{"id":56,"date":"2000-02-22T08:48:17","date_gmt":"2000-02-22T12:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/2000\/02\/22\/memory-lane\/"},"modified":"2006-07-22T09:08:03","modified_gmt":"2006-07-22T13:08:03","slug":"memory-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Memory Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"
February 22, 2000
\nTuesday<\/div>\n

My essay yesterday elicited some feedback from readers. One remembers the Presidents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Day change as taking place a little later, 1973, when she was in high school. Perhaps I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m remembering a time when the idea was being introduced, at least in Pennsylvania. I can attach the image of the sign on the porch to 1971 because that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the only year I had to drive down Paxton Street and over that railroad bridge to get home.<\/p>\n

I saw a Far Side<\/em> cartoon once that was captioned \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How the Brain Works.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It showed a workman in t-shirt, tool belt, and droopy jeans bending over a filing cabinet. He had electrical cords slung over his shoulder, some plugged into each other, some just dangling. He was rooting in a file drawer, obviously looking for an elusive piece of information\u00c2\u00a0to add to the tangle.<\/p>\n

I know that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how my brain works. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be thinking about something and one detail will trigger another, which happens to be permanently attached to another, which then pulls another up along with it, like those clumps of\u00c2\u00a0weeds in our lawn that are strung together by underground creepers, so that lifting one disturbs others along several feet of turf.<\/p>\n

Another reader, actually one on a list which discusses historical research, noted that I live in Harrisburg. She said that she lived here some years ago, gave me the address, and asked that if I had occasion to go near that neighborhood I check it out and report on what it looks like now.<\/p>\n

That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the kind of favor that appeals to the historian in me, and I made it my business to go that way today. It is only a few blocks from the first apartment my mother had when she came to Harrisburg in the late 1930s. What was once a solid working class neighborhood of modest semi-detached and row homes has declined somewhat over the last 35 years.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the mom-and-pop grocery stores have become bars (one padlocked last year after some notorious incidents). The streets are dotted with abandoned cars and some \u00e2\u20ac\u0153booted\u00e2\u20ac\u009d ones (vehicles owned by traffic ticket scofflaws that are parked legally with up-to-date tags but are immobilized until the fines are resolved).<\/p>\n

The house my correspondent asked me to look at is in good repair and appears to be undergoing some remodeling \u00e2\u20ac\u201d sheets of drywall were visible in the front window. It is half of a double on a street that has undergone some urban renewal. The former city junior high school in the next block, abandoned as an educational facility nearly thirty years ago and left to crumble for a while, has been turned into subsidized housing for the elderly.<\/p>\n

This neighborhood is three blocks from the site of Bishop McDevitt High School,\u00c2\u00a0the school\u00c2\u00a0I attended from 1961 until I graduated with the glorious Class of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc65. It is an imposing structure, built in 1929 and still beautiful after all these years, with two seventy-foot medieval looking towers that were once at the ends of the building but now, after three major additions, mark the boundaries of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Marian Hall,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or what would be called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Old Main\u00e2\u20ac\u009d if it were a college.<\/p>\n

Bishop Philip R. McDevitt built it. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t named for him until 1959. Until then it was just \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Catholic High.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The site is on a hill that sits on top of a hill, Allison Hill, which rises steadily from the railroad tracks downtown out twenty-two blocks. At that point the grade gets a little sharper, and there is a round island in the roadway planted in bulbs which marks the line between the working class area of the city and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bellevue Park,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d an enclave of stately mansions laid out in the early part of the twentieth century as part of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153City Beautiful\u00e2\u20ac\u009d movement. It was where the town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new money built their homes, the old money having established themselves along the riverfront in mansions that are now either parking lots or office buildings.<\/p>\n

Bishop McDevitt was criticized for choosing the site, which had to be purchased when the diocese already owned a serviceable building downtown, and approving the design, which was thought too ornate. He was adamant, believing that the Catholic community\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s children deserved a castle with a pleasant seat to pursue learning and wisdom.<\/p>\n

He was a man of vision. The high school, like Bellevue Park, endures, despite changes in demographics and attitudes toward parochial school education that mean the entire student body at today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s McDevitt is barely larger than the head count of one class in the old days.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the last comment on yesterday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essay. Someone asked about the number given for my honors history class \u00e2\u20ac\u201d 35. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right, as I remember it. There were 615 students enrolled when we started as freshman, of whom about 570 were left at graduation. Six percent of a class in the honors division\u00c2\u00a0is about right. That we were all herded into one class was typical. I once counted the number of faculty pictured in the yearbook and discovered that Bishop McDevitt operated with the same number of teachers for 2200 students that the school where I taught did for 1000.<\/p>\n

You can get bumper stickers that say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I Survived Catholic School!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and it is often fashionable to exaggerate the supposed horrors of such an experience. I can speak only for myself, and when I do on this topic I make it clear that I loved every day I spent at Bishop McDevitt, and would not trade a moment of it away. And yesterday, after my errand to inspect South 19th Street, I drove up the hill, past Bishop McDevitt, and every one of those moments seemed to gather near the front of my memory\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s file drawer, and I pulled over, and just sat with them for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

February 22, 2000 Tuesday My essay yesterday elicited some feedback from readers. One remembers the Presidents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Day change as taking place a little later, 1973, when she was in high school. Perhaps I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m remembering a time when the idea was being introduced, at least in Pennsylvania. I can attach the image of the sign on Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-down-into-a-memory","category-my-letter-to-the-world-2000"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}