A fire blazed through our very own high school causing massive destruction to the school and the lives of the students, including my mother.

The fire happened December 16, 1975 in our very own auditorium on the right side of the stage. It took only 15 minutes to find it, but  nearly 10 hours to put it out. The auditorium was destroyed, including all of the theater’s equipment. In addition to this was flooding throughout the hallways, smoke damage, and the destruction of a multitude of classrooms. The result was part of the school being torn apart and rebuilt from scratch.

My mother was on her bus coming from her home on Kiwanis Drive, it was her junior year. When the bus arrived at the scene, she was confronted with the students yelling and chanting at the school. Things like “Burn, let it burn!” and ecstatic exclamations of “No more school”.

It didn’t register until later how much they would lose due to it.

The school was closed for damage assessment, and they came back after their winter break. Half the school was virtually unusable and there wasn’t enough room to teach all of the students.  For the rest of the year, they split the grades into morning and afternoon sessions, it would be half days for the six months left of the school year. Although, there was still not enough room. They had to utilize everything, including the locker rooms.

With only 20 minutes per class, my mother struggled, as well as her fellow peers. There was simply no time for any learning and it made the teacher’s jobs grueling. It was the main reason why my mom fought to keep her grade from dropping to a D in geometry. She recalled, “It was very hard to learn the lessons. I especially struggled in geometry. It was like you would just get into a lesson and then you to go to the next class.”

My mom reminisced about the side glances she and her friends would share of pure confusion and of her friends trying to cheat off her. Her reply simply was “It won’t do you any justice, both of us will fail.”

There was no internet, no websites to help you learn. You were fully dependent on your classes for information. You couldn’t look up how to do it online. It was a lot harder for them than today, now we have the information right at our fingertips.

In addition, many sports were canceled and all of the memories of the year were lost in the fire. There were no photos that the yearbook could recover since their office was destroyed as well. The students attempted to recapture those precious times, but it did no justice.

It was a “lose-lose situation”, said my mother. The administrators and teachers had no chance of keeping the students afloat. However, the students, initially overjoyed with the minuscule amount of school they had, lost an important time of learning and social interaction.