The Blue & Gold

Before middle schools we had junior high schools, grades 7-9. In Olympia there were two junior high schools, Washington and Jefferson. I started out in Washington but partway through my academic journey there they built a new junior high to absorb us Boomers. It was called Reeves Junior High. It was named in honor of Mr. Reeves, my grade school principal at Roosevelt Elementary. He was a nice man who lived a block away from me.

Reeves was the school for the tough, working class kids. It was not an easy place to learn from the classroom due to the anarchy. All of our lessons came from elsewhere.

The school newspaper was called The Blue & Gold (school colors) and was run off on a mimeograph. I have a scattered few issues from the first year. Many of my cartoons failed to reproduce to the point where they could not be read, but I found a few I could post here.

It was at Reeves that I first learned the power of cartooning in politics. The Olympia Mayor, Tom Allen, wanted to turn the downtown Sylvester Park into a parking garage. Even though I was a teenager, I met with him to state why this was wrong, and he treated me like a teenager. That is to say, I was brushed off and ridiculed by him as an "environmentalist." (The term "treehugger" had not been invented yet and The Evergreen State College had not surfaced in Oly at this time, so we were still living in an extension of the 1950s in Olympia). So I drew a bunch of cartoons about "Tommy Treecut" for the Blue and Gold. The principal, Ted Wynstra, called my parents to complain, saying Tom Allen was a friend of his, and my Mother responded by saying, so what? The kid has a right to free expression.

Yes! As I have stated before in this blog, I was very fortunate in the parental department.

And Tom Allen was later nailed in some scandal involving self-interest in the construction of the public library and left office under a deserved dark cloud. 

Anyway, part of digging into that mimeo gel to produce those cartoons meant I had to sit in the school office area. I quickly noticed that the central microphone for the school announcements was in the same room, as well as the stack of notices waiting to be read. So I started writing bogus notices and slipping them into the stack. I wonder how many people showed up for fake meetings?

Ain't I a stinker?

So, here are some of the cartoons I drew during that era, 1969-1970:

Norman, the Wonder Prune was regular character I used

Remember, the Moon landing was new thing in 1969!

 This cover was drawn by our art teacher, "Snuffy" Jenkins.

He died fairly young, only a few years after he drew this.

He was a squat, square, straight-talking guy who loved teaching.

This was the kind of Cold War paranoia nonsense we Boomers could not get away from, even in a junior high newspaper!

Bezango: Life Lessons From Roosevelt Elementary

Olympia Power & Light, Dec. 16-29, 2009. The school building shown on OP&L's webpage is the recent incarnation of Roosevelt. I have yet to find an online image of the Roosevelt I attended.

When the school celebrated it's centennial a few years ago, a nice history was assembled, including this bit:

Over the years, Roosevelt School has had a number of building additions to make room for its expanding student population. In 1949 Roosevelt received the first new elementary school building in Olympia's modernization program. The new school was made out of brick and had one floor with no steps or ramps. The classrooms were painted pastel shades to give "a cheerful and homelike atmosphere". The district boasted that it was the safest type of building being planned. Families rapidly built houses in the neighborhood so they could send their children to the new school. Roosevelt's student population increased 32% between 1948 and 1949. When the new school opened in 1949 there were 395 students enrolled. Although the school had the most modern facilities, it lacked a public address system. Roosevelt's innovative principal Wilfred Reeves would go down the hall on roller skates to notify teachers or students when they had a phone call. Luckily the PTA was able to raise sufficient funds to install a public address system. Forty years later in 1989, Roosevelt opened another new school using a special floor plan where grades were clustered into three pods; one for kindergarten and first grade, one for second and third grade, and one for fourth and fifth grade.

I bolded the roller skate part. That sentence not only demonstrates how long the halls were, but also Mr. Reeves' playfulness. Of course, when I remember the principal he was quite old and finishing his career, but I can easily imagine him skating down the hall in his younger years.

A real-life, official Roosevelt School beanie!