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Art from the past is returning to Smith-Cotton Junior High School
Artistic alumni of Smith-Cotton High School are being invited to provide inspiration for the students now attending class in the building where they went to school.
Smith-Cotton Junior High Principal Wade Norton has plans for an alumni hall on the west side of the main floor that would “showcase and celebrate the school’s alumni and their artistic abilities,” he said.
If alumni would like to place a piece of art in the building, Norton is accepting donations. He wants today’s students to see the accomplishments of those who walked those halls before them.
“They can be inspired to bigger and better things,” Norton said, “They can see that if they work hard and keep their nose to the grindstone, they can achieve their dreams.”
The hall also will celebrate student life through the years. Norton has collected items from the now-closed Eddie’s Drive-In and Griff’s Burger Bar that will be on display.
“When (the building) was a high school, it was open during lunch shifts and was the heart of the community,” he said. “We would like to get things on the wall, some memorabilia to celebrate those times and experiences.”
Another piece of the past, the Victory Bell, will be returning in the spring.
Norton said a retaining wall with flower beds will be installed and the bell, donated to the school by Carl Schrader, will come out of storage. Norton said the bell still works, and students will ring it when an S-C team posts a win.
Barbara Schrader, the donor’s daughter, said construction of the Physical Education and Arts Building on the campus was completed in 1962, and her father donated the bell in 1963; he died later that year. Her father was a friend of Heber Hunt, who just a few years before had retired as superintendent.
Schrader’s mother, Geralidine, told her later that her father told Hunt, “A school like Smith-Cotton should have a bell to ring. ... So he went out and found it and donated it.”
Smith-Cotton Junior High Principal Wade Norton has been busy with his “night job” — pursuing, preserving and displaying items that were part of the original Smith-Cotton High School building, which now houses the junior high.
His latest find is six of the 10 art prints that were purchased by the school board to mark the opening of the high school in 1927. Norton said to buy the pieces, the board set aside $1,000, “which was a pretty good sum in those days.”
Over the years, the prints were moved, rehung and some of them stored in classrooms and closets. And through personnel changes over the past 10 to 15 years, the pieces’ whereabouts became unknown.
“History got lost in the shuffle,” Norton said.
That shuffle became more clear with the help of a fellow history-minded person with ties to S-C.
Former librarian Mary Lee McGuire took part in a reunion of S-C teachers a few months ago at the FEMA building on the junior high campus. Norton conducted a tour of the grounds for the group and discussed his efforts to honor the building’s history.
Afterward, McGuire contacted Norton to let him know she had one of the original 10 prints and to see if he wanted it to display in the school.
“He said, ‘Oh, yeah, I would like to have that back,’ ” McGuire said, admitting that she had “basically forgotten I had it.”
McGuire said that in the early 1990s, there was an effort to remove older items from the school and replace them with new ones. Dr. Kay Wilcox, who was assistant principal at time, “thought they were getting rid of too much history, so we tried to perserve as many (of the prints) as we could,” McGuire said.
The one McGuire had, a pastoral scene with sheep and a shepherd, once hung in the school’s library; to preserve it, she ended up taking it home and storing it. Another, a scene from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” that was going to be thrown away, was rescued and graced a wall in English teacher Sharon Brause’s classroom.
Brause said she first saw that print in Wilcox’s office in 1996. Then, “it disappeared, no one knew where it went,” she said. The print is a replica of Edwin Austin Abbey’s “King Lear,” which depicts Cordelia’s departure.
Brause found it perched on a window sill, sitting in direct sunlight. Since she teaches Shakespeare in her classes, she asked if she could have it for her classroom. When the new high school was built, Brause planned to bring it with her.
“I feared that if I left it behind, like the other pieces, it would disappear, too,” she said.
She took it home and cleaned it up, but the print never made it to her new classroom. Then she got an email from Norton asking teachers to check their classroom walls and storage areas for the other prints.
“I got that message and thought, ‘Finally, somebody cares enough about the school’s history and wants to preserve it,’ ” Brause said.
Earlier this month, as staff members were doing some cleaning and rearranging in the library and in a back room, they found one of the prints, which was in fairly bad shape, behind some shelves. Then two more showed up, a pair of photos from 1909 in Boston.
Norton has found four of the 10 images in the background of images in old yearbooks, as well as two others believed to be part of the original collection. He fears that some of the missing prints may have been tossed in the garbage, but he is hopeful they ended up being sold at auctions and are still in the area.
“I would ask the community if you know of the whereabouts of any of the original pieces, contact me so we can get it back on the walls of Smith-Cotton where it should be,” Norton said. “We apologize for misplacing these things. ... We are just trying to get things back and set things right.”
McGuire said she applauds Norton for his efforts to embrace the building’s history.
“We here in the U.S. tend to tear down and build new,” she said. “It is nice to hear somebody is trying to preserve our history.”
She also is hopeful that the other prints can be found.
“I just can’t imagine anybody destroying those,” she said. “They were so beautiful.”
