Northport Nostalgia: Laurel Avenue, The Big Move

The spring of 1959 in Northport was the gateway to expanded education facilities.  The exploding population of school children had placed a huge burden on the system and the infrastructure was inadequate. At the Laurel Avenue School we had been eating our lunches in the auditorium because there was no place large enough to accommodate all of us and recent years had seen their share of struggles with double sessions. 

The baby boomer group, a byproduct of post-war optimism was just coming into its own. While attending the Laurel Avenue School, the East Northport Jr. High School on Fifth Avenue was under construction, a project that seemed roughly the size of California. The plan was that once it was finished, the students would vacate the Laurel Avenue School so it could be renovated and expanded to modern standards. In hindsight, those modern standards likely included the introduction of more asbestos and lead-based paint. 

The new facility on Fifth Avenue would encompass the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, relieving the ninth grade burden from the Middleville High School. In the meantime, the two-year renovation plan to the Laurel Avenue School would allow
access by even more students still in the pipeline of the future.

Money was in short supply and the taxpayers were squawking like stuck pigs. I know, my Dad sat on the school board and I heard many a dinner table diatribe concerning the lack of money and the need for infrastructure. I suppose it seemed like a unique situation to Dad at the time, but over the years I've come to recognize the recurring scenario. The more things change, the more they remain the same. 

The Fifth Avenue School was complete and ready for occupancy around Easter,
1959 and all the Northport schools were bursting at the seams so the call was made to move into the new school at the end of Easter recess. This would be a monumental moving effort and would have to be executed with the precision of the June Taylor Dancers.

It would require the involvement of all hands on deck, packing those books into cartons, labeling things, preparing items for transport carrying heavy loads to staging areas, etc. I guess there were about 700 kids in that school and that was one large work crew. We were directed by our teachers to abandon our lesson plan for a day or two and pitch in, a real-time lesson in life. 

Our attractive CORE teacher was conducting the proceedings with the skilled precision a Maestro and supervising details when our group “Fonz” had a dusty picture in his hands which he had taken down from the wall. In one swift motion that became instant adolescent infamy, he turned around to ask where to put it and ran into her.

She was wearing a black felt-textured dress and the picture left two distinct dust imprints, each about the size of a silver dollar on her breasts. Oooops! Our "Fonz” was a little surprised and flustered, but the teacher just brushed herself off with a tee-hee or two. I guess she told him to put it in a carton or something, but
that little incident became pretty hot conversation for us 13-year-olds. Funny, it doesn't take much to amuse the male of the species and this sort of thing still remains pretty interesting. I guess there is just no hope for us guys.

So we went on to the Fifth Avenue School and served out the remainder of our hitch as “seniors” in a two-grade school, but the following year they added the Ninth grade to the program, making us “seniors” again!  The school we had just left was built in 1925 and we were now in a brand new 1959 School with all the amenities of uptown living.

I hoped my grades would follow the luster of the new bricks, aluminum and glass, but they didn't.  It was the beginning of a long siege of failing notices, some of which I was able to intercept, others not. If I had simply put the same effort into learning as I had into beating the system things might be different even today.  But then, in contemplating the last half century, I'd probably do it again the
same way. It might not have been perfect, but it was a blast!