Forest+Grove+High+School

Essays

//Forest Grove High Schools Old and New// (student research paper, c.1960)

"The old Forest Grove Union High School sat on the corner of Seventeenth and Elm Streets. It must have looked very formidable to the passer-by. the building was a two-story brick building with cream trim around the windows. The basement was a half day-light type with the windows just above ground level (it must have looked almost like the north side of Lincoln Junior High does today). To enter the building you had to climb a flight of stairs, those stairs were made of concrete and were quite steep.

The basement was a teacher's nightmare. The halls were very narrow and very low. The cafeteria was down there along with the science department and the home economics work area. During lunch time it was almost impossible to walk down the halls let alone teach a class in one of the adjoining rooms. There were tables in the halls for the students to eat on, thus cutting the narrow halls almost in half. Movement through these halls was minimal because of congestion.

The home economics classes faced an almost insurmountable task during the lunch hour. The stoves and cooking equipment used for the instruction of the students was the same equipment used by the cooks to prepare the hot lunches for other students. Therefore, when the cooks arrived about 9:30, all the home economics students who were cooking had to move out and let the cooks get to work. The girls in the home economics classes between about 9:30 and 1:00 seldom, if ever, got a really good chance to try to cook.

There was the same problem with the sewing room of the home economics program. The sewing room was nothing more than a corner of the cafeteria lunchroom. During the lunch hour, girls trying to sew were put through all kinds of tortures by the students that were on that lunch. To be a home economist from FGHS proved to be not only a test of skill, but also a test of endurance and patience on the part of the girls.

The science department and Mr. Brachmann also had many hindrances in the teaching of their chosen field. The rooms were very small and dark. The lighting was very insufficient in most rooms. The laboratory was very ill-equipped, thus making the use of experimentation by the teacher difficult, but by the students it was almost impossible.

On the main floor were located the offices of the administration, the chorus room, the drama room, and the rooms used for business courses. these were also very small and somewhat inadequate although their weaknesses were not as glaring as those of the science and home economics departments. The hallways on the main floor were just as narrow as those of the basement, but the stairways from the main floor to the second floor were almost an impossible route of travel. There were three stairways, two of which were so narrow that they had to be restricted to one way travel. That is, one was used to go up and was so designed and the other was used for traveling down and was also so designated. The third stairway was the granddaddy of the other two and, therefore, was big enough for two-way travel and three students could stand shoulder to shoulder within its great spaciousness.

Once you finally reached the second floor, you were greeted y the same dismal looking view, the narrow, dark, and very poorly lighted halls. On this floor was the department of English, the department of history and also the library. The English and History departments not needing many outside aids or apparatus, were probably the best equipped of all, not because they had more but because they needed less.

The library was the room that seemed to be the most interesting of the whole building. It was a converted classroom with a very high ceiling. The room was almost a perfect square with windows on only one side. They wall opposite these windows was completely shelves. The other two walls were halfway covered by shelves. There were two entrances to the library, a double door and a single door on opposite sides of the room. This proved to be quite and inconvenience to the librarians and those who were trying to study, because industrious students used the library as a shortcut between the two adjoining corridors. There were a number of inconveniences for the librarians, the foremost being -- water. There was no running water in the library so the student assistant had to run down the hall and carry water back in a pitcher every time someone needed some water.

The furniture of the library was really the most interesting part of the whole room. It was made and constructed by the students in Industrial Arts classes of previous years. The chairs were very heavy and very rough. They were so rough in fact that many girls refused to sit in them because they snagged nylons and ripped coats and skirt and dresses alike. The tables were also very rough and large. This made space a premium and the librarians had very little work space to repair damaged books and supervise the handling and checking out of library books.

With the lack of space there was much more that the student could get his hands on and mix up. The periodicals were the main source of this type of complaint. They were stacked on a table out in the open, if a student wanted a periodical, he simply thumbed through until he found the one he wanted. Students being what they are always put the periodicals back on the top, never bothering to replace them in the right order, so if you needed a magazine you had to thumb all the way through the pile and hope no one else was using it. As you can see, many students never once studied in the library because of the poor conditions which lent very little to proper and good study habits.

The gymnasium was also very inadequate. (It still stands today across the street from the Catholic Church, and is known as St. Anthony's.) It was very small and afforded very little seating area for spectators at athletic events held there. This is the reason that the new gym was used a full year before the students were going to the new high school.

There was one thing and only one thing that the old high school had that was better than the new one and that was an auditorium. With individual padded seats, assemblies were much more comfortable for the students and probably kept the noise down quite a bit.

The transition between the old and new high schools for the most part met with a great deal excitement and enthusiasm. Most of the departments transferred their equipment with a great deal of orderliness. This was not so in the library. Mrs. Clark had the perfect way of transporting the books with a minimum of mix up. All books were put into cartons according to their Dewey Decimal System number, and placed in the ready room of the new library. There was only one major flaw in her plan; students. When they were unloading, some of the cartons broke and the students just threw the books anywhere. Soon it became a game; all the cartons were thrown in one big pile in the center of the room. Many cartons were broken and books were scattered all over the place.

Although the basketball games were played in the gym that January, classes did not begin until the next September; the Class of '53 were the first to graduate from the new FGHS.

That first year was a rather hectic one. There were no facilities for the Industrial Arts students, so they had to be bussed back and forth to the old building (the Industrial Arts building is the only building still standing at the old site). The new High School was a monument to preplanning although they had only 500 students at the time. This was because they built it to hold 750 students.

Little did they know that the school would never grow to almost 1000 students. Soon they realized their mistake and began planning for expansion. First, the Shop win was constructed and then in 1964, the new south wing was opened; thus, bringing the school up big enough to handle all of the new students. The new High School had many good features that the old one could not have begun to match; the new science laboratory, the shop wing and equipment, the audio-visual aids, the photographic laboratory and equipment and, of course, the fabulous new gym.

I thin that we go to one of the better high schools in the state as far as facilities go. Should there be a problem of overcrowding in the next few years, the next step will be to build a new junior high to accommodate three years and change the high school to a three year high school. I think, with the exception of a possible swimming complex, that the new FGHS will remain the same for a great number of years to come.

Yearbooks

You can find a few of the local high school and college yearbooks in our history room. History room reference includes "The Optimist" of Forest Grove High School (FGHS) for 1958-1960, and 1979. On Ancestry.com (which can be used for free in the library), you can find free digital copies of FGHS "The Optimist for the years 1926-1929, as well as 1946-1947. Under the schools other name, Forest Grove Union High School (FGUHS) you can find "The Optimist" from 1931 and 1966. Finally, for yearbooks from Pacific University in Forest Grove, called "Heart of Oak," you can find 1922, 1924, 1931, 1948, 1965, 1976.