You know you are getting old when:

[2jakes]

Picture images of the courtroom from the film, "To Kill a Mockingbird." Real wood & long Windows.
When I started my career in TV
news in the '80s. I was fortunate
to have seen those buildings when
they were used for that purpose.
Same with the old post office &
public library. Today's structures
are mostly all glass,steel & boring!

 

[LizzieMaine]

We still have our old Superior Courthouse with the traditional accoutrements. I've seen some pretty impressive felons led up those stone steps to face The Law. I got thrown out of that courthouse once for sneaking a newspaper in to read during breaks in the court action. Whoops.

But the District courthouse, where smalltime malefactors go to get their drug misdemeanors and OUIs dealt with, which is that brick thing extending from the left side, has all the architectural majesty of the building you go to to see your dentist.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

The Post Office in my hometown was built in 1942. It has this bas relief inside that I recall vividly from my boyhood. I suppose that it was made toward the tail end of the WPA. I enclose a photo because I think it will warm the cockles of Lizzie's heart.

 

[2jakes]

The city courthouse is still active .
Biggest changes occurred after 911.
All side entrances have been closed with only the front & rear available
You may enter only after going through security check & scan devices.

Being a news-photographer, I had a special permit that would allow me to pass
the check-point without having to display my contents. I simply walked pass
the line into the courthouse. Security didn’t know me. But all I had to do was
flash the pass & I was in. ( So much for security...I often wondered)

The gear consisted of camera, camera bag, tripod, light kit & newspapers or paperbacks
to read during a recess or waiting for the suspect which was brought in through the
corridors. Providing us with a head shot video for the 6 & 10 news.


This was not the case with the Federal courthouse.
No cameras were allowed & security was very tight.

I was sent to cover the Waco trial in Tx. regarding the
Branch Davidians & followers of David Koresh.

Although no cameras were allowed.....guess what ?

I was designated as the sketch artist by my news station
because they knew I liked to do oil paintings.

Try as I may, the producers could not understand that just because
I liked to draw on my spare time, did not in no way qualify me for
the task.

Sitting in the front row in a Federal courtroom having to wear a
coat & tie ...and sitting all around me were professional
sketch artists from all over the world to cover this trial was,
to say the least, a bit intimidating.

And I had many questions, but no answers.
How does one draw a face when they were constantly moving?
I cheated. I went to the newspapers, Time, Newsweek or
whatever print that had photos of the people in the trial.

I also made several drawings of the courtroom background the night
before & I would insert who ever was on the stand for that day.

Time was against me. What took the pros a few minutes...
took me hours. And as Lizzie knows time & deadlines are
very crucial.


Looking at the sketches the pros were doing...I developed
confidence ...”heck...I can do that!” I told myself.

And thank goodness I was able to come up with something decent.

I still have some of those sketches somewhere.

Life is Good !

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Boy...talk about pressure....

 

[tonyb]

My high school opened in 1960 and closed in 1985. After its tenure as a high school the structures served as a state university branch campus and as the state police academy. Last I heard, it was in mothballs.

I appreciate the architecture more in retrospect than I did when I attended. It features three essentially identical classroom buildings, a cafeteria building, a music and gymnasium building, an art building, and an auto shop building, all connected by covered walkways. Must be at least a dozen acres of athletic fields and parking lots. With the exception of the gym building, all the structures are one-story and faced in red brick.

The school was quite near the flight path to Sea-Tac when it was built. Now the airport has an additional runway and handles much more traffic. The Port of Seattle made a huge settlement with property owners, so what had been a non-descript post-War suburban neighborhood is now more countryfied than it was when the school was built. Many property owners sold outright. Houses and other structures were demolished or burned down for practice by fire departments. Now the land features riding stables and dog kennels and a huge Boeing spare parts distribution center. (A stone's throw from a major airport is where you want to put an airplane parts depot. You can get those airplane pieces on their way to most anywhere, and you can do it RIGHT NOW.)

I'd like to see the school structures saved and put to good use, but I'm betting they'll be demolished.

 

[2jakes]

Boy...talk about pressure....

This is pure guess.
But I’m thinking that after a stint in the military, anything else wasn’t as bad.

I worked in retailing for 10 years before going to news.
I felt caged being confined in the same building every single day.

The news gave me the chance to get on a truck, mostly just me &
my video cam & travel all over.
With no one to tell me or check on me as long as I came up with
the footage.
I recorded the good, the bad & the ugly.
There was pressure no doubt. But I could handle that.

The pressure that was really very frustrating was when reporters
wrote the narration/story to my videos.
But never wrote to what I had shot!
They took forever to write.
We had a deadline to meet.
I would tell them, “ Hey, it’s simple ...just write to the video!"

But overall I had a grand time...still do !

 

[Zombie_61]

I was the first student ever enrolled at Dr. Charles Best Elementary School, Burlington, Ontario, when it was built in 1972. 44 years ago this past May. It is unusual in that it's Kindergarten to grade 5 (still open), not many of those around then or now.

I went to Orange Grove Elementary School in Whittier (California) in the late 60s and early 70s. Then, and now, it provided/provides Kindergarten through grade 6. The original buildings were damaged in the Whittier Narrows earthquake in October of 1987, so they erected some "temporary" buildings (trailers, actually) to teach the students while the classrooms were being repaired. I use quotation marks around the word "temporary" because those trailers are still there; apparently they needed more classrooms to deal with the increased population over the last few decades.

