More Pine Bluff High School deconstruction, etc.

Top photo: the John Allen building on the Pine Bluff High School campus. It was built in 1907-08, and torn down (bottom photo) in 1973. I attended PBHS during 1969-1972 and had many classes in the Allen building.  The other two old buildings on the campus were the Junius Jordan Building (1918) and the Woodrow Wilson building (1924, originally used as the junior high school).

Both of the above photos are from the 1974 PBHS Annual. Most of the PBHS annuals are digitized and viewable at the Pine Bluff library website. For some reason the 1969 annual (yearbook) isn't uploaded. I'll have to see if I can correct that oversight. The bottom photo must have been taken in the early summer of '73, before the 1973-74 school year began. The John Allen building was the first of the three old buildings to be torn down. I recently found, on microfilm in the library, an article and photo in the Pine Bluff Commercial from June 4, 1973, about the beginning of the John Allen building demolition. And I actually remember seeing the beginning of the demolition that summer, and being shocked by it, because I felt I was partly responsible for it.

In the '71-'72 school year, as editorial editor of the Pine Cone, I'd written a few editorials saying the old buildings were fire hazards, implying without realizing it that they should be torn down and replaced by new buildings. A reporter from the Commercial interviewed me in January 1972 about my editorials, so I'm on record as supporting the demolition of those beautiful early 20th Century Pine Bluff High School buildings, designed by Charles Thompson. Talk about Ink on His Face! But I'm not sure what else could have been done with them, and they were fire hazards.

So the demolition of the old buildings began 51 years ago, and the class of 1973 was the last senior class to attend classes in the John Allen building.

The night I saw the beginning of the John Allen building demolition, which would have been close to the time it started, I was at a party in the Broadmoor neighborhood and Brian Carty, a classmate of mine, told me the building was being torn down. Then he drove me and someone else (don't remember who) in his new VW Beetle over to look at the beginning of the demolition. This must have been the first weekend of June in '73. Two other things I remember from that night are: being told that the McDonald's in Pine Bluff had just started serving breakfast, and hearing the song "Monster Mash" on Brian's car radio. Brian changed stations when it came on, and I sort of registered a complaint, saying I hadn't heard it in a long time. Brian registered a counter-complaint. He said "They're playing it all the time now."  It was the beginning of the "oldies" radio sensation for my generation! A bigtime radio business now. What would it be like without such nostalgic songs easily listened to on the radio airwaves or satellite radio? It would be a lot more nostalgic to hear the 60s and 70s songs, that's  what. "They're playing them all time now."

I now live a block from the Pine Bluff High School campus, which is currently (again) being demolished, or at least all the buildings are. The football stadium is not. The McFadden Fieldhouse was left standing 50 years ago, and so was the modern building with the cafeteria and the band and choir classrooms in it. But these buildings are being torn down now along with the 50 year old ones.

Above and below: Goodbye McFadden Fieldhouse.

The football stadium in the background.

The John Allen building stood in the approximate

area where the sign is in these pictures.

This year, 2024-25, PBHS classes are being held at what was

formerly Jack Robey Junior High, on south Olive Street.

Vintage postcards of the John Allen building (above) and the Junius Jordan building (below).

The statue David O. Dodd, "the boy hero of the Confederacy," was moved to the front of the Jefferson County courthouse before the demolition of the Allen building in '73, and thus it's missing in the first photo from the '74 annual (top of page). Last year it was moved again, this time to a more appropriate location, Camp White Sulphur Springs Confederate Cemetery outside of Pine Bluff.

And one more (below), showing, at the bottom left to right, McFadden Fieldhouse, the Wilson building, and the building with the band and choir classrooms and the cafeteria. And the hole where the Allen building had been. The other photos show a snow-covered hill and a basketball game inside McFadden Fieldhouse. There were very few hills in Pine Bluff, so it's a safe bet that this one is at the Pine Bluff County Club, where I went sledding as a kid during some of the few times it snowed back then in Pine Bluff.

