Day: June 29, 2013

Are they really selling these downtown Boise lofts for these prices?  Nearly $200,000 for a 434 square foot studio?  Over two million for a three-bedroom?  I don’t really believe that people are paying that much.
 

Sara, Shawn and I take a picture after our last official reunion event.  Notice that Shawn’s halo is a little askew.
 

Lori’s house, the site of many childhood sleepovers.
 

Southminster Presbyterian Church.  I was confirmed there.  It took for a bit, then it didn’t.
 

I knew my elementary school had been torn down and another school built but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I encountered.  I approached the school from the back.  This used to be the very back of the field.  Now the school is located here?
 

And!  Gasp!  It’s not called McKinley anymore? Who decided that was okay?
 

This parking lot partially covers where the school used to be.
 

Jenn’s house.  There were a goodly amount of sleepovers here too.  One summer night, we stayed up all night just to scare our classmate Ben, who was the paperboy.
 

It’s a new sign, but still the same Big Bun.
 

You know what you get to do at Big Bun?  Wait in your car in the heat for your order. And though they are fast food, it gets pretty hot in the car. I eventually turned the air conditioning back on.
 

Sara got a scotch and soda.  I got a Fingersteak dinner, which is no longer the six dollars it was the last time I bought one.
 

My second job, my first job where I worked more than one day per week.
 

Site of where Wild Waters used to be.  I spent a summer (it may have been the final summer) there as a lifeguard.  Lifeguard at a water park is the dregs of the lifeguard world. If I get skin cancer on my nose, I’m blaming Wild Waters.
 

The Fingersteak dinner comes with cocktail sauce, fry sauce and a mint.
 

Look at this!  All one’s daily calories tidily packed into one meal, lacking any fruits, vegetables or fiber.  Of the starches, I love the toast the best, as you can tell by the fact I couldn’t wait to take the picture before I took a bite.
 

We got to TAKE A TOUR OF THE SCHOOL!!!!  This was perhaps my favorite part of the reunion.

Isn’t this a great photo to begin with?  Pretty much no one has any idea what this strange black cage is, but I know that it’s what the band director stands on when he’s working through the marching band show.  But it’s not where it was.  It used to be on the marching band practice field by the track.  But now there is an auditorium there. (Yay!) So apparently the marching band now practices on what I think of as the soccer field.
 

Each class raises money for a class gift.  Here is 2006’s efforts.  Though I really took this picture because I’m delighted at the annoying hijinks of the adolescents who tossed their apples in the bird barriers, impaling the apples and making more work for the staff.  Those darn crazy kids.
 

We first went to the “new gym” which I don’t care about and thus took no pictures.  The new gym was used my senior year for basketball games, but I was grumpy at the time (and still am) that our school now had two gyms and no real auditorium.  It was all about the sports at my alma mater.

We then went to the old gym “where most of your memories were made” commented the principal.  (Ahem, sports again.) And memories were made there, though not the kinds she’s thinking of.

Here are the words to the alma mater. When I played saxophone as a sophomore I got to play this during games.  But when I switched to cymbals for junior and senior year marching band, I could sing along.  Sara, fellow cymbal player,  sang the words as written,(because she was true to her school) but I had other lyrics more befitting my feelings about the school. Most of them have been lost to memory except the last two lines, “so as we slowly puke and die, we’ll scream out loud kill Borah High.”  Those were delivered at top volume with Sara trying to drown me out.  Good times.
 

At one time, this was the stage. Boise voters are nothing, if not cheap, when it comes to school bonds.  So when Borah was built, we got this multi-purpose gymnasium where basketball and volleyball could be played as well as a stage, for plays, where the chairs could be set up on the gym floor.  The upshot was that we played all the home boys basketball games at a rival high school, because our gym was too small, and that no one in the arts was happy with the arts part of the gym.  We played every band concert in this gym, with our parents sitting on the risers and us sitting on a moldy old parachute spread to protect the floors.  We would also have to roll the piano from the band room across the stage and lift it down to the gym floor.  It particularly irked me that the band director would encourage all the guys to do this, as if it really makes a difference if a mixed or single-sex group of 20 or so adolescents lifts a piano off a stage.

But anyway, no more stage! Because there is an auditorium now!
I’m interested that they blocked the whole thing off. I wonder what’s behind that wall now.
 

I took no pictures of the auditorium, but spent some time feeling a bit sad we didn’t have access to a good performance space when I attended.  But this picture is the back door entrance to the band room!  It looks like they have a trailer now for their equipment.
 

Also, really Borah, you still have portables?  Those were there when I was there.  The one on the end was the room of the really bad history teacher who used to be the football coach.  I think the third or fourth one was my German class.  On the right is the Math Hall.  It’s apparently still called that.
 

A look from the Math Hall back at the building that had the band room.  Looking straight ahead is the new gym.  Before it was built there was a U road to both of the parking lots.
 

Oh look!  They still have in-house.  I never went, but a lot of boys I liked spent some days there.
 

I had completely forgotten about the felt flags for whenever an activity (that was a sport) won state.  Did I also mention that if you lettered in a sport at Borah you got a big sized letter “B,” for your letter, but if you lettered in a non-sport (like say, band) you got a smaller sized letter?  Guess which looked better on the letter jackets.  What do we think about that?
I do love that they still have these flags up though.
 

And I always loved these and am glad to still see them there.  In my time, there were three displays of every person in the graduation classes of the first senior class, the bicentennial class (1976–the class that one of the teachers at my junior high was a member of) and the Idaho Centennial class (1990).  They’ve since been joined by the 50th graduation class and also, I think, another milestone year.  I wished our class had been a milestone year.  I wished it even before I got to Borah.
 

