As Glenda Cornforth walked the halls of the Jasper Junior/Senior High School, memories came flooding back to her.
Cornforth was in school the year the new building was finished, and 62 years later memories of coming to the new building still stick with her.
Almost every room she passed prompted a story: the old ringer washer they used to have in the home economics room, the gleaming new laboratory with its then state-of-the-art experiment tables, or the comfy student council room that students had all to themselves.
This week, that building shut its doors to students for good. After serving as the home of Jasper’s high school and junior high for more than six decades, it will be gutted and torn down as students begin a new school year in the soon-to-be-completed Joint School Facility next door.
June 10, Cornforth was part of a tour put on by Sheila Couture of the Jasper Yellowhead Historical Society aimed at giving some of the building’s first and oldest students a chance for a final goodbye.
“I wanted a chance to get to see the old place - and especially a chance to hear all the stories,” she said. And at the tour, those stories came in droves.
Craning her neck at the pictures of past graduating classes lining the walls, Cornforth pointed out several old friends, or recalled anecdotes about past teachers. As she reached the photo of her graduating class, she told the group only 12 people graduated that year.
Bob Baxter, another former student who witnessed first-hand the move into the new school building, recalled the students’ elation at having lockers.
“We were so excited about those lockers,” he said with a chuckle.
One thing Baxter and Cornforth both distinctly remembered was the building’s new washrooms. As Baxter pointed out, unlike those in the old school, it was very tough to get away with smoking in the new ones.
“I think I had a few puffs, Bob,” Cornforth teased. “We opened the windows, but we fooled no one.”
And while Cornforth and Baxter’s memories might seem like snapshots of the building’s most distant years, past graduate Terry Olsen said that things were still quite different not that long ago.
Olsen graduated from the school in 1973, and remembered gym classes being segregated by sex. She recalled that even then girls were forced to wear skirts, and only when the temperature dropped into the extreme cold ranges were they given the luxury of slacks.
“It was cold,” she said, shaking her head.
For Olsen, her memories of the building aren’t nearly as important as those of the people she spent time with there. Her fondest memories are of her wry-witted old English teacher, or the shenanigans that went on in the drama productions.
She told the story of one of their productions, where a character was supposed to get doused with a bucket of water.
“We were supposed to use a whole bunch of chopped up tinfoil in the bucket. But we didn’t - of course being kids we filled it up with real water and doused them.”
Dale Karpluk, a former principal at the school, had similar memories. She said that for as long as she lives she will never forget the Christmas concerts the school put on every year.
One year, she recalled, an elementary class was just about to start their song, when “the curtain opened and there was two little boys in the front row punching each other.”
She remembers the curtain whooshing shut, and seeing in the gap between the curtain and the floor a pair of heels clack across the stage, shuffle around, and clack back to the wings. The curtain opened and the two boys were smiling sweetly.
“She must have threatened them within an inch of their lives,” Karpluk laughed.
Olsen said that back then the student body felt almost like a family.
‘”I remember the people and teachers and the students. We were a close-knit community. When you went to school here you knew everyone, and you knew their parents,” she said.
Today, she said, a “whole new flock” of students populate the halls and classrooms, and she’s encouraged by the fact that - despite all that has changed, that close-knit bond between students still seems to exist. In spite of that, she said, she will still be sad to see the building torn down.
At the end of the June 10 tour, Cornforth leaned against the railing in the band room, scanning the artwork on the walls. Speaking slowly, in a low and serious voice, she put her thoughts to words.
“It’s sad to see it go - because we have so many great memories,” she said.
Trevor Nichols
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