 

[MisterCairo]

I went to Orange Grove Elementary School in Whittier (California) in the late 60s and early 70s. Then, and now, it provided/provides Kindergarten through grade 6. The original buildings were damaged in the Whittier Narrows earthquake in October of 1987, so they erected some "temporary" buildings (trailers, actually) to teach the students while the classrooms were being repaired. I use quotation marks around the word "temporary" because those trailers are still there; apparently they needed more classrooms to deal with the increased population over the last few decades.

Probably the same thing, in Canada we call them portables, and they're "temporary" permanent fixtures, and used to deal with population bursts. I had several classes in portables in high school, where here they are more likely to be found (but not exclusively).

 

[LizzieMaine]

My high school opened in 1949, and is still open in an unrecognizable form. Like a lot of postwar construction, it was shoddiily built of cheap materials and didn't age well, and when I was going there in the 1970s, it was a real dump. A few years after I graduated, it was stripped of its accreditation, but remained in operation because there wasn't anything else they could use. Finally, the district went deep into hock to rebuild the place into a state-of-the-art facility in the 1990s.

All was well until district politics went haywire in the early 2000s, and towns began withdrawing -- and now the place is in need of renovation again and they can't raise the money to fix it.

 

[Fading Fast]

This NYC public school is right near were I live and the architecture is incredible. My coop has its meetings at night in a room in the school - which appears well maintained (I've read that Bill Gates poured a ton of money into the school), but with much of the original architecture still in place. When I go to those meetings, I feel like I'm walking back in time to the '40s and '50s. These are the best of the not-great on-line pictures I could find:

 

[BlueTrain]

The frieze in the photo above (from a post office) is very similar to the ones on the county courthouse in Princeton, West Virginia, my hometown. The style of the courthouse is said to be "Art Moderne," and was built in 1930-1931. The appearance of the building has never changed. The architect of the building was a certain Mr. Mahood from Lynchburg, Virginia. He actually attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris no less. But apparently he freely designed buildings in many different styles from Georgian to mid-century modern. Supposedly his mother designed the friezes. I've never been inside.

There is across the street from the courthouse another monumental Greek temple building called the Memorial Building, which was essentially a multi-purpose building that housed the city library, armed forces recruiting offices and such like. It was where dances were held. It now houses a sort of war memorial museum. Another relatively new building for the county nearby is built in the same style, sort of, and they did a good job of making a modern building match the older styles.

My wife is an elementary school teacher and most if not all of the schools in this county have some temporary classroom spaces, although they aren't all trailers. Some would be better described as "pre-fabs," which contain everything, including restrooms. I can appreciate the difficulties that school planners have with changes in school populations. Apparently the last thing they can do, meaning the one thing they can't do, is to change school boundaries.

 

[AmateisGal]

They just tore down the first high school built in my hometown and built a brand new one. While the new one is nice, it doesn't have near the beautiful architectural details of the old one.

 

[Zombie_61]

...My coop has its meetings at night in a room in the school - which appears well maintained (I've read that Bill Gates poured a ton of money into the school)...

One of the guys who was on the team that maintained our computer equipment at my last place of employment told me that one of his neighbors worked in Bill Gates' "inner circle" of trusted employees, and that he (the neighbor) once told him that Mr. Gates donates millions of dollars every year to public schools all over the U.S. because he knows they're underfunded.

 

[MisterCairo]

The house I grew up in (built in 1910) had the same push button switches.

Our house, built in 1900, has these in the main hallway. It freaked us out as such an installation usually means the dreaded knob and tube wiring, but the prior owners, he is a contractor, re-wired it using the modern standard:

 

[BlueTrain]

My father-in-law was an engineer and although he was an aeronautical engineer, he also had an electrician's license. When he retired, they moved way out in the country and immediately started remodeling his house. He was very careful about things like wiring and always followed code. After a certain project was finished, he had county inspectors out to check things out. He said he followed the code in the book, showing them the code from where he used to live. The inspector was surprised that he had a code book and asked, "Hey, where'd you get that." Apparently he'd never seen such a thing.

It used to be that when he came to visit us, which was a rare thing, he seemed to always be carrying along tape measures, screwdrivers and stuff and was always checking things out to see if they measured up to his standards. His plumbing work, however, was another story. He never liked to waste anything and the family beach cottage was plumbed with leftover pipes.

 

[Fading Fast]

Mister Cairo - very nice switch plate.

This is our "four ganger" from, in theory, a ship captain's home in Portland Maine. All our wiring was updated by a licensed master electrician (I was not going to fool around with that) and the switches (buttons) themselves are all new UL certified. The second picture, the one of the two-ganger is from the kitchen - just posted as I thought it looks nice against the subway tile:

 

[Atticus Finch]

You know you're getting old when you see a Facebook post about the child actors in some popular 1970s sitcom who have grown up and are now fifty-year-old pill heads...

And you don't recgonize the actors or remember the sitcom because you were in graduate school and didn't own a television.

AF

 

[belfastboy]

My wife and I stole this idea from the novel The Art of Fielding....in our travels on the road when we approach an institutional building we play the game.....School or Prison. Many times it is hard to tell the diff.....although if you spot the razor wire it is likely a prison.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You know you're getting old when you know somebody just ten years older than you are who's a great-grandparent.