Here’s the library.  Less books, more computers.
 

Back in my day, it was called Senior Hall, because all the seniors had their lockers there, not “B-Wing.”  But this is actually a picture of the school store.  At every break and lunch you could purchase all matter of unhealthy food.  Like Hostess Cupcakes, which sometimes would have a bonus cupcake, giving you three cupcakes for fifty cents!  They also had yogurt and granola bars, which was a healthy meal for cheap.  But mostly I was buying crumb donettes and the like.  Because this was not an orderly queue, but a clump of people, this is where I discovered I was very good at moving through clumps of people.
 

The girls taking a picture at the senior year lockers.
 

Quotes!  Quotes are new!  I approve.  And I was amazed and astounded that Ani DiFranco is quoted on the wall of my high school.
 

“What’s a Borah? Is that an acronym?”  Nope.
Senator William E. Borah, the Lion of Idaho!
And, holy crap, he had an affair and a child with Alice Roosevelt Longworth! (Daughter of Teddy Roosevelt)  Read all about it in the Marriage and Family section of the post.  And then read about the poor girl’s life by clicking the link.
 

Here is the blurry picture of the principal in my reign.
 

Sara at our junior year lockers.
 

Discussing how it was better when they were green.
 

Here’s the quote above where our lockers were.  It’s pretty good.
 

Back in the old gym, we attempt to visit the band room.  But first, I stop to take a picture of this Pepsi Lion who always looked weird to me.
 

Thank goodness we ran into Alex and Barbara.  Alex was able to turn on the lights so we could see into the band/choir area.  On the left were the practice rooms. I remember as a sophomore being amazed that there were practice rooms.
 

Here’s the Band Room. It was locked, so we couldn’t get in, but I was happy to see Mr. Sullivan’s name.  His first year was my last year.
 

The band room and the instrument storage room.  Good times.
 

Barbara took our picture on the stairs outside of the band/choir area.  That Alex in the top row.  Then Ang, Sara, Jen and me on the second row.  Then Jen’s two daughters in the third row.
 

The long walk from the band area to the main building.  How did we ever get to anything on time with those four minute passing periods?
 

I’ve written about my time at Borah Pool and here’s a visual.  The 12-foot tall high-dive is now gone, alas.
 

This bump out part is the kids area.
 

It looks exactly the same down to the color of the paint and the fact that the lifeguards still make hash marks on a sheet of paper when you come in.
 

My grape snow cone from the shack outside.
 

Sara and I wandered over for a walk through the community garden.
 

It was looking good.
 

This used to be all field and the farmer still plowed with horses.  Now it’s a housing development and land that is waiting to be a housing development.  Just across the field is Bishop Kelly, the Catholic high school.  Despite how close this school was to Borah, we never mingled.
 

In the earlier post, I walked around downtown and took a bunch of pictures.  Ironically, I actually did not spend a ton of time downtown for my neighborhood was far away (though on this visit I found everything much closer together than I remembered) from the very exotic downtown area.  Here’s where I mostly hung out.

That empty lot is where I went to junior high school.  Before it was an empty lot, it was West Junior High School, home of the Mustangs.  There is still West Junior High today, but they’ve built a new school somewhere else. (note to West’s website person. I could not find the address for the school prominently displayed or at all. You should fix that)  I had really great teachers at West, and I did not appreciate them at all until I got to high school, where I had a bunch of so-so teachers.
 

This nursing home, catty-corner across the street from West, is where my grandmother lived the last few years of her life.
 

This hill, behind Hillcrest Plaza is the marker of the “second bench” which is where I lived.  When biking in Boise, it’s flat, except for the first bench and the second bench.  I worked, for a time, for a liquor store on the other side of town.  Many days I rode my bike and got to go up these hills on the way home.  It doesn’t look that steep in this picture, but look how long the approach is. Before I had a bike with gears, this was a hill to walk my bike to the top.
 

Here’s Hillcrest Plaza.  It has been totally renovated since I left town.  The Plaza Twin movie theater used to be here.  It was the first dollar movie theater I encountered and I frequented it often.  This theater was the site of the mid-week double feature of For the Boys and The Fisher King.  We were out until 11 on a school night! We were so wild.  Also.  The lot at the top of the hill has been available for decades.
 

The across-the-street neighbor’s house.
 

My birth-to-eighth grade house.
 

Another view.  That lilac bush was there when I lived there.
 

Mr & Mrs. Heimbauch’s house.  Mr. Heimbauch died while I was in junior high school, but Mrs Heimbauch lived there for a very long. They were our very old neighbors.  It seems she wasn’t too terribly old when I was little, because I’m 38 and she just recently died at age 100.
 

Around the corner (five houses down from the first one) is my second house, the one I call my high school house.
 

Another view.  I’m glad to see it’s still that butter yellow color.
 

I have no memories of this house, I was just intrigued by the pie plates.  Whatever could be up with them?  There’s a short story to be written here.
 

Around the corner from the high school house is my friend Cindy’s House.  I was delighted to see the Jalapeno Wagon was sitting out front.  That was a very fun car with a lot of modifications, including very cool cup holders.  It even had (and probably still has) a CB radio.  One night we drove up and down I-84 chatting with truckers.  Lori was the best at chatting.  Her handle was “Cotton Candy.”  She convinced one trucker to pull off at the Flying J truck stop and have some food with “five beautiful women.”  The fifty-year-old trucker laughed when he saw our giggly 17-year-old selves and so did we.  He was a nice man and we had a good conversation.

Cindy’s mom was in the yard and I stopped to chat, thus ending this nostalgia drive.