Cushing, Oklahoma – Part Four
2012.12.22
The national Head Start Program began in 1965 as a preschool for low-income children. We were above the federal poverty line, but they could accept one or two kids above the usual income threshold, and so Mom enrolled me when I was about four. In Cushing, Head Start was in a building on the “wrong” side of the tracks; the teachers and nearly all the other kids were black. I only have a few short memories, but I think I mostly enjoyed it. A couple of the kids would end up in my kindergarten and grade school classes. Like our house, the old school building is gone now.
Kindergarten was, and still is, at the Wilson school, near the hospital. I was less enthusiastic about kindergarten, but I made a few friends.
There are four elementary schools scattered around town, and I ended up at Sunnyside. It is outside of town on a road called King’s Highway, which back then was just a gravel road; very bumpy in the back of the bus. There was one classroom for each grade of first through fifth.
Since then, a large addition has been added behind the original building. My first grade classroom was a separate outbuilding which is no longer there. Amazingly, part of the old playground equipment remains: a climbing structure meant to look like an old truck.
We moved before I started middle school. However, the bus that picked me up in the mornings stopped there, and I transferred to another bus that went to Sunnyside. I was always intrigued by the round gym on the corner.
The current high school was built in 1976. While we were there, they slowly demolished the previous high school, a three-story brick structure built in 1922 and expanded in 1937. I remember the wrecking ball struggled to smash through four layers of brick.
Cushing III