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Hello Classmates!
This page has been created for you to share your stories of times and years gone by, to remember old friends from old neighborhoods, classmates, teachers and school days from Weymouth and all the memorable times that made you who you are today. Thanks for the Memories!!! |
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2012
BLOG
Remember the gymnasium in junior high school, its hardwood floor gleaming like candy, the firebrick walls draped with gray exercise mats at the ends behind the basketball hoops, the air scented with floor wax and varnish and the piney smell of the red sawdust the janitors sprinkled to sweep the floors (or the sourness when it was used after someone had gotten sick), and high overhead, like faded kite tails, crepe-paper streamers still taped to the ceiling from last spring’s dance wavered in the afternoon air and the gym held a hallowed silence until a class came in to break it and soon the space would echo with the thunder and stamp of basketball, the scuff and squeak of Keds, the puffing and shouts of seventh grade boys, and the shrill pierce of Mr. McCarthy’s whistle, and after, in the locker room, doffing uniforms donned not an hour before, this being the first year when gym class was boys-only, wearing shorts, T-shirts printed with the school’s name, and jock straps (one kid inevitably pulling it over his head, mistaking the unfamiliar item for a nose guard), and the hissing of showers and the clank of the machine that spritzed anti-fungal solution between your toes when you stepped on it as you exited the shower room and took one of the white towels handed out by Mr. McCarthy (whose name was Robert but who for some reason kids called Benny) and the rough/soft textured towels soon damp and rolled into rat tails and snapped good-naturedly at some kid’s ass, and you dressed quickly, still moist and perspiring but intensely alive there on the brink of things you didn’t know, as you brushed up your whiffle, grabbed your books and headed to your next class, where the girls, fresh from their gym class and locker room (with its whispered-of individual shower cubicles with a little bench to sit on, and privacy curtains, and a Kotex dispenser—more mystery—on the wall), wore a glow of their own, and everything was silly and very serious at the same time?
Understandably, we were excited. It was a fine sunny day in September, and we’d been briefed. The school was an architectural and educational marvel. Guests from all over America would be visiting in the coming weeks and months, feature articles would appear in newspapers and magazines. So there were new rules for us. Goodbye jeans and sneakers. Hello slacks and shirts and ties for the boys, dresses and hose for the girls. The front office would inspect us daily. We were going to be stars.
The walk over was like crossing a shining silver bridge to the future. We were going from the century-old school to the brand new building, from rag time to razzmatazz.
The new school was a modern concrete, glass, and brick sprawl with multiple wings and eye-popping architectonic angles. The circular cafeteria, with its window-walls, was connected to the main building by an elevated viaduct. The gymnasium had a slanted roof with banks of skylights. A vast parking lot gleamed like black ice.
In the new school we felt like new kids. It was as if we’d all been transfused with fresh blood, new born every day in every way. And nine months later we graduated, the very first class from the new school.
Back in my home town the other day I drove past the school. I stopped. Tired and quaint-looking, it’s the old school now. Some of the walls are overgrown with creeper vine; windows here and there have plywood in them. The circular cafeteria is still rad, but not in a good way; it looks like a leftover prop from a 70’s sci-fi film.
I sat in my car looking. Could so much time really have passed? I asked myself.
A glance in the rearview mirror confirmed it.
http://patriotledger.com/opinion/20190316/kevin-dwyer-dont-rush-to-tear-down-old-weymouth-high
The Reunions have been great to reconnect with old friends that you knew in school and to make new friends of those you didn't.
We all share a piece of each other's history in our memories of old friends, old neighborhoods, all the schools that we've attended and in our different parts of town in Weymouth where we grew up. Thanks for all those fond memories!!
Pam Selwood King