114. Hail To Thee, Our Alma Mater

This will be short as it is too nice a day to put too much time into thoughts, words, pictures, and occassionally attitude. Today was the day on which twenty-nine years ago, on a Friday as I recall, but it might have been a Saturday, as that would make more sense, I graduated from the rigors of high school and commenced by life in the free world. I was 17 and acted like it, knowing I could conquer the world, or at least my little corner of it. I had what I consider a pretty good education, better than many, who like me, were a product of the Jefferson County Public Schools in the 1960s and 1970s. I had graduated from Prestonia Elementary School in 1972, the second graduating class of that school in their new building on the campus of Sallie Phillips Durrett High School. There would only be nine more. Graduating from Durrett in 1978, I was in the fourth-to-last class, of a total of 22. Both Durrett and Prestonia closed after the 1981 school year due to a decrease in enrolment, mostly brought on by their location. Near the geographic center of the county, both schools' districts were being given over to expansions for the public good. The Watterson Expressway, one block to the north, had begun its great widening project in the late 1970s, just as I was getting my driver's license. I learned to drive on the "old" Watterson, which was two lanes in each direction, with more than a few entry ramps, like that along Durrett Lane, which were little more than openings in the fence along the highway, with acceleration ramps, if you could call them that, of about 25 feet. Interstate 65, which runs directly in front of the schools, had also began its expansion from the old four-lane Kentucky Turnpike, which cost ten cents to enter from either the Outer Loop or Fern Valley, to a fourteen-lane wide true interstate. The Fairgrounds was also expanding along its west side, territory which provided a number of students, especially for Durrett, from the old Seneca Mobile Home Park. Elementary students from there went to the old James Russell Lowell School, the public school built in the 1880s, which served the Highland Park neighborhood, a neighborhood and school which would be wiped off the map about four years later with the expansion of Lee Terminal at Standiford Field into the modern Louisville International Airport, where you can go anywhere in the world, as long as you are in a box and being shipped out by UPS; otherwise, our only international flights are to Montreal, Quebec, which admittedly is in another country.

So, here we are twenty-nine years later. The Airport continues its expansion, now taking in ground to the south. The Fairgrounds - no longer called that officially, it is now the Kentucky Exposition Center - and is also still building. Soon the State Highway Department, built in the early 1960s in the front yard of the Fairgrounds, will give way to the bulldozer and the ever-burgeoning Fairgrounds. (As a side note on the Highway Department, my mother retired from there in 2005 after almost 39 years of off-and-on employment, so whenever there is talk about the instability of the state retirement system, both she and I pay attention. But, I digress). Both the Durrett and Prestonia facilities have been put to reuse, which is good. Since 1991, Durrett's old building, on which was spent $21,000,000.00 for an upgrade, has been home to a Louisville legend, Louisville Male High School, now in its 142nd year, or thereabouts. Prestonia, which existed as a school in three different buildings from about 1912 to 1981, is now home to the Gheens Institute, a public facility which is used as a teacher-training school for teachers and others from throughout the Commonwealth. As a gesture to the Sallie Durrett family, which since 1790 held the property on which both Male and Gheens is situated, the new auditorium built in between the two structures was, in 1995, christened the Sallie Phillips Durrett Auditorium, Thus the venerable name of my old Alma Mater remains a part of the educational process of the public school system and for that I am glad.

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Unrelated, I am going to my first fundraiser (although there have already been some) in the re-election campaign of my congressman, John Yarmuth. It is time to get started for 2008. Oh wait, we do need to win the Governor's Mansion this fall.

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[There are no pictures today as I am blogging from a secret remote location along E. Oak Street in the Germantown neighborhood, here along the Left Bank of the Ohio River near Milepost 606].