As the text says, there was an ice storm in January 1974. I was there and remember driving my 4-on-the-floor 1972 Toyota Corona on the ice-covered parking lot next to TG&Y in the Jefferson Square shopping center, skidding and sliding in circles in the car, and also "skiing" along next to my car holding on to the open driver's side door and the roof. 

I was enrolled in a Vo-Tech electronics course at Pines Vocational Technical School after dropping out of Hendrix College at the end of 1973, and I do recall the return that year to Daylight Savings Time in January (energy crisis), because it was still dark (as the text above notes) as late as 7:30 or 8 in the morning, because it was really 6:30 or 7. And January, and cold! The daytime (7:30-3:30) electronics course was not to my liking and I quit after one day.

I lived in a modern one-room cabin "riverhouse" my grandparents had built in 1969 next to the Arkansas River (no telephone) at the time. My parents didn't find out I'd quit the electronics course until March. Since I was unencumbered, instead of getting mad at me for wasting his money on the class, my dad asked me if I wanted to go to Costa Rica with him and his friend Joe Hardin from Grady. I did. I enrolled in my first physics class that May, in the first semester of summer school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. My free and easy drop-out days were over then.

Pine Bluff Commercial and 2 trains passing in the daytime

I worked for the Pine Bluff Commercial newspaper twice, once after graduation from high school in 1972 as a summer job before going to college, and then again when I moved back to Pine Bluff  in the late summer of 2005, after being away for 33 years. Both times I started as a copy editor, then became a reporter, and both times the job only lasted a little over two months. This was what was expected of me in '72, since it was just a summer job. I actually liked the job then, EXCEPT for having to be there at 7:30 a.m. since it was an afternoon paper. Even though it was a morning paper in 2005, and work hours were flexible and started around 11 a.m., I struggled with the work of being a modern copy editor,  using InDesign to edit and lay out stories and photos.. Then I struggled just as much with being the Business and Farm reporter when that job came open, because I'm no good at writing copy quickly.  I wrote some stories about Hurricane Katrina based on interviews with evacuees from New Orleans who were staying in Pine Bluff, but I really wasn't suited to the job, so I up and quit the first week of October.

The Commercial is still being published, barely, having been bought in 2020 by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette . It's published as a 6-page part of that newspaper's Arkansas section. It wouldn't have survived on its own, so it's good the ADG bought it. The building the Commercial was in from 1963 until the paper was purchased by the ADG--the building I worked in both times I was there--is still standing but is in pretty shabby shape, basically abandoned, although it was bought two years ago with the idea that it could be used to house a cryptocurrency mining operation. Here are two photos I took of it recently, the first before the shrubs were trimmed. The state of the building is an indication of what has happened to newspapers as well as what is happening to Pine Bluff.

The cryptocurrency operation plan isn't happening yet and I hope it doesn't. The parking lot beyond the chain link fence was the employee parking lot both times I worked there. (I don't recall if the fence was there in 2005--probably not--and it definitely wasn't there in '72.) 

In 1972, the glass door going into the newsroom from the parking lot had the words "Employe Entrance" stenciled on it.  That spelling of "Employe," I learned later, was an older spelling of the word that the Commercial (the owners, Ed and Armistead Freeman) still insisted on using in 1972. 

I took the above photos at Beech Street and 4th Avenue, while I was parked on the railroad tracks on 4th Avenue. Beech Street is one of the few streets that has a RR crossing now (Cherry, Walnut, Pine, Main, State and Alabama are others). Overpasses were built in the late 1980s on University Avenue, Convention Center Drive, and 5th, 6th and 28th Avenues.  Poplar Street, a block east of Cherry, doesn't have a RR crossing, but I pulled up there a few weeks ago when I was leaving my house to drive to Little Rock because I noticed there were two trains passing on the two tracks--a rare site. It was something I thought other former or current Pine Bluff residents might like to see. I was playing the title track of Joy of Cooking's 1971 album Closer to the Ground while shooting the video. The temperature setting in my recently purchased 2008 Camry Hybrid happened to be 71 also. I think my late friend Pat Calkins would have liked this video, although there's not much to it. He made a video about ten years ago that I have somewhere (on a VHS tape) of the harbor and the Pioneer Inn area of Lahaina, Maui, while walking around and narrating it. I sure hope I can find that tape, now that the old Lahaina area he filmed is gone.

