Snohomish County News
The “Pit” hosts last match
Doug Ramsay photo
After 72 years, the last varsity athletic event was held Jan. 21 in the “Old Gym” at Snohomish High School. Originally known as the “Pit” because of the raised wooden bleachers that surrounded all four sides of the court, the timeworn facility opened its doors on Oct. 14, 1938. In its heyday, the gym could seat 1,200 fans, said Mark Albertine, Snohomish School District athletic director. But after a building remodel in 1984 when the east and south side bleachers were eliminated for additional classrooms, the gym’s capacity was reduced to 600. The basketball and volleyball programs moved to the present main gym, with a capacity of 2,000, in 1983. The wrestling team, which began competing in the Old Gym in 1959, continued to call it home until last week. The gym will continue hosting freshman basketball games through the rest of this year’s season and will be used temporarily as a library until the facility is demolished in 2012, as part of the school’s modernization project paid for by bond dollars. A new auxiliary gym currently under construction will open next year. Above, with the junior varsity wrestling match in progress, fans begin to arrive for the Jan. 21 varsity match. See sports on page 5 for match results.
Vote! Vote! Vote!
Doug Ramsay photo
Columbia Elementary third-grader Elise Petersen, 9, is flanked by Columbia PTA president Barbara Ross–Burns (left) and Endeavour Elementary third-grade teacher Donna Pearl as they wave signs along the Mukilteo Speedway Jan. 23. Students and school officials waived signs at city intersections to remind people to vote in the Feb. 9 special election. The Mukilteo School District is asking voters to renew a maintenance and operations levy and approve a capital facilities bond to pay for improvements.
Doug Ramsay photo
Everett High School’s main building was built 100 years ago, and the school is celebrating the milestone at a Jan. 30 event beginning at 2 p.m. at the high school.
Everett High School celebrates 100 years
EVERETT - More than 100 years ago, a man riding his horse along what is now Broadway sauntered past a group building a small, wooden structure.
He asked the men what they were doing, and they answered they were building a schoolhouse for elementary students.
“Put up another story,” he told the builders. “Put up another story, at my expense.”
And that was the start of Everett’s first high school.
The man on the horse was Henry Hewitt, widely acknowledged as the father of Everett and the namesake of one of downtown Everett’s main streets, Hewitt Avenue.
Larry O’Donnell found the story of Everett High School’s founding in a newspaper article, now stored on microfilm in the Everett Public Library.
“I’ve spent so much time at the microfilm machines if they ever inventory the library they’ll count me as part of the equipment,” O’Donnell said laughingly.
O’Donnell is a graduate of Everett High School — class of 1955, he says proudly — and later worked there as a principal.
Now that he’s retired, O’Donnell is delving into local history, turning a longtime interest into an all-absorbing passion.
O’Donnell will give a presentation on the school’s history at 2 p.m. during a Jan. 30 celebration.
But there is one part of the story that doesn’t add up, O’Donnell says. There’s one part of the story behind Everett High’s founding that just doesn’t add up. “I never could find any evidence that Hewitt paid for that second story,” O’Donnell said.
Centennial celebration
After its first stop in that small, second story, Everett High School moved from building to building from 1882 until 1910, when the white-brick building students use today opened on Colby.
In honor of the school building’s 100-year anniversary, school officials are throwing a celebration, complete with band and choir performances, blue-and-gold spirit gear sales and classrooms where each decade can gather and visit their fellow Everett High grads.
O’Donnell says he enjoys giving presentations, sharing what he’s learned with residents who are curious about their city, but his favorite part comes after the presentation when people share their own stories with him, filling in the gaps of his research.
“It gives you a little slice of history you would never get any other way,” he said.
Learning history has made O’Donnell good at numbers.
“I’m tied with my brother for worst mechanic in Everett, but give me a date and I tend to hang on to those,” O’Donnell said. “Ask me about 1994, and I may not know as much, but go back a hundred years and I’ll know more.”
He also knows exactly how many Everett High graduates died during World War II (112 men and 1 woman), how many people lived in Everett in 1910 (25,000) and how much money residents paid in a bond to fund Everett High School’s 100-year-old main building ($200,000).
But when he listens to people’s stories, adding to his understanding of his hometown’s history, he says he skips over the dates and facts “because those you can find elsewhere.”
“What you want to know is, what are the stories?” he said. “The stories are what make history come alive. The facts and figures are just the hooks you hang the story on.”
Yearbook memories
Even 100 years ago, students, teachers and administrators recognized the enormous impact the school building would have on Everett High School students. In the school newspaper, the Kodak, which was founded in 1893, a reporter recorded the afternoon march and rally that marked the shift from temporary, cramped classrooms to a school that was, even then, “one of the finest in the United States in manner and thoroughness of appointment and appearance,” wrote the reporter.
Before then, most buildings in Everett had a temporary, transient feel — what the editor of the 1910 Nesiska, the high school yearbook, called “growing pains.”
“Everett is distinctively a western city,” the editor wrote 100 years ago. “Growing at an alarming pace since its birth 20 years ago, it is not strange that the city’s builders should have passed on in their feverish ambition, leaving many things in the rough and with a tinge of pioneer days.”
A permanent high school marked a milestone for the fledgling city, proving Everett to be a place where parents raised children, not just a place for loggers and mill workers. A year later, when President William Howard Taft came to Everett, he gave his speech at the new high school “because it symbolized the community,” O’Donnell said.
The 1910 building cost $170,000, which translates to almost $4 million today after adjusting for inflation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The school included a gymnasium, three domestic science classrooms, a typewriting room, a manual training department and an upper floor dedicated to science classrooms. Students in 1910 were particularly awed by the heating system, which pumped steam into classrooms through pipes controlled by a thermostat, and the clocks, which were run by electricity and governed by a master “old grandfather” clock in the main office.
The Kodak newspaper reporter tells the story of how students transitioned from the old to the new school. First, they gave one last cheer for the building that had housed them, albeit uncomfortably, for almost 10 years.
“A ripple of expectancy course through the auditorium as the underclassmen filed in from the roll rooms,” the reporter wrote. “Daun Sharpless mounted the rostrum and lifted his arms for attention; then— ‘High School, twice! One, two three—’ and how they did yell! It was the parting token of the high school to the building that was being left behind.”
Then, students lined up two by two and marched to their permanent school.
“As the first senior marched onto the new campus, the last freshman was just descending the steps of the old home,” the reporter wrote. “The procession was over three blocks in extent and formed a novel spectacle.”
Students marched into the assembly hall, where they sang the school song and held a “yell-fest.” They couldn’t start classes yet, as many of the rooms still didn’t have furniture.
Both the Kodak reporter and Nesiska editor mark 1910 as the beginning of a new time, a new era, for the city of Everett, and O’Donnell, who found their words a century later, agrees.
“The very ‘spirit of education enthroned in Everett’ has been given new life by this change,” the editor wrote.
By LINDSAY TOLER
Published Jan. 27, 2010