My first transcription assignment at the New Bedford Whaling Museum was the logbook of the whale ship Catalpa and its expedition to make the escape of the six Fenian prisoners from the prison in Freemantle Australia happen and bring them to the United States. This was a shot in the arm for Irish Independence and certain people have been touted as the heroes and got all the accolades then and continue to do so today.

However, at two of the most pivotal, make or break moments in the escape by whale boat, it was the first mate’s quick thinking that made it all work.

He is hardly mentioned.

There are always those in an activity who are obvious, but there are those who, just by doing their jobs, play pivotal roles of which no one, including themselves, gives much note.

There are also those who make a major but overlooked move that makes a difference because they know it is the right thing to do, and, being there at that moment, did what was needed.  

Kudos was not the goal.

I was teaching at Taft Middle School in Oklahoma City in the 90s. One year for some reason I was assigned to teach a speech class. Teaching Regular Education English and various subjects to Special Needs kids in no way prepared me to teach a speech class or, let’s be honest, knowing I would be spending a lot of time first cajoling them to write and deliver their speeches and then would have to listen to student after student speak at me for their final grade, I took the alternate route of using video to get the kids to become public speakers in a way that I could do it as I had in my time teaching in Los Angeles, and they would see it less of a typical school class but something better.

Among the Regular Education kids I had, there was one class filled with a mixed bag of Special Ed kids with their individual  needs and presenting difficulties and doing videos actually turned out to have been the best approach as traditionally shy kids somewhat written off as people to feel bad for but nothing much beyond that, were appearing in school-wide and district-wide videos in which they acted after having worked on creating the video itself from planning to editing.

I always kept a good relationship with custodians and school secretaries of every type, first because they were as important as the teachers in their own ways and they were the people with the power and knowledge and could control a school as one secretary had during my career by basing the school’s main filing system on a formula she had devised that could get her right to a needed file while others would have searched until they called for help.

They could not get rid of her until she trained her replacement which she did at her retirement.

During my time teaching the speech/video class we often asked the custodians for help, and they were more than happy to supply props and do the occasional cameo in a video. During the taping of a video about the architecture of the school we were approached by a custodian who thought we might be interested in a closet that had been closed off when new lockers had been put in the school years before.

Unable to turn down the treasure hunt, the students were eager to find what was in the closet  behind the wall of  lockers and came across a treasure trove of items from the school’s past, long hidden and forgotten.

There were trophies and pictures going back to the 50s and 60s before the baseball teams’ name was changed to the Royals and were no longer named after the sound of the bat when hitting a home run, The Crackers.

As a segregated, all white school at that time, being called a Cracker was more acceptable than when schools became integrated.

My Special Needs class saw this as archeology, and they wanted to learn more about the school’s history and the building itself. They started doing research and asking a lot of questions of a lot of people who up to this point they would never have approached. In the process, the school secretary presented them with a file that the school’s secretaries had been keeping since the school opened in 1931 until the present which contained relevant news articles and other writings of interest.

As a young city, even up to the 1930s there was no real city development north of 10th Street in the NorthWest quadrant and as part of the real estate plan of those who knew the land speculation game, that section of the city would be the high end, expensive area. To seed that idea, a school up to the task of attracting families with money to that area was planned and Solomon Layton, the designer of many prominent buildings in the city, including the state capitol building, was hired to design it.

Sitting at an angle on the corner lot, the building’s façade features yellow bricks arranged in intricate patterns with both sections that spread out from either side of the Art Deco front door having white-faced terra cotta friezes representing the four disciplines, Math, Science, History and English.

It’s library, with parquet floors and a reading area with a fireplace, was designated the most beautiful school library in the country at the time which added to the whole school having also been designated the most beautiful junior high as they were called in those days.

Hallway ceilings were completely covered in frescos deigned to appear from ancient Egypt. The transoms above each door were of stained glass. The theater was designed not only for school use but for community as well, so it was top of the line. The gym had a swimming pool.

