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Looking Back |
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Last front-page of the "Old Hickory" newspaper dated: May 16, 1975. To view the full image of the Old Hickory Final Edition, click here.
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Click peace sign to go to the Class of '67
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Old Hickory
Turning out the lights For those alumni who left AJHS before 1975, you may be interested in how the last classes to attend JHS said goodbye. The reflection [left] is a copy of the final cover of the Old Hickory. It gives you a feeling of what it was like, the sadness of those last days together and tempered excitement that became the signature of my class as we had 3 classes of friends, brothers and sisters who were watching us knowing that they would never get the opportunity to be JHS alumni. The cover may be over 27 years old, but the overall feeling of frustration and sorrow are in the hearts of JHS Alumni today when thinking of our school, what we had and the friends we made. We knew closing JHS marked the end of something special, something that made us unique within the South Bend school system. Good or bad, Jacksonites hung together. And with this web site, it's apparent that the closeness still exists today. The closing of Jackson High School filled the last year of the Old Hickory. There were other articles and stories on a few other subjects and the obligatory "Senior Wills" acknowledging another class was preparing to graduate, but even those did not escape the shadow looming large over every event in the spring of '75. There were other articles as well, but not as many as I hoped for and certainly less than I had remembered. In the end, it seemed wiser to look elsewhere for reminders of our days at Jackson rather than sort through the weekly stories, each one trying to find another way of saying that everyone not graduating would be expected to line up at Riley High School next year. That roundabout reference to our graduation became the way a lot of people viewed the Class of 1975. No longer a class like the others before us, we became known as "the Class of 75 -last graduating class of Jackson High School". TV news coverage showed us walking into graduation, while the reporter's voice-over discussed the merits of closing Jackson and sending everyone to Riley next year. The class of 75 was rarely the real subject. Things like, "What happens after.... Once this class graduates.... When the Class of 75 walks out the doors..." were the typical lead ins to the story about...yep: Riley. Everything seemed keyed on when we walked out. At the time I don't remember it bothering any of us. We would have been all right if they'd called us anything BUT graduates of Riley High School. I don't remember anyone even annoyed or bothered by the endless planning and jabbering about Riley that filled our Senior year's Old Hickory. The spring of 1975 cover of the Old Hickory is captured the essence of what we had lived through and what the others left behind were facing. In the end, we were not unlike the classes before us, with additional feelings of sadness. Seniors who felt sad for the classes left behind, for the teachers, especially those who would be teaching junior high school students and not making the move to Riley and sad because it was the last time Andrew Jackson High School would hold a student body that was closer than any other in the school system. The End of An Era1965 - 1975 To date, Jackson has been a middle school more than twice as long as it's life as our high school. Andrew Jackson High School's alpha and omega total one decade. A decade that bridged one generation. It seemed longer at the time, the similarities between 1965-1975 obscured by the all too turbulent times between us. Ten years - eight graduating classes, a war, a peace movement, Woodstock, man on the moon, 2 assassinations, occupation, evacuation, resignation of a President and finally U.S. capitulation. In 1975 the last troops were pulled out of Vietnam marking the first month since the Class of 1975 was in kindergarten that the U.S. had no armed conflict, official and unofficially. That is an awful lot of history packed into ten years. While all classes were touched, the first alumni touched by war seemed so far removed from the everyday routine we enjoyed at Jackson. There were probably alumni getting ready to come home from Viet Nam when our class was getting ready to close Jackson. What did we learn? Certainly not why JHS was turned into the middle school it is today. Maybe we didn't learn a thing. Maybe we learned to appreciate the time we have with family and friends because you just never know when you might turn around to find it's gone.
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