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Revised April 7, 1999
The Partington Center, which now occupies the block enclosed by Kalamazoo Street, Pine, Chestnut, and Lenawee, was formerly the Kalamazoo Street School (grades K-6) on the Kalamazoo Street side and West Junior High (Grades 7-9) on the Lenawee side. Although we lived at 2200 S. Rundle during most of my school years, which was in the Barnes Avenue School district for elementary students, my mother was teaching Home Economics at West Junior so she arranged to have me attend Kalamazoo Street school, which simplified the family logistics. I went through Kindergarten and all six elementary grades at Kalamazoo Street School. (I was living in Kalamazoo Street's district when attending Kindergarten and First Grade, as we then lived at 505 Cherry Street, across from the already-closed Cherry Street school. That little apartment building is intended to be the subject of a later article for LAHA).
I don't know the dates of construction of these buildings but from their style I expect they were built in the early 1920's. The most notable feature of schools around the country from the pre-air conditioning era was the generous glass space, provided in multi-light, mullioned double-hung windows which opened to provide good ventilation in the warm months. The hallway floors, stairways and bannisters were made of sturdy terrazo, which was kept highly polished by the custodians. The bannisters had cast knobs to discourage sliding! I was able to walk through the hallways again in January, 1999 and noted with delight that these sturdy floors were unchanged (the brass framing I thought I remembered was not there, however). The child-height bannisters were skillfully concealed in full-height plaster partitions for the stairways in the 1971 conversion to Partington Center, so, alas, the brass knobs are buried in those partitions!
The classrooms had, as I recall, about 30 permanently-mounted desk/seat fixtures, and a cloak room behind the head wall, whose door opening (without door) was adjacent to the doorway to the hall. The door to the hall, as I remember, had a window with translucent, pebbled glass, with the room number painted on it, and a glazed transom which was usually open to provide air circulation to and from the hallway. High up on the front wall was hung a reproduction of the unfinished Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, and (since the subject years for me were 1947-54) a 48 star flag fully extended hung high on the wall on the hallway side of the room. Looking at the field of this flag in 4th grade is how I remembered that 6x8 was 48. This was before Madelyn Murray O'Hair 's case, so each class day began with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer (Episcopal version). I remember being annoyed when Congress changed the pledge to include the words "under God" because I thought the pledge was one of those everlasting things that should not be tampered with. I was also annoyed when the Revised Standard Edition began to be used for Bible readings in school instead of the King James version (and I recall that there were Bible readings aloud, not just at Christmas and Easter but at other times of year). There was a children's-scale auditorium with stage on the second floor across the hall from the classrooms (and hence above the gymnasium on first floor), and at Christmas a children's pageant would be put on during a seasonal evening, for the parents, with singing by a children's chorus. I recall that I mouthed the words but didn't sing. Luckily, not many pursued this strategy. The gymnasium, my January, 1999 visit indicated, has become the Board of Education's very attractive meeting room on the first floor, while the auditorium appears now to be the space where the retirement records are housed on the second floor.
In the terminology of the time, Lansing's colored population was about 10 percent and therefore about 9,000 people. The "colored district" was centered around Main and St. Joseph streets west of Logan, much of it demolished in the 1960's to make way for I-496. Between Main and St. Joseph on the east side of Logan was the Lincoln School, its name being a giveaway of its de facto segregated status. But Lincoln was not large enough to serve the entire substantial African American neighborhood and Kalamazoo Street School had about 10 to 15 percent black students. Although I know there were lots of racial tensions in the city among the adults, going back at least to the 1930's (Malcolm X's father was killed in a race riot in Lansing), none of this was felt by the children at Kalamazoo Street School, where we accepted each other matter-of-factly. In the 3rd grade I recall an antagonist of mine at recess was Vicki Brown, a talented black girl (she played the violin) who for some reason led a big group of mostly white boys and girls, to taunt me and back me up against the field stone retaining wall along the driveway side of West Junior on the Sycamore side. I don't remember what this was about (I suppose I had picked on her about something) but I remember I stood my ground and afterward Vicki and I respected each other. She was in my graduating class at Sexton in 1960 and I often wondered if she pursued the violin.
