Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It was heartbreaking when they demolished the old Shoshoni K-12 School, sold Harold Bailey Field, and abandoned the track west of the bus barn. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do.
Last week, I received these pics of the old Wind River High School that was once Morton High School in an anonymous e-mail.
This was my high school.
We didn’t have a 50th class reunion, the only one I attended was our 10th in 1985. A handful of us have kept in touch over these many years, but most have simply faded from view.
The views were tragic. The building was in shambles, vandalized, with graffiti on every flat surface and many areas open to the sky and elements.
I’m going to take a trip down memory lane with a few photographs and a little story about each one.
The first one is from everyone’s favorite teacher and coach, Mr. Sinner.
Leroy Sinner was a fabulous teacher, and an even better track coach. We learned to type on manual typewriters, with the IBM Selectric, the electric typewriter with the spinning ball, and even a correcting ribbon that arrived later. It was high end in 1973. If you were caught chewing gum in class, he took your chair, and you sat on a trash can for the rest of the period.
The second is the science lab on the far end west end of the north wing of the school. Mr. Blackwell’s domain.
By our senior year, my buddy Pat Wilson and I had taken all the science classes that Wind River could offer. We cajoled our new principal, Mr. Bookout, into letting us take an unsupervised “independent study science” class. That’s right, no teacher, no supervision, just a couple of 18-year-olds with access to the chemicals of a 1960s-era lab.
We opened cans of sharks, cats, and other creatures stored in formaldehyde since the Eisenhower administration, and played with chemicals, lots of chemicals.
One day, Pat and I were making esters, trying to create unique smells from a variety of acids. We’re not sure what the concoction was, but we spilled it on a table, and it began to eat through the Formica into the pressed wood underneath. As it burned through table it hissed and generated a foul, metallic smell, we caught it in a beaker and poured it down the drain with ample amounts of water. “The solution to pollution is dilution,” I later learned.
Our next stop was the gym.
I dislocated my left knee at freshman basketball practice under that basket back in December 1971. The backboard was the old fan, glass style, in those days. The modern rectangular ones didn’t come until later.
I watched my friends “edge” Jeffrey City 122-32 in the first game the Longhorns ever played in 1974 against the eventual Class B runner-up Cougars under head coach Jack Draxler.
The stage has a hole in it now, but we put on the junior class play, “Exit the Body” and a musical, “Calamity Jane,” on that stage under the wonderful direction of our English and speech teacher, Rosemary Samulski. I was supposed to one-punch my friend Cubby Furlong in a scene in “Exit the Body,” but in our final performance, we staged a 30-second fake fight that brought the ire of Mrs. Samulski. Cubby was a natural
Now, to the favorite room of every boy who graduated from Wind River from 1969 to 1988, the cafeteria. There is a special place in heaven for Fern Watson and Rosie Baker. They made school lunch so delicious that it can’t be described adequately by anyone who didn’t get the privilege to eat in their kitchen.
There were a couple of rules: the first was that you had to try a bite of everything, the second was that you ate everything on your tray, and the third was that if someone threw food, the seconds line was closed.
One dreadful day, a new kid from Riverton (he only lasted a day) came in and threw one of their legendary rolls across the lunch room. We all snapped our heads toward the serving line, hoping that Fern hadn’t seen it. Nope, there she was with a stern face, holding a big wooden spoon, and the dreadful words, “No seconds,” soon echoed across the room.
That kid took a punch from about a dozen junior and senior boys outside a few minutes later; he didn’t come back.
Rough justice I know, and something that would bring TV news crews to a campus today, but then you’ve never tasted those rolls, rolls so good that every boy licked each of them as he sat down, otherwise they’d be immediately stolen.
Now outside.
My mom worked as the school district business manager in this office until she moved to Pavillion a few years later. The room to the right was Mr. Fehring’s Woodshop, a great place to build just about anything and the staging area for a three-period carpentry class I took as a senior with nine of my friends, including the late Cubby, Chet Stagner, and Orris Miller.
The spacious stands of the Cougar football field. We poured those during the summer between my junior and senior year when Cubby and I worked for the school district.
Our “football” scoreboard. Someone ordered a scoreboard in my sophomore year and didn’t pay attention. It was a baseball scoreboard. Everybody we played laughed at it.
The coaches adapted, using just the first four innings to keep score with chalk, and later with plastic numbers like those you probably had in P.E. class.
The goal posts on the north end of the field still stand. We didn’t win many games, but our final one was memorable.
Morton and Pavillion had beaten Dubois a few times in 8-man football in the decades before we arrived, but since 1969, the Rams owned the Cougars.
On a mild October afternoon in 1974, we finally beat the Rams 6-0 in our last game as seniors. My friend Wally Westling was a talented athlete, but it took him 300 yards behind us to overcome our penalties and bonehead calls before we finally won the game. Yep, memorable.
Something less than memorable was that hill leading up to the water tower.
We were edged on one of the final plays of the game in our season opener at Byron, 28-24, and looked forward to a rematch with the Eagles. We played Basin, Byron, Dubois, and Shoshoni twice in those days; that was our season.
When Byron came to Morton, they hammered us 34-8.
Coach Blackwell was all stick and no carrot. We were never rewarded for good plays, but we ran a lot of hills and did a lot of monkey rolls when we screwed up.
Evidently, giving up 34 points to Byron was a huge screwup.
In game gear they marched us to the base of the hill and we ran a hill for every point Byron had scored, 34 in all. We were broken into two groups, juniors and seniors, and freshmen and sophomores. I felt sorry for the younger guys. The sprints were timed, and if a single player didn’t make it, everyone in the group ran another hill. Those kids ran 44 before they staggered into the locker room.
Adding insult to injury, Blackwell asked the Byron team to watch us, but they left after just a few minutes.
Our parents and girlfriends stayed for the entire humiliation.
Imagine the lawsuits if someone tried that today.
It was a sobering trip down the shattered remains of a once proud school, full of memories, triumphs, failures, successes, and disappointments.
I don’t ever want to go back.