School Days in the NR

Today I am enjoying a thread on Facebook with several dear old friends who I went to school with back in the dark ages. We grew up together in a little town in Ohio; North Royalton. Through this wonderful media called social networking we have been able to reunite after many years...

Todays topic... Royalton Road School.  It was one of the original structures in North Royalton, and even by 1960 standards it was old with a capital O.

Imagine if today parents sent their kids to a school with some of these features;

Construction of sandstone block, soft enough to drill through with a pencil. ( as I did in attempt to get the attention of Kathi....

A center gymnasium/stage with footlights so hot, that if the wooden covers remained in place and someone accidentally turned on the footlights, the covers would catch on fire.

Every room of the building had steam heating pipes running through them covered by... you guessed it; asbestos... not only asbestos though, asbestos that was crumbling and peeling off every pipe.

Cafeteria tables made of old bowling alley lanes from a remodeled bowling alley. ( The Red Eye, for you Royaltonites)

The shower rooms looked like something out of a German concentration camp. The concrete floors had no covering or treatment, so they were in constant "crumble" mode. The ceilings were only 6 feet high, so the bare light bulbs hanging from the exposed heating pipes were always in danger of bursting if splashed or worse yet, touched by a wet body. ( luckily we were elementary kids and none of us were  6 feet tall!) But the best feature was the holes in the wall separating the boys from the girls shower room... teachers had to stand guard to prevent the much sought after opportunity to look through the holes!

Probably the best overall feature of the building was the southeast stairwell that had been declared "unfit" by the city building engineers, so no more than one person at a time could use the stairwell. Eventually, all the stairwells were declared unsound so all classes were held on the first floor only.

Ya know what though... some of the best memories were born in that place, and the dearest people in this world traversed those hallways... and.... we survived!