Tom Mooney
                                Remember When

Tom Mooney

Remember When

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School’s out – for good.

This week, for the very last time, students walked out of GAR Memorial High School. It wasn’t the first time an area high school closed as part of a consolidation. For GAR, though, closure was a bit more spectacular.

Thanks to the efforts of 1982 grad Stephen Morio and friends, scores of alumni showed up and formed an honor guard for the final class of seniors as they entered the auditorium for the last-ever graduation in the school’s 96-year history.

Students from the Wilkes-Barre Area School District’s three high schools – the others being Coughlin and Meyers – will move into the sparkling new high school in Plains Township for the fall.

Saying goodbye to an old school is not easy. But it’s happened many times before right here in Luzerne County.

At one time, nearly all the 76 municipalities in the county had their own school systems, at least for the elementary grades. Now, there are just 11 districts. Costs and the increasing demands for technical and professional education made the old system untenable.

GAR – which I admit is my old high school – did not surprise me with its alumni festivities on graduation day. It’s always been somewhat of an outlier among the area’s high schools. Its name, location and even the colors have been part of a unique personality.

The name was meant to honor the veterans of the Civil War, the men who gave their blood and lives to keep the nation whole and end the scourge of slavery. Local veterans already had their GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) Hall on South Main Street for generations, and several of them showed up to help lay the school cornerstone in the 1920s.

The location of the school in the Heights section of the city was eminently fitting as well. The cross streets were nearly all named for Civil War personalities – Lincoln (the president), Welles (Lincoln’s secretary of the Navy) and generals Hancock, Grant, Sherman, Meade, Sheridan and Custer, with two more nearby for generals Howard and Logan.

The school’s colors of blue and gray (the uniform colors of the two sides) were certainly no coincidence. The magnificent carving in the entranceway showing U.S. and Confederate soldiers shaking hands in brotherhood while a personification of education overlooks them suggests a near-holy mission.

As with any school, there were larger-than-life figures in its history. Sam Savitz, a 1930s graduate became an illustrator and drew some of the first images of the Lone Ranger. Fighter pilot Lou Lenart helped Israel win its war of independence. David Bohm (1935) became a world-renowned physicist. Lillian Lenovitz Cahn founded the Coach handbag company. Greg Skrepenak played in the NFL for Oakland and Carolina.

There was sadness. Teacher Mildred Gwilliam fell to her death down a school staircase in 1936. There were also triumphs. Student Vincent Lorusso’s education was interrupted by World War II, but he later returned and became GAR’s principal.

In a mission of mercy, the school housed victims of the floods of 1936 and 1972.

Now, the future has arrived.

My late mother (born 1912) said that she was in the first group of students who left the old Wilkes-Barre High School and entered GAR in the 1920s. Was that a difficult transition?

Apparently not! She also said that being in that first group of students and helping to build new traditions was so exciting that before long the former high school was just a distant memory.

Though sad, maybe that’s the way it should be.

Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at [email protected].