Rogers60

Again Wyatt has triggered a flood of disjoint memories. My first encounter with the Rogers gymnasium was in the spring of 1956 while I was still attending Cooper Elementary. The weather was shirtsleeve weather, so school must have been ready to end for the year. Several eighth grade classes from the feeder schools attended a theater-in-the-round play that was held in the gym. I think it was part of an orientation designed to soften us up for high school. The play probably only lasted a half hour, but I enjoyed it. Set changes were carried out by the actors carrying stuff up and down the aisles. I remember a chunky frowning big kid carrying a chair past me followed by getting into a smiling persona as he sat the chair on the stage.

 

I remember the small set of bleachers on the North wall. We could enter the gym at the top of those bleachers from that back hallway. Other entrances were from the girls' locker room on the east wall and the boys' locker room on the west wall. The boys' locker room had  the sweatbox and the coaching staff offices above it.  The gym teacher launched each TOTB* educational period from a window in the upstairs southwest wall, as Wyatt said. That was the only time I saw the teacher.

 

Can you still picture the area? The south side of that east-west hallway connected the Pirates' Cove, the music room, a door to the outdoor shop area, the girls locker room, the gym, and the boys' locker room. The north side of the hallway led to the stage and the two connectors the the rest of the main building, but to me, that gym was the central anchor for that dark hallway. In our 2000 tour I was lost in the back hall area, but I recognized the field house. The gym as we knew it was gone.

 

Some boys had homeroom in that old gym. These must have included the "W" boys, because my friend, Jim Wellwood, described guys throwing swish free throws before homeroom. I went in there a few times to watch them before the bell rang.