“Alma Mater, God preserve thee/ Dear Schenley High…”
A couple of years ago I read that a graduate of my high school had written a book. I bought the book and read it because the characters were students of a fictionalized version of that high school and came from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhoods I grew up in. I was reminded of my passage into and through the massive building, the diverse student body and stimulating and challenging teachers of Schenley High School. I spent two days in early August of this year at an event that I could not have imagined as a young man: my 50th year high school reunion. I went there with the high school friend who became my first bride.
“Through the years, we long to serve thee/ Dear Schenley High…”
As it has been for a few years, my reunion year, 1965, was combined with 1964. James “Buddy” Burwell (my first bride’s cousin), at our “meet and greet” in the hotel, introduced a woman who had graduated in 1964. Janet Kwasniewski Rattay read a reminiscence crafted around our school’s song, a memory lane stroll that encapsulated so much of our high school experience, our growth while in, and graduation from Schenley.
“We revere the spirit caught there/ Reverent minds that lived and thought there…””
Janet is actively involved in veteran’s affairs as a member of Vietnam Veterans of Pittsburgh. The essay from which she read had appeared in the “International War Veterans Poetry Archives,” an organization which has also published many of her poems. She wrote of what I had barely remembered: “We were young and vibrant and ready to take on the world…” and of the day we were stunned with the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. She reminded me of “the ‘Up’ stairs and the ‘Down’ stairs” (we could not climb and descend on the same set of stairs), and that the boys entered from one door, and the girls entered from another, “… a generation that lived through their impressionable years before the world changed …”
Jake Orescick, an alumnus from 2001, presented information about the history of our school, which sat on the edge of two distinct cultural neighborhoods, and drew from each: white and black. Oresick’s research indicates that the school — initially chartered in 1855 as the “first public high school in the Pittsburgh school district” — was “designed for collaboration.” And on this night in August, in this place we had come to on foot and in wheelchairs, on walkers and canes and the arms of spouses, friends and lovers, we collaborated as we had done “in the living years,” those of us who had outlived the “turbulent sixties,” and returned from war, wounded and weary and hopeful, still. When “The Cupid Shuffle” boomed from the DJ’s speakers, we hit the floor together, and danced.
My high school’s last class was 2008; the building is to be sold and converted to another use, and as Janet mourned, the physical and emotional landscape will be changed by the erasure of “Dear Schenley High” from “the corner of Bigelow and Center,” a place where I began to develop as an artist and to learn to write. Janet and I never met while attending Schenley, though we must have passed in the halls and perhaps, sat in the same chairs. The rich soil in which we grew and the challenge carved onto the building — “Enter To Learn, Go Forth to Serve” — brought us back to once again, share the
“Memories of my Alma Mater: Dear Schenley High.”