Elementary Echos

One windy day in October, I visited what had been my elementary school. As I walked through the halls I raced through as a child, my footsteps echoed and the wind pushed something around just out of sight.  I was surprised to find the school still standing.  North Palm Beach Elementary is scheduled to be demolished so that a new technologically advanced school can rise out of the ashes by 2014.

As I walked down halls and peered in windows, I tried to remember what it had been like. What I had been like before life accelerated way past worrying about who I would sit next to at lunch. I had spent several years of my life here. The graduates I know are doctors, lawyers, magistrates, homemakers, secretaries, policeman, teachers, parents, artists and writers.  

Cafetorium Extraordinarium

It was 1965. Toward the end of the summer, children all over North Palm Beach met in the combination cafeteria/auditorium known as a “cafetorium,” to buy large paper sacks of school supplies from the Parent Teacher Association. The PTA charged $5.00 per sack to provide everything we’d need and it was heavenly looking at all the interesting things I’d be using in the coming year.

My memories start at first grade—Mrs. Atherton was my teacher. We sat in wooden chairs at tables and wrote furiously in workbooks that told the story of Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot. We took their lives seriously as we labored over each letter. “Run, Spot, run. See Spot run. Dick and Jane see Spot run.

Physical Education was held on sprawling fields that stretched to the north and west of the school in the days before any of us knew about s.p.f. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Tommy right over!” With aching arms, sweaty bodies, pink noses and shoulders, we trudged exhausted back to the classrooms with our bobby socks colored gray by Florida sand around stickers that we invariably picked up from the weeds in the fields.  

We had orchestra and I attempted to learn how to play the cello. I have no idea why I didn’t choose a flute or something small, but I was very grateful that my friend Chip helped haul the cello to the curb when I had to take it home to practice. We’d wait for our rides under the melaleuca trees that lined Anchorage Drive, peeling the papery bark of the trees as we talked.

When I was at North Palm Elementary, Spring Carnival was held on the front lawn where the library was later built. We wore colored poster board cut in the shape of tulips, roses or daisies on our heads like masks with holes cut for our faces and ribbons holding them in place. We sang songs about spring and danced. 

Portions of the hanging ceiling
removed showing the high ceilings of old.

North Palm Beach Elementary went up in stages from the late 1950s until the 1970s. Gradually, portable classrooms started taking up the play fields to the north and then the portables themselves were replaced with buildings.   The school is going to disappear much more quickly. Plans are to pull down almost all of the buildings and remodel the two that will remain standing.  They’re replacing the cafetorium with a better facility—nicer cafeteria, more impressive stage.  I remember it as a big room with high ceilings where suspiciously, cafeteria ladies always served spinach on days the lawn was mowed.

I really do understand that the old school is out-of-date. Technology has raced ahead and the old buildings were built way before computers became small enough to fit in a phone. The price to retrofit must be way more than the cost to just tear down and re-build. Part of me, though, regrets that one day soon, I won’t be able to drive by and see how it’s changed. Unlike my father, whose school still stands as part of Old School Square in Delray Beach, mine will disappear.

Bittersweet, to be sure.

If you’re a graduate of North Palm Beach Elementary, it might be too late for one last visit by the time you read this. Demolition and clearing was scheduled to start in October. I’d driven by one last time to say goodbye.  As I walked out of the school for the last time, the sun slowly set over what was left of the play fields and the shadows crept further and further down the halls. The sound of my footsteps echoed against those walls I last touched at eleven years of age. 

This column originally appeared in Seabreeze Publications, Inc. as "North Palm Beach Elementary Echoes" on November, 2012.

UPDATE: I was by the school on November 3, 2012, and it was still standing. You may still have a chance to say goodbye.

Copyright (c) 2012 Ruth Hartman Berge