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Looking Back |
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June 1, 1951 was both the end and the beginning. Class members built upon our BHS background to become skilled technicians, teachers, successful entrepreneurs, bookkeepers, farmers, military officers, college professors, secretaries, nurses, and many other careers including one medical doctor, a state legislator, a magazine editor, a coin expert, a musician, a college dean, and a record-setting glider pilot. We've now collected our gold watches, a few have embarked on second careers, while most of us are busily re-inventing retirement and have more interest in the accomplishments of our children and grandchildren than in our own. We are the class that was born into the Great Depression. The average income was $1500.00, the average new car sold for $550. and a new Lincoln V8 was only $2900. A loaf of bread cost 7 cents, a gallon of gas a dime and a gallon of milk 42 cents. We played hide-and seek at dusk, ate hot rolls and butter, bought penny candy in a brown paper bag, loved hopscotch, butterscotch, double-Dutch jacks, kickball, dodge ball, and red-light-green-light. We saved dimes to cure polio, bought war bonds, collected scrap metal, old tires and milk weed pods for the war effort. We sat under desks for air raid drills and marched in gym class. We saw the beginning of television, the computer, the cell phone, the Atomic Age, and the Space Age; including a man walking on the moon and satellites circling the earth. We lived through the assassination of a President, the impeachment of a President, the hanging chads, the dangling chads, the dimpled chad, and the election of the President by the U.S. Supreme Court. We saw more changes in our lifetime, lived through more wars, saw more social changes than other generations. Yet out of all this we survived, prospered and made a better world for our children and grandchildren. We came not only from Bellefonte but also the surrounding areas such as Pleasant Gap, Coleville, Milesburg, Port Matilda, Yarnell, and Snow Shoe. We came from rural one room schools named Oak Grove, to multiple grade schools such as Bishop Street, Spring Street and the Dale Building. We were before the Bellefonte Area School District Jointure, the Central Pennsylvania Institute of Technology and the Bald Eagle Jointure. We had outstanding
football, basketball, baseball teams and
saw the introduction of wrestling to our school. We enjoyed the band,
chorus, dramatic productions, dances at the Spring Street Gym, the State and
Plaza Theatres, Krape's and Thomas's. We were
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