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Gary Ravani
Well, I went to the centennial. There were sign-in sheets attached to the doors and I saw about twenty names, many familiar, in the 1955 to 1959 group. There were quite a few people around so I didn’t pick any of our cohort out of the sea of faces.
It was interesting; however, I was disappointed that more classrooms weren’t open. The one that was, is a room I never had a class in. It had been converted into the teachers’ lounge. Looked pretty plush compared to the lunch-rooms I am used to from Petaluma. I assume all the rooms had been upgraded.
There were several new building including a gym that now takes up most of what used to be the paved playground area and basketball courts we played on. The playing fields are now nicely turfed, and the “drainage ditch” that paralleled the baseball fields is now leveled out.
The school office was still in the same place. I wanted to look in to see if there were any indentations from my butt still visible in the "bench" in there. I spent quite a bit of my AE Kent career sitting on that bench. That and sitting on the lunch benches outside the classrooms facing the drainage ditch because I was fooling around too much. Got to where i actually liked being sent outside to sit on the bench.
Next to the open room was the first classroom I had at Kent in 4th grade after I moved up from the City. That was with Miss Shapiro. Then we moved down one room for 5th grade, beginning the year with Mrs. Davis (who moved with her husband to Battle Creek , Michigan,--home of Kellog’s cereal—for some reason I remember that)., then Mrs. Cadwallader took over. (Interestingly, years later I was taking an adult ed class at College of Marin—folk music I think-- and ended up sitting next to Mrs. Cadwallader.) Then it was down one more room for 6th grade with Mrs. Worsley. Then back to the original (4th grade) room with Mrs. Hartly for 7th. Then across the “quad” area for 8th grade with Mr. Ansley. I believe around 1958, Kent turned that whole section of the school into a de facto junior high. The Boomers cometh.
Poor Mrs. Hartly. Her hair seemed to go gray in that one year. She was gone the next year. I wonder if she stayed in teaching? We were absolute beasts in her class. For my own 31 years at middle school, every time I had a really difficult class, and there were several, I always thought “Mrs. Hartly’s revenge!” Didn’t really cheer me up.
The multi-use room is pretty much the same. Sandy Mckean and I used to do the DJ work for lunch time "sock-hops" on rainy days in there. The stage seems to be upgraded. It was there, in 5th grade, that I had my one and only thespian experience in the yearly Christmas Pageant. That was an overtly Christian celebration of the Christmas story. It makes me cringe in respect for the 1st Amendment when I think back on it. We must have had Jewish kids around. What did they think of the whole thing? That was the last year as there must have been the Supreme Court case ruling around 1955. Whatever, it was fun even if un-Constitutional, and something must have penetrated the old DNA because I have a son who is pursuing acting in Hollywood right now.
I played one of the “Three Kings.” Still remember my lines for that matter:
“Behold! Behold! What does this mean? The gates of Heaven swing open wide. A Heavenly chorus fills the air.”
And:
“Come, let us go, even on to Bethlehem, to see this thing which has come to pass which the Lord hath made known to us this night.”
I was ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille, as they say.
Funny what you can remember after all these years.
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