Let the Show Go On!

  

    The start of school brings a flood of memories when you have lived as long as I have. And I think of some of the famous young people today who never experienced simple things in school like going to the auditorium. Victor Wembanyama, for instance, the new darling of San Antonio and the basketball world, was a year ahead of his age and lived in a dorm to finish when he was 15. His major was earth and life science, and I'm sure he never felt the excitement build to know an assembly was coming. His French school did not have one.

    My elementary school(now a parking lot) didn't have a library, a nurse's station, and or any special entrance, but wow did we have a big/old auditorium. There was a fall operetta for grades 1-3 and a spring operetta for grades 4-6, and the productions were attention-getters every time. When you went into the auditorium with its creaky wood floors and big stage,  it was a unique time, and we all thought there would never be anything as important.

    My high school(not a parking lot but no longer used for school) did have a library, a nurse's station and a special entrance, and its auditorium was used all the time. An assembly every Friday was part of the package, and all the classes hurried to get the best of the wooden seats that weren't one bit comfortable since the building had been built about 1920. Plays of every kind and meetings for every occasion were in that place, and when we began to hear later that schools would be built without auditoriums, we couldn't imagine why. Too expensive was the excuse for the use they get, we were told.

    When I started to teach at Wilson, one of the first things that took place on the first day of school was the opening of school assembly in that big auditorium. The new seniors got to sit on the front row, and every grade had to make room for them. It was the mark that they were at the top, and the younger kids looked at them and thought, "Some day I'll be on the front row." The entire school crowded in, and we got opening remarks from principal and superintendent. Before they blocked the drafty windows, the blinds would be clanging if the wind was blowing, but nobody cared. It was the special place to be. And the one acts that were put on there were as good as any--maybe better. No excuse that the auditorium wasn't being used because it was.

    In the early 1870s a two room school was built in Lower Valley, Guadalupe County that was the only school for students near Cibolo Creek. It held on until almost 100 years later when time and county enrollment made that location unnecessary for students. There was no auditorium, but the crafty teachers figured out that the big porch that circled the school could be used for plays and presentations, so that's what they did. Costumes did the trick, and the students sang and acted as if they were on the wooden floors that other other auditoriums had.

    So we look back and think of a place that modern students will never experience as they go to the combination cafetoriums or whatever they are called. The pictures and the sounds will come to us as we remember other days. And auditoriums will be in that time capsule.