974 when the three county high schools were consolidated at Grayson County High School, there was intense competition between the Red Hawks and Leitchfield’s Bulldogs and Caneyville’s Purple Flash. For the rest of his life, Coach Davenport called this consolidation “the worst thing that ever happened to the county’s schools.”

There were sometimes fights at these games, but the altercations usually involved fans, not the players. If arguments came to blows at these games and a player was involved, that player knew he had better stay out of Coach Davenport’s sight until the cuts and bruises healed.

Players recall that as being very difficult. Davenport had spies in addition to eyes in the back of his head, they said. And he had heard every excuse under the sun. Saying a cow kicked you in the side of the head or that you hit your head on a stool at the Red Hawk Grill got you punishment both for the fight and for lying about it. 

And one last memory of CHS from this writer: In the 1957-58 school year, CHS was crowded, and we walked uptown to the old Nazarene Church for American history classes in the basement. Mr. Robert Armes was the history teacher, and it was he who sparked my life-long interest in history.

On the way to and from these classes, we would stop at the Red Hawk Grill, where, if we came by some change, we could buy the best drink I’ve ever tasted in my life – a cherry Coke.

(Editor’s Note: Mr. Williams is former editor-reporter and columnist for the News-Gazette. He lives in Boise, Idaho, where he works as a producer-scriptwriter for Idaho Public Television. He is writing a book of essays on growing up on a farm in Grayson County in the 1950s, which is expected to be published in 2010, “unless the current Great Recession hits the publisher too hard.” He was editor of the Grayson County Historical Society’s 422-page “Historical Sketches and Family Histories of Grayson County.)