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End of an era in Hicksville

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By PETER GREER

greer@crescent-news.com

HICKSVILLE -- It's the end of an era.

While staff, faculty and students last month concluded the school year in the new Hicksville Exempted Village Schools building on the east end of town, the venerable buildings, which were vacated in January and in which generations of children were taught, have outlived their usefulness. The elementary building has already seen the wrecking ball, with Hicksville High School due to go likewise very soon.

Hicksville graduates will recall fond memories of the old facilities for decades to come.

Virlynn Rex, a 1965 HHS graduate and a middle school teacher from 1972-2002, began her formal education in an even older school building until the recently demolished grade school was built in the mid-1950s. "I was in third grade," she recalls, "and some of the school officials came and got me and several other third-graders and took us down to where the new school was being built. They wanted us to stand in the restrooms so they'd know where to install the bathroom mirrors. That was strange." (The school was completed as Rex began fourth grade).

For Candace Overmyer (class of 1963; second-grade teacher from 1968-98), one less-than-treasured memory had to do with the way the elementary building had been built. "Kindergarten, first and second grades all had (separate rooms in) one wing," she recalls, "and whenever you had to take a class out of your room you had to take your students through all the other rooms to get where you were going. It was very distracting, you'd disrupt the other classes, but if you took (students) outside instead, some parents would get mad at you."

Although long after her student days, the gymnasium in the high school, which was built in 1939, is the source of one particular memory for 1946 graduate Betty (Neidhardt) Rohrs. "My daughter Sandy's (Rohrs Wonderly) class was the first to graduate in the new gym, I believe," she says. "It was 1968, and I remember you couldn't hear any of the (commencement) speakers. They had very bad acoustics and there was something wrong with the new sound system. They got it fixed in time for the next graduation, though."

The gym also holds memories for 1983 grad Susie (Meyer) Smalley, due to the lack of space in the high school. "We put plays on at the high school stage, which was in the gym," she remembers. "That stage was totally inadequate for theatre. We had no acoustics, seating or footlights, but we put on some good shows there. I remember the director of one show calling us together to give us notes after a rehearsal. She didn't see that one of her actors was hanging upside down by his knees on a basketball hoop just above her head. We were all paying attention, but she didn't know why."

Smalley's husband, Dean (also a 1983 grad), recalls a bit of mischief dealing with high school lockers -- and an unexpected ally. "(Science teacher) Jerry Balser used to let us out of class early so we could stack a particular student's locker," he says, laughing. "Every morning she'd open her locker and all her books would fall out. She never caught on."

Melody (Guilford) Stevenson (class of 2002) was one of many hundreds of Hicksville's student musicians. "During free periods I would always hang out in (teacher) Sue Brubaker's music room," she says. "One day some art students came in and Saran-wrapped the whole room. I don't mean just covering up the chairs; I mean they literally made a maze in there. I had to watch where I walked. And I had to clean it up afterwards."

As students and alumni look toward the future, Rex offers another perspective of the vacated school buildings: "I could look out my front door and watch the elementary school being built," says Rex, who as a child lived several doors down from her current residence, "and now I can look out my back door and see the same school being torn down. I've outlasted the building!"