Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 11, 1993 TAG: 9309110078
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If you spent much of your childhood there - as I did - then you identify strongly with the building. Perhaps even dream of it.
Virginia Heights is back in business after a year off for remodeling. It's undergone radical cosmetic surgery, and I'll admit the sight of it fills me with conflicting emotions: happiness and envy.
Happiness because it's good to see the school all spiffed up and standing proud and tall on the hill above Grandin Road.
Envy because my contemporaries and I should look so good after a face lift. We could use it, too. A new look and a fresh start, extending way into the 21st century, would be sweet.
That's what ran though my mind this week as I walked through Virginia Heights Elementary for the first time in, oh, 25 years or so - also known as a quarter-century.
Newly painted and carpeted in pastels, the school's much less drab that I recalled. Also much smaller, but that's to be expected since I'm a big boy now.
I found my way around well enough, despite all the new rooms and knocked-out walls. But I can't say it looked familiar.
No wonder. I'm deep into my 30s, that decade when life's equilibrium shifts.
Time is leaving its mark progressively. Hair's turning gray or falling out altogether. Facial lines deepen; waistlines expand. It takes some courage to look in the mirror each morning.
Yet - all these ravages can't mask the faces of the kids I went to elementary school with. It seems every time I go to the Community Inn or Spike's - the neighborhood pubs - I not only run into an old classmate but recognize them readily, no matter how life's revised their looks. A child's visage is what I see.
That happened just the other night. I ran into Craig, fellow member of the Virginia Heights class of '67, and inevitably we talked about old times and the old school.
He's much the same as he was: tall and thin with a wry sense of humor. Back in school he was an artful dodger, always more incisive about challenging authority than book learning. He liked to walk the line and was willing to take the whacks - very entertaining to a wimpy do-gooder like me.
Craig shares a sense of ambivalence and nostalgia about Virginia Heights. He's still tender about the destruction of the older building where we all attended first and second grades.
For years there were two buildings, connected by a walkway. But they tore down the older and smaller structure about 10 years ago, all of a sudden, without enough notice to salvage a brick. To me the empty space where it stood was like the stump of an amputated limb. Craig said losing the building hurt him, too.
No matter that the building was old and unsteady. When it fell we lost something sturdy, a life's marker that seemed more resilient than mere flesh and blood.
I told myself that someday I would walk through that old building, just to see how it looked after all those years. But I never did.
Craig, on the other hand, lost one building and wasn't going to let it happen again.
Two years ago, when they closed down the surviving part of Virginia Heights for the present renovations, Craig and another classmate took a nocturnal trip through the building.
He told me they got a 12-pack of beer and spent four hours roaming around inside. "I couldn't believe how many rooms there were inside there," he said. "And we went everywhere - even crawled up some chimneys."
Naturally they wanted some memento of the building. The fire alarm horns looked inviting, the ones that used to blare unexpectedly for fire drills and make you forget all that careful potty training your parents gave.
Craig said he was quite surprised when, while trying to separate the horn from its clamp, the alarm went off. It was quickly disabled but hastened the end of their trip. All in all, Craig said it was a satisfying experience, and I found myself wishing I had been along.
We also talked of Virginia Heights' teachers. In those days all of them were women, and most of them were on the high side of 50.
They were Aunt Beas with attitudes, stern and craggy - yet benevolent - dowagers with thick shoes and hair buns and matronly bosoms. The loose skin under their arms would flap when they wrote on the chalkboard, and they ruled our small society imperially, able to wilt any miscreant with a stare.
I doubt their autocratic method of keeping order would work these days. Times have changed, for better or worse. Back then, we said the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer each morning. It was no big deal, mostly because in our homogenous, lily white, middle-class neighborhood there were no other races, religions or creeds to offend. We had not the slightest idea about or concern for how anyone else lived.
For example - the highest achievement for a sixth-grade boy of good scholarship and citizenship was appointment as a Patrol Boy. We reported to school early and stationed ourselves at busy intersections, guiding young children across Grandin Road or Memorial Avenue at great peril to ourselves. A noble calling, indeed.
On the other hand, sixth-grade girls of good scholarship and citizenship could aspire to be a Hostess. Hostesses helped clean up the cafeteria after lunch, wiping slop off the tables with wet rags. Girls were Hostesses and boys were Patrol Boys, and that was that.
Also - our classrooms often had 35 kids to be taught by one teacher, with no aides. This was long before anyone knew of learning disabilities or dyslexia or any physical impairments that might impede learning.
Everybody was thrown together in the same class, and undoubtedly some of the kids who were chronic misbehavers and frequently dragged into the principal's office were suffering from a condition that wasn't their fault, not at all.
Really, even in those days it was tough to retain your innocence. Events from the outside world had an evil way of intruding.
I vividly remember being scared out of my wits in my second-grade year by the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was no CNN, but we all realized that something horrible might happen, a monstrosity worse than any bogeyman under the bed.
School administrators scheduled a nuclear attack drill. When the alarm blew, we kids were to leave school and walk home - presumably dodging bits of nuclear fallout en route - while the teachers (who were spinsters or long-since barren) got to head down to the basement and the shelter where they stored the water and crackers.
Fortunately, it rained on the day the drill was supposed to happen, Khrushchev blinked, and things cooled off.
Until that dreadful day, Nov. 22, 1963. We were watching slides of our third-grade teacher's trip to Italy when the maid came in and told us the president had been shot. School was dismissed and we went home to find our mothers sobbing in front of the black-and-white television set.
That day seemed to light a fuse. Vietnam, civil rights, rock 'n' roll, counterculture - all swirling around our little insulated world at Virginia Heights.
We lived in anticipation of calamities. But there was no preparation for the cold, November day in sixth grade when our principal, Mr. Dickerson, walked into the room and solemnly told us this:
Our teacher, Miss Farris, had been in an accident. She was driving to a teacher's convention when her car was struck head-on by another vehicle that pulled into her lane. The collision killed a fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Box.
Miss Farris was in a coma and not expected to live. She died several days later. At her funeral we wore our Patrol Boy belts, badges and helmets, and saluted at her grave.
I thought about her while I walked around Virginia Heights' playground, which is the only part of the school that hasn't changed much over the years. It's still an emotional memory.
Also I thought about Mr. Dickerson, a wonderful man and the only male authority figure at Virginia Heights, unless you count Mr. Pendleton, the janitor.
Mr. Dickerson used to come outside during recess, hang his coat on the fence, pull a red cap over his head and pitch softball to us. "Show me where you want it, son," he say if you took a couple of pitches without swinging.
There's a story that may be mythological - although Craig said he witnessed it, and I've also heard it from several others - about the day Mr. Dickerson pitched to one of the more mature boys among us. The boy swung and knocked the ball into our principal's groin, which caused considerable shock and consternation among the boys, even those safely within their sexual latency period.
Why would such a story persist in our memories? I'd say it's because we're just grown-up children at heart, despite all life's evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps that's why when I close my eyes I see Virginia Heights Elementary School through a child-like vision. It's an exercise of escape.
So it's good that the school's back on line. It gives us an anchor and an identity, those of us who are liable to show up on a birthday in one of those newspaper classified ad, the kind with your cute grade school picture and a silly slogan like:
Regurgitate! Robert's 38!
by CNB