In the 5th and 6th grades, I was one of a trio of boys especially interested in science in Ford Caesar's classes (he was a splendid teacher who moved from 5th to 6th with us). We three boys did several things together in school. The other two boys were Ron Porter, whose family lived in a big house on Logan in the area where all homes are now demolished, and Jack Davis, a fine-featured, ebony-black African American who speech had no trace at all of southern or "Negro" accents nor any West Indian accent either, so I think his family was one of those who had been in the north for generations. Jack was also in my graduating class at Sexton in 1960, and as a senior had ambitions to dance on Broadway, though he had the brains to pursue any career he had chosen. Again, I have wondered whether he did that. I have not had to wonder what Ron Porter did. I used the Dietze, Davis law firm in Boulder, CO to assist me with a house closing there in 1981, and when the new business memo was circulated, Ron was an attorney there and of course there are not many Jerry Pinkepanks in the world so we met again 21 years after our graduation from Sexton. Ron was soon a senior partner in what became Dietze, Davis & Porter, the leading law firm in town, but to my great sorrow I learned in 1998 that he had died of a sudden onset of cancer.
It is indicative of the close-knit nature of the black community around Main and St. Joseph that I could bicycle over the Logan Street bridge from my neighborhood to Jack Davis's and without knowing his address, stop the first kid I saw of similar (6th grade) age and ask where Jack Davis lived, and be told exactly, neither the asker not the answerer thinking that it was at all unusual that I would ask or that he would know. On that occasion I was with two friends and we invited Jack to come over to our neighborhood and make a fourth for a scratch football game. He came, we all had a great time and none of us thought anything of it, but I am sure the adults were tense without us knowing it, although as I recall Jack had lunch at our place, my mother masking what was, I now know, her discomfort. This was probably the summer of 1953. In the summer of 1956 our family vacation took us through Memphis on our way to Mammoth Cave toward Grand Canyon, and for the first time I saw the institution of segregation, with dualized water fountains on the street labeled "white" and "colored". I was outraged and started to say something and my Dad quieted me saying, "that's the way they do things here." I think he was shocked himself. He had black co-workers at the Moores Park power station with whom he regularly ate lunch and if there was prejudice in the power plant work force it was kept out of sight. Dad would have been the last person on earth to look down on another person. The first efforts at desegregation in the South had taken place two years earlier (the bus boycott in Birmingham, AL) but there was no awareness of this in our news-aware family. Not until the Federalization of the Arkansas National Guard by Eisenhower to enforce integration of the schools in Little Rock in 1957 did we become aware of the desegregation effort. In fact, Brown vs Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, was still a year in the future when our scratch football game was held. This was not to say that race hatred was just a Southern phenomenon. My maternal grandmother visited us from Wisconsin by bus in 1955. On her return trip, she was appalled when the restaurant Greyhound used between Lansing and Chicago would not serve a black woman passenger. Grandmother brought her a sandwich when she reboarded. Several of us who were white students of Mr. Adams, a black teacher at Walter French Junior, listened to him tell us, without apparent bitterness, in an after-class bull session in 1956, about the careful planning his family had to do for a trip from Lansing to Gary, Indiana, in order to get gas and food at places that would serve them. In the 1960's, when I-496 dispersed the Main-St. Joseph community I know it led to a lot of white flight to the suburbs of Lansing, but I doubt that any of the former students of Kalamazoo Street School participated. We were used to living together, and I have always blessed the experience there in later life. It also left me thoroughly convinced of the value of school desegregation in holding together our national fabric.
The Lansing School District sent a travelling music teacher around to the elementary schools. The repertoire for us to sing was big on Stephen Foster tunes and, in those years just after World War II and with the Korean War raging, also the four Service hymns. The teacher would blow on her circular pitch pipe and we would all, black and white, launch enthusiastically into lyrics that featured "darkies" and "Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day." I know everybody cringes now, but I don't think it registered on any of us at the time, teachers or students. One reason it did not is that we also sang, regularly and with feeling, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, including all the verses-"As He died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free." Teachers often had us modify this to, "Let us live to make men free." The Civil War was taught unambiguously as a war to end the evil of slavery, in which the good had triumphed over a great evil. That put a lot in perspective.
