This year contains a long run of important anniversaries, and a very important one reaches its end this year as well. Thirty years ago last month, at a particularly pretentious high school in North Texas, a particularly pretentious writer started his career. Three decades later, the writer moved to horticulture, and the high school saw demolition.
See that bank of windows above the doorway? That was the view into the classroom shared by both the school newspaper and yearbook staffs, back when both concepts weren’t as quaint as morning milk delivery. Oh, but we had dreams. Heck, some of us even managed to get published outside of high school and college publications, and a few, a very few, actually became noticed for our work.
And as of August 26, this was the last trace of those old days. I was part of that last generation of high school newspaper students before the desktop publishing revolution: I was halfway through my senior year when the Macintosh came out, and we had no clue that this would change everything. Back then, layout was done with pica rulers and rubber cement, with articles manually transcribed from typed or handwritten hard copy. At that point, any guy taking a typing class was either joining the newspaper staff or wanting to meet girls, and computer science classes consisted of thirty students per period jockeying for five minutes on a single Apple II or (horrors) a TI-99a. The wonders of online life? That wasn’t even science fiction: the “cyber” aspects of cyberpunk didn’t come to the fore until William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer came out the year after I graduated, and the emphasis within the genre was on the “punk”. Not that you would have had the chance of finding any of it back then.
Well, the old school is gone, but Lewisville’s cultural center remains intact, with lots of new augmentations. Now, as then, the battle between academia and athletics was fiercely discussed, with the community deliberating between recognizing noted alumni and recognizing accomplishments on the football field.
And Lewisville High’s priorities remain.