The Martha Beall Mitchell house at 4th and Elm (a block away) is barely visible (behind a tree) at the 48 second point in the video.

Pat Calkins remembered briefly on St. Patrick's Day

Pat Calkins, my best friend in junior high and high school, would have turned 70 on January 20th of this year if he'd lived that long. He died in 2016. I wanted to post a remembrance of him then, but couldn't find the photo from the Pioneer Inn of him in front of the painting of the Sirens. He helped with the restoration of the Pioneer Inn in 2001. St. Patrick's Day seems like a good time to post something, so here are a couple of things:

This letterhead stationery is from Jim and Pat's record shop they owned when they were in high school, at the beginning of the 1970s.

Pat's main career during his life time was as a carpenter and builder, mainly in Fayetteville.

Present Stereo Set-up

 

I repaired my 50 year old Advent speakers last year, replacing the "foam" ring on each woofer and replacing the old tweeters with new ones. Also used soap and water to clean the speaker grilles and let them dry in the sun for a day. The speakers sound great! Some of my albums are shown on the right, the rest are on the left out of sight. Crosby Still and Nash is on top of the right speaker, and King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King is framed and hanging on the wall. (Both albums were released in 1969. My King Crimson  copy is a bit scratched in places, so I also have the CD.) I bought this copy of the CS&N album recently at Been Around Records (it's in very good shape), but I bought my original copy in 1970, when I bought it and In the Court of the Crimson King as a new member of the Atlantic Record Club. The CD in front of the Technics record player and the Nakamichi cassette deck is Miles Davis Volume One. A Sony receiver, my only non-vintage piece of stereo equipment, is on the lowest shelf. The open book on the TV tray is vintage also: An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Volume I, third edition, revised printing, June 1970, by William Feller (1906-1970).

100-year old barn at the farm

 

The sky above the barn. A modern sky, due to the jet contrails.

The place where the barn is most deteriorated after approximately 100 years.

The place where the barn is least deteriorated--the tin roof and rafters.

Looking westward in the hayloft with its now-warped floor.

Eastward view. It was about 4:45 pm when I took all these photos.

Dried up cow dung mixed with dirt on the ground floor.

East side of barn, ground level.

West side of the barn at loft level. 

I didn't realize it until I began writing this that I took these photos on my grandfather's birthday, February 7. (He was born in 1898 and died in 1973.)  This barn and a bigger one (now gone) and the milking barn (a one-story rectangular brick building) were built for my grandfather's dairy farm.  He was Walter Trulock Jr., and his father, Walter Sr., owned the farm, which was strictly a cotton farm until my grandfather started the dairy business. My dad, Walter III, was born in 1921 and grew up on the farm. Later--34 years later--he moved back to the farm from Washington DC, bringing me, my older brother, and our mother back with him. So I grew up, until I was nine-and-a-half, on the farm also, and played in this barn as a kid. We lived in the remodeled milking barn from 1955 until 1964. It's still in use as a home, and is in good shape, but is owned by another family. The farm itself, with a little less acreage, is still owned by my family (three of my brothers and me). No cotton is grown on it currently, just soybeans, rice, and corn, and occasionally winter wheat.

The front of the remodeled dairy barn house on a foggy-ish day in June 2009. The barn and its surrounding field are out of view behind the house, but the edge of the bigger barn, torn down in 2010 or 2011 at the request of Floreen Chadick, who lived in the house at the time and whose descendants still own it but don't live in it, is visible on the left.

During the time my family lived in this house, my father occasionally would say I was "the strong, silent type," when I was introduced to people and didn't have much to say. He didn't know that I occasionally went out to this bigger barn and threw clumps of hay down to the ground from the hayloft to attract the cows. While they were munching on hay below me and as I was throwing more down to them, I shouted to them, and as I recall it was a bit of lightweight verbal abuse about them being dumb and not paying attention when I was talking. "Hey you! Yeah, you! Wbat are you lookin' at?" Etc, etc.