Yesterday I saw someone’s posting on the internet that my old junior high school building - Roosevelt Jr. High - has been torn down. This was in Middletown, my childhood home in the middle of the world. The place I escaped from as soon as I graduated High School.
I was a bit sad when my elementary school - Wilson Elementary - was demolished some years ago to build a new school in its place. My elementary school memories are like a Hallmark Greeting Card, sweet and gauzy and laced with happy sentimentality.
Not so Roosevelt.
I went from a good elementary school in a relatively safe, unified environment, in the midst of a fairly safe middle-class neighborhood, to a large melting pot of kids from all over the place.
I befriended guys we called “hoods” in those days and some Saturdays in seventh grade - after morning basketball games at Roosevelt - we’d go shoplifting downtown. Small stuff like belts.
One of those guys is dead, one I know went to prison years ago for counterfeiting or some such thing.
Fights after school were a common occurrence.
My one and only school fight came after I defended my buddies at lunch from verbal assaults delivered by a ninth grader. We were seventh graders. He told me to meet him after school and, of course, I had no choice but to honor that.
He was much taller than me and his first punch knocked off my glasses. That was a major coup for him seeing as how I was terribly nearsighted. I landed a couple of punches that did little damage.
A parent of a friend stopped his car next to us on the street and yelled at us to stop.
He drove off and naturally we started brawling again.
The tall ninth grader threw a right punch that landed squarely on my mouth. Less than a week earlier my teeth had been branded with braces, the wires not yet attached.
This punch slammed my skin into the metal, shredding the skin. Blood poured forth.
I refused to give up, but the same father of a friend came by and stopped the fight.
I was a mess.
I won’t miss that damned school.
Roosevelt was also my Jr. High to where a number of grade schools fed the student body. I met a number of my long time high school buddies at Roosevelt that came from Lincoln Elementary. Those old buildings were a basis of various memories, but I'm not sad they have been removed for better structures.
ReplyDeleteI was at Roosevelt in 1960, 1961, and 1962. There were two locations for fights. The best one was down by Sunset Tennis Courts. It would accommodate a large number of people. These fights were not limited to just the guys. There were some pretty rough girls that would go at it as well.
ReplyDeleteThe other favorite place to fight was across the street from Roosevelt in the ally just in back of the last large house facing Central. When a fight was held at this location, the loser not only received a bloody nose, but had his knees , elbows, and hands torn apart by the asphalt.