My niece graduated college the other day and someone on Facebook noted that they graduated high school in 1989, the same year I did, and that it happened to be the 25th anniversary this year. So I decided to blog some high school memories about old Robert E. Lee high school.
What can I say about Lee High?
It was nice….once. Built in the early 60s, to teach the then prosperous Galleria area kids. It was a direct pipeline to the University of Texas. A lot of rich people came out of that school back then. Though the only really famous person that ever came out of there was Billy Gibbons from the band ZZ Top.
By the time I got there in 1985 it was starting to get run down. The rich families that supported it had moved farther west so there was less money to spend on it and it was crowded. I think around 2500 kids. There was a shortage of teachers so they hired just about anyone that walked in off the streets. One teacher quit in the middle of the school year and took off never telling anyone.
We didn’t realize how crappy an education it was till we got to college. I think of the seven of us that tried to study engineering in college, not one of us made it past two years before changing majors or dropping out. The high school diploma I got was nothing more than a cheaply printed piece of cardboard.
Besides the education it was a fairly apathetic experience, the football team lost more than they won. At one point the marching band was down to 10 people. Clubs of course and I got into those mainly for my college application but there wasn’t all that much enthusiasm. Drugs hiding in the background, not much gang activity. Like I said apathetic.
I think people just wanted to get through high school and get on with their lives.
People ditched classes a lot, but really I never got the sense that the staff cared all that much if the kids attended class or not. There were parties of courses but it was all very cliquey and you had to be in “the group” to be invited.
My fondest memory of that time is that I finally got a job and a car and I had some limited freedom to be out on my own.
As far as my future education went, I was uninterested in school until I got placed into home room with Stan Pipkin. Stan was one of those guys that could do anything or be anything that he wanted. He was ridiculously intelligent (went onto be the valedictorian), He was a baseball player, he got along with everyone, and everyone wanted to be his friend. I think he inspired me to take school seriously and think about college. He did way more than any teacher or counselor in the school to get me into college.
Time passed and we graduated and went to college or got on with our lives. The school district got tired of the school’s controversial name and changed it to just Lee high school and disbanded the football team that had no student support. The school is still there of course. It now sits in a fairly overcrowded part of the city, and there’s already talk of demolishing it.
I haven’t seen most of my high school companions in ages. I went to the 5 year reunion. If you saw the movie “gross pointe blank”, it was somewhat like that (same 80s music, same type of people) but with less murders. I’ve thought about going to another reunion but I don’t sense much enthusiasm for it from the people who I do keep in contact with.
Some things are best left in the past.
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