The whole school, as my students saw when a custodian snuck us up to the roof to see it, had a commanding view for quite a few years of the city and the developing housing that lie at its feet.

My getting a job there was a matter of chance as, applying for a job in the district I was sent to Taft because they needed another Special Ed teacher to address a need and, as I walked in, I fell in love with the building just walking up to it and was completely sold on wanting to teach there when I saw the huge, Art Deco 6-8 foot tall tower light on an outcropping by the main entrance.

All that happened with me and the school district after that fateful day in January 1994 until I left the City in 2011 was because of that light fixture.

My students fell in love with the building and gathered materials that could be used to get the building on state and national historic registries, and this was going to be a project over time until the day the doors showed up.

All the external doors of the building, even those to the gym were of heavy oak with beveled glass. They had been there since Taft was built, but apparently some pencil pusher who could most likely have never walked through the building or actually  looked closely at it decided that, because of the Murrah Building bombing in 1995, these doors should be replaced with those horrible, generic, windowless, orange metal fire/security doors that blemish too many schools making them look like prisons.

I, along with my students, was aghast as were, it surprisingly turned out, the crew the district had assigned to replace the doors. They knew the value of the school’s history and having worked on various projects throughout the years, came to appreciate the building.

And so it was that on the day the metal door jambs were dropped off in the courtyard/teacher parking lot behind the building to be installed as the first step in door replacement beginning the following Monday, the men placed a few door jambs on the ground, ran over them slowly with their truck so as to misshape them but not ruin them, and then called their boss to report that some of the door jambs seemed a little off and they would all have to be inspected before installation.

Part of the motivation for this was that I had expressed my horror at the door replacement to the installers and how this would ruin the historical designation of the building showing them the information we had collected and the, as yet to be submitted, paperwork for at least state historical designation.

Their decision delayed the beginning of the project until such time as the jambs could be inspected. It also gave me the opportunity to go to the state’s history department to submit the papers and, perhaps, have things expedited to save the door on the Friday before work was to commence. The head of the department, who had to drive by the school every day on the way to work, was well aware of the history and the value that would be lost and worked that weekend to at least get the process going far enough along to halt any work on the building.

The doors were not replaced, and I am sure those 10-12 kids in that class have no idea what the result of their interest produced.

I transferred to the high school across the street where I was to have quite the adventure, so I never knew if the principal or the people in the state history department had followed through with pursuing full historic designation. I had no reason to consider either would not as the latter loved the building while the former was a stickler for paperwork and loved every chance to get involved in it in any form or for any reason. Everything in his sparsely furnished office was perfectly and purposely placed, not to be moved.

23 years later in 2022, the Oklahoma City Public schools proposed a bond be placed on the ballot that would allow the district to repair and rebuild schools that needed improvement and new ones where needed. Present school boundaries would be redrawn, and separate schools might have to be combined.

Taft, one of the oldest schools in the city, was on the list to be modified, and as remodeling, rebuilding, renovating, and combining also means some buildings get torn down or sold to become something that masks their history, not build on it, the fate of Taft had to be clear from the get-go.

Although the students of Taft will be combined with students from a soon to be closed middle school nearby and news of a need for an appropriate facility might have implied the removal or modifications to the structure rendering it an oddly out of date section of a new, modern school building, the final outcome of ongoing discussions has the original structure safe.

Modifications may be made as additions might be added, but the original building stays as is.

It has, after all, designation as an historic building.

It had apparently gone through.

Although I and the principal at the time are connected in people’s minds with the whole historic designation business, it was 10-12 Special needs kids who got the whole ball rolling and two maintenance men who bought the time to get the papers processed as, once the papers were turned in and accepted, the process began and the recommended structure must remain intact pending the decision of the people who make those decisions.

History wins out and it is because of the quiet and necessary contributions of the unmentioned First Mates.

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