Schooling in Park Ridge

(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)

I went to grammar school in Park Ridge.  The middle school I was supposed to go to burned down so we had to take our studies in the portables.  They had no insulation at all but they had a big pot-bellied stove.  The teacher had to fire that thing up.  You all had to wear long underwear or you would’ve perished.  Really would’ve.   The weather was very cold, oh my.

Then I went to Maine Township High School.  Hillary Clinton and Harrison Ford also went there.  The high school was built in 1932.  They had a lot of sports fields and I loved all sports.  There are a couple of things that are very important to me in life.  One is sports and physical exercise.  I just had to get into all of that.  We went out for soccer, field hockey, baseball, basketball, threw the discus in the field and just had a marvelous time.  That was the name of the game for me.

But the main sport of Maine Township High School was swimming.  In 1932 they built an Olympic swimming pool.  Of course the taxpayers thought they were out of the minds.  But that was good because they didn’t let anyone graduate unless you could swim the length of the pool.  It was a wonderful thing.  I was on the swimming team.  I just loved every minute of it.  A lot of my friends were on the swimming team too.  It was big time there.

We didn’t have a theater.  The school would remove all of the chairs from the basketball court and put the plays on up in the balcony or else in the town theater.  That seemed to be alright because nobody knew any different.  People were so lacking in funds.  We never had a yearbook.  We never had a school paper.  We never had anything like that because there was no money for actual paper.

But we had a lot of sports because we had a lot of fields.  We had a campus of about 40-something acres.  It was used by two towns, Park Ridge and Des Plaines.  We were about three miles away from the high school.  They had no busses but you rode on a city bus that came out from Chicago and stopped in Park Ridge and carried on and went to Des Plaines.  You just jumped off where the high school was.

You had to pay your own fare on the bus.  So to save money, you would occasionally walk home, usually with a guy, and stop for a nickel’s worth of ice cream at Prince Castle.  And you didn’t think anything of walking that distance.  Of course you had to walk quite a ways, no matter what the weather was, to get to where the bus came in from Chicago.  I particularly remember coming home after swimming practice with my hair frozen.  But nobody minded.

I enjoyed my teachers very much.  I particularly liked English and science.  We always won the state chemistry prize.  They had a meeting in Springfield once a year.

I remember we used the library a lot.  “Ma, I’m going to li”.  Well, you could walk up there at night and go to the library and walk home and it was alright.  You were free.  Something kind of gets lost when you have too many people.  Then you have too many interactions.  There’s a possibility of somebody knocking somebody off the curb or into the car or something else.

I think I had an unremarkable childhood but a jolly childhood.  I think the main reason was that all of us were free in those days.  I don’t think that’s ever coming back, at least not here.  I remember a young family came from Ohio with their two boys who had bicycles.  They asked me where they could ride the bicycles.  And I said, “Anywhere you want.”  They looked stunned.  Where can I go in the boat?  Anywhere.  Canoe?  Anyplace.

People aren’t used to this and it’s getting worse now.  You see nobody out and no rapport.  We knew everything within six blocks around ‘cause you went over to your neighbor’s house or they came to yours.  I’d come home from school and I’d yell, “Mom, I’m home.  Goodbye!”  I ran out to see my buddies.  And then I’d come in and have supper and then do homework