Site Ensures Closed Schools More Than Just Memories
Posted on: Sunday, 11 May 2008, 09:00 CDT
By Erika Slife, Chicago Tribune
May 11--When they finally decided to close Sheldon High School in Iroquois County in 2003, the decision ended fights between neighbors and generations of families, but left an unanswered question: What do you do with the school's stuff?
Not the desks and chairs, but the trophies, yearbooks, game schedules and uniforms--the stuff memories are made of.
For communities forced to close schools, usually because of low enrollment and lack of funds, how to honor the school's memory can be an emotionally charged debate. Especially in small towns, the high school is often the center of the community, where people gather for ballgames, to vote and to have meetings. Take away the school and you take away part of the town's soul, residents and experts say.
For one Chicago man, honoring those shuttered schools has become a personal quest. David Nanninga knows every relic cannot be saved. But he has found a way to preserve some memories.
Nanninga, 46, created the Illinois High School Glory Days site ( www.illinoishsglorydays.com), an online tribute to closed high schools. Since he launched the Web site three years ago, more than 900 schools have been added to it. The school profiles include their opening and closing dates, scholastic achievements and athletic accomplishments. It's all data that Nanninga and a few friends compiled, with the help of visitors to the site.
"These schools are a very important part of Illinois history, and to see them be forgotten would be a shame," said Nanninga, who is an Illinois State Police lieutenant by day and history buff by nature.
Given the number of visitors and comments, experts say the site has likely touched a nerve, or at least the heartstrings, of a group of people who have not bonded before.
Before World War II, Illinois boasted nearly 20,000 school districts, said William Phillips, an associate professor at the University of Illinois-Springfield and a leading authority on school consolidation in Illinois. Now, the state has about 870 districts, and the thinning has left thousands of alumni and sports fans of closed schools without a connection.
That empty feeling can weigh down a town. "I think you go through the same process when someone close to you dies. You go through a mourning process," said Ben Winchester, of the Center for Small Towns at the University of Minnesota in Morris.
No one knows it better than Nanninga, who grew up in tiny Mineral, just south of Interstate Highway 80, about 40 miles east of the Iowa border. After its high school closed in 1961, he felt the drag on the town's morale.
"You're no longer the Mineral Leopards--you're just Mineral, which is a town that feeds into the Annawan School District," Nanninga said. "Most people wouldn't know that as time goes by. It's just a forgotten fact."
As a boy, he listened to his parents and grandparents share stories about great times at Mineral High School, and he longed to have worn the hometown Leopards' jersey. He was bused to Annawan and played for a basketball team representing several towns. He could never shake the feeling he owed something to the school he heard so much about.
So as his children graduated from Catholic schools, he enlisted the help of a friend to launch the site. Although it is basic--Nanninga has no training and works from his basement--the site has generated excitement equal to a pep rally.
"For those of us that paid the price, suffered the loss, of a school district totally gone and fallen apart, Glory Days may be most of all that is left," an e-mailer wrote last month.
A son wrote of seeing his deceased father on the site and not knowing about the good teams he played on because his dad didn't talk about his youth. Visitors click on a school and fight songs and mascots can spring to life. "When the picture . . . appeared and the old fight song came on I darn near jumped up and began cheering again!" a Springfield Feitshans alum wrote.
Nanninga has answered more than 5,000 e-mails from all over. And he keeps an 18-gallon bin full of newspaper clippings, photos and statistics people sent him on their alma mater. For now, the bin stays in his laundry room. Nanninga doesn't know what to do with it all. He can't put all the information on the Web site--he operates on a bare-bones budget out of his own pocket--but said it's not right to throw it away.
"I had no way of knowing I'd reach [the number of] schools we're at now. I keep thinking the site is going to run its course, but it just keeps picking up steam. People really seem to enjoy it."
There's a wistfulness to the site too that may speak to why it resonates with some. It quotes Mineral alum Francis Immesoete writing when the school closed: "The feverish din of ball games and the whisper of young people finding romance for the first time are all gone now, never to return, just like the carefree days of our youth."
Nanninga implores visitors to document the past while those who lived it are still around.
In Sheldon, about 35 miles from Kankakee, officials left part of the building open for the elementary school, and alumni and residents worked to turn the band room into a Sheldon High museum. It's now used for reunions and alumni gatherings.
"People came out of the woodwork to put this together," said Supt. Dale Hastings from Milford Township High School, which absorbed Sheldon. "When teachers teach and administrators administrate in these small, rural schools, it's more than a feeling of family. It's a feeling of a mission."
For alumni and even rivals of the former Sheldon Rams who don't live in the area, Nanninga's site is a lifeline to that past.
"It's people's roots, basically. It's where they're from," said Rodney Merkle, an Iowa man who ran track against Sheldon and contributed statistics to the site. "Some of the school buildings don't exist anymore, but it doesn't mean [people] didn't go to school there."
eslife@tribune.com
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