An event which every student in the Kalamazoo Street school of the appropriate year (1951) will certainly remember is the State Building Fire. What is now the Lewis Cass building was simply called the State Building then, because the Stephen T. Mason building wasn't yet built. An arsonist trying to avoid the Korean War draft ignited records on one of the upper floors of the building, and by early afternoon the next day, the fire had spread throughout the top two floors. Fire brigades came from as far as Flint, but in a forecast of the Towering Inferno film, the upper floors of the building were beyond the effective reach of hoses from even the tallest ladder trucks. On what I remembered as a beautiful spring day [I now know it was February 8, 1951 and 8 degrees below zero!], all of the students of Kalamazoo Street School were led out to the lawn to watch the drama playing out a block away. It was unsettling to the core to watch this solid stone building shooting orange flame and black smoke from upper windows all around. The firemen were able to keep the blaze from spreading downward, and after a night and a day the flames on the top two floors burned all the available fuel and died away [I now know it was 6 days later, February 15, before the fire was officially out]. My memory may not serve me well, but I think those top two floors were demolished and today's building is shorter by two stories [that is confirmed, but the upper story was a partial one which housed the "72-ton" PBX switchboard, which fell through the ceiling into the fire on the first day. The 72-ton figure is in a well documented brochure now kept with the photos of the fire in the State Archives, but I wonder if it was supposed to be "12 ton"]
Ron Porter and I had been friends from first grade, and in the earlier grades the third in our trio was Jimmy Gold, who lived only a couple of blocks away from the school. We sometimes went to his house to play after school, before my mother was through at West Junior. I would tell her where I was going and she would pick me up from there. Jimmy's Dad was, I think, owner or manager of Capitol Furs on Washington Avenue. I was surprised to see that storefront still intact in January, 1999 though it did not appear open. The Golds were Jewish, and this was my introduction to the fact that when we celebrated Christmas (including very religiously at Kalamazoo Street School) we were celebrating a holiday that the Golds did not. There was a calendar in the Gold kitchen showing the Jewish holidays and I asked questions about it and Jimmy explained. We were probably 7 or 8 years old. Again, it was just matter of fact, and we went back to playing. I think the religious education elements that we lost with Mrs. O'Hair's lawsuit took away something valuable that has not been replaced (perhaps comparative religion classes could help fill the gap) but at the same time, I always remember Jimmy Gold and how left out he must have felt in December, and I understand why we had to go the way we did in public education. It was another valuable lesson in the unintended curriculum of Kalamazoo Street school. The Gold's home was also, like the Porter's, in an area which has become a treeless desert around the capitol, but at the time it was a very pleasant residential neighborhood thickly shaded with tall elms, maples and-I recall-at least one Ginko, reflecting some whimsy in the Department of Public Streets.
As elementary children, I recall us being very aware of current events. The School District supplied us with My Weekly Reader and there was a portion of the school day devoted to the news items in it each week. I remember following the siege of Dien Bien Phu in the Weekly Reader as it unfolded week after week in 1954, when I would have been in 6th Grade and ready to move on to Junior High the next autumn. That is perhaps not remarkable for age 11 (I have a July birthday) but I also recall a conversation on the Chestnut Street side of the school right after we had been dismissed for the day and were playing in the school yard, in which I bragged to a friend about General MacArthur (and recited the strategy of the Inchon invasion). My friend shocked me by telling me that Truman had fired MacArthur. For that event, we were age 7! There was a radio advertising slogan at that time for Lucky Strike cigarettes in which somebody chanted "L.S.M.F.T.-Luck Strike means Fine Tobacco." These letters appeared on the bottom of the pack in continuation of the advertising theme. During this period, several boys I knew, and I joined this chorus, would chant "L.S.M.F.T.- Lord Save Me from Truman!" Some of these fellows' parents were probably Democrats, but it was too cute to pass up. I now teach 10 year olds in a Sunday School class and they are very bright but I am astonished at their total lack of knowledge or interest in current events. Let there be no doubt, Kalamazoo Street School (and, I am sure, the Lansing School District generally) produced participating citizens.
Kalamazoo Street School had a gymnasium on the first floor. However, the most vivid gymnasium recollection I have is not from this gym but the larger one at West Junior. Here, I came with my parents on a Friday evening to attend a square dance called by Governor Soapy Williams, polka dot bow tie and all. G. Mennen Williams was an enormously popular Governor across party lines. Our family was normally Republican in voting but followed the Michigan tradition of ticket splitting and supporting long gubernatorial eras, and my parents always voted for Soapy. Of course, his square dance calling helped cement his huge statewide majorities, and we cheerfully doe-see-doed across the polished floor of the West Junior gym. I was rather small to be doing this but really got in the spirit and the adults took me right in with them. Its hard to imagine a Governor being able to do this today, and I'm not sure what has changed in public civility that took away the possibility. Lansing had a small town feeling then, even with its near-100,000 population, and you could do this in a small town. Soapy probably had a couple of out-of-uniform State Police guards but they were unobtrusive and people didn't mob him for handshakes, autographs, etc.
There is more that could be told of Kalamazoo Street School and West Junior, like the tale of the formidable Miss Shea, but it will have to wait for another time.
Jerry A. Pinkepank
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