Sepia Saturday

I have just signed onto a new blog, Sepia Saturday which I discovered through Willow who BTW has set up  Magpie Tales to be unveiled here on February 16, Tuesday....But Sepia Saturday offers a place to share my  wonderful old photos and my  thoughts and meanderings about these.  "Launched by Alan Burnett and Kat Mortensen in 2009, Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind."   Just yesterday I posted copies of  newsclippings I had salvaged from 1959 of our Jr. HIgh School basketball team.  I am amazed that these survived all these years in my collection of photos, from PA to CA, in CA and finally back here to MN in retirement.   

So here we have the 1959 championship boys’ basketball team,  well girls sports were not sponsored back then as they are today pre-title IX ( the number may be off) and the rest. So we gals were loyal supporters of our team; we played girls basketball in gym class and that was the extent of it. I know I have always been a basketball fan but seeing these clippings cemented just how devoted a fan I was. And don’t forget if there was a sports team, there were the cheerleaders. I never had ambition to be a cheer leader and I would have been way too clumsy and uncoordinated anyway. Just as well, it allowed me to be busy as usual on the bleachers and around the area, visiting, being verbal, etc.  



Today I am in touch with some of these people through hometown connections and Facebook. It is a long way from Ridge Avenue Jr. High School. Our class moved to Ridge Ave which was the former high school after the new high school was built out the road. Ridge Ave Jr. High was much closer to my home than the old 4th Avenue School downtown where we went to 7th grade. I had forgotten that, but my friend Kathy Zabec reminded me of it in a conversation last year. It takes a cadre of old friends to retrieve long buried memories.

We were such busy kids, running up and down all the hills around New Kensington, PA. No one ever got a ride to or from school. Most families had only one car if that and Dad usually had it at work. We did wear out the soles of our shoes, which were then replaced if our feet had not grown. Every day in 7th grade, we ran that mile or more home and back to school for lunch. There was no school cafeteria and no one suggested carrying lunch to school. It had to be at least a mile from our neighborhood up the hill to the downtown Fourth Ave. Jr. High, but we trekked that four times a day, to school, home for lunch, back to school, and home again in the afternoon, rain, snow, sleet or sunshine. It didn’t faze us. We just did it. No one talked to us about needing exercise and we had little problem with childhood obesity all the concern today. It was a different world.  I found this picture taken my last day of 6th grade, standing in the alley near our home, notice the hill behind me.  I remember looking so forward to junior high.  I don't remember looking this dorky, but here we have it, my own handwriting across the bottom of the photo.  
 

So moving up the hill to Ridge Avenue for 8th and 9th grade with a school only 5 blocks from my home was a big benefit. It was easier to go home for lunch and I can remember even having time to eat leisurely and catch some of the TV soap operas if my grandma was at our house. She followed Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow which had migrated from radio.

Today this old junior high after sitting empty for years has been leveled and renovated into lovely senior housing. I wonder if any of my school friends will eventually live there.  I will have to take a photo of it the next trip back home, then and now.  I heard they sold the bricks from the old school.  Some of my friends bought those.  Think about it how would you like to move into your old junior high school in your real senior years!