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Dear Old Golden Rule Days Huntley School District Retirees Get Together to Catch Up, Reminisce

Posted on: Thursday, 21 July 2005, 21:01 CDT

Friendships formed in school, they say, can last a lifetime.

That old adage proved true Wednesday morning, when a group of local school district veterans got together at a Huntley restaurant to renew old friendships and share stories of days gone by.

More than 20 retired teachers, administrators, and school district employees attended this year's Huntley "school breakfast" for a morning of good food, conversation and catching up at the downtown Village Inn.

It all started when two veteran Huntley teachers, Lorraine Lid and Mary Ellen Moerke, began to wonder what had happened to the people they had worked with throughout the years.

A thought took root and, after a few phone calls and a little planning, a new tradition was born.

"Lori (Lid) came up with the idea for this several years ago," Moerke said.

"Every year since, we've had a good group show up."

A longtime English teacher, Lid still works as the curriculum coordinator for Huntley Unit District 158.

Moerke, a retired business teacher, is active in the McHenry County Retired Teachers organization.

Each July, the two friends work together to organize the annual breakfast, mailing invitations to former and current school employees throughout the local area.

The informal group includes teachers and administrators, office staff and school nurses, maintenance and cafeteria workers, and sometimes bus drivers, too.

"Everyone usually knows each other, and everybody is welcome," Moerke said.

Most, though not all, of this year's crowd were employees of Huntley School District 158.

Sun City resident Donna DeVita, a retired teacher from School District 155 in Crystal Lake, came to the reunion to meet new people and share her own experiences with other school retirees, like Jim Skomer of Hoffman Estates.

When Skomer was principal of Huntley High School back in the late 1970s, there were only 80 students in the graduating class, and a total of 250 in the school. The graduating class was considered big, he says, and it was enough to keep him a very busy man.

"In those days, you did everything - whatever was needed," he said. "I was the principal, the drama coach, and a football trainer, too."

The school was well-known for its theatricals, Skomer said, and the entire town would turn out for the performances, which were staged on risers in the old school's cafeteria.

Considering the size of the school, they did some ambitious musicals, he recalls, such as "Oklahoma" and "Oliver," where sixth- graders played the children's roles and high schoolers played adults.

Since the middle school shared the same building with the high school, practice was easy to arrange.

In those days, administrators didn't need a large staff, Skomer noted, when they had a good school secretary.

"We just had Vi (Williams)," he said. "She kept us straight, and kept everything going. She always did a great job."

The district's office staff consisted of Williams, Eva Isenhart, and Pat Peterson, all of whom worked there for decades until they retired.

"Pat had this dry sense of humor, and often she would make a comment that would lead me to think of a line in a song. So I would burst out singing, and they all would kid me about that."

Retired history teacher Bob Frenz remembers years of coaching freshman-sophomore basketball at Huntley High, with a good record of success - in all, 212 wins to 103 losses.

Now that Huntley has joined a larger conference, playing schools like Jacobs and Crystal Lake, they may find the competition tougher for a couple of years, he said.

"But that will just be temporary, with all of the kids that they have coming up," Frenz predicted.

As today's grade-schoolers reach middle and high school, "there will be so many new students coming in, that they will have a really good pool to choose from."

Before he retired, Ed Reim taught middle-school students for many years. He remembers when Huntley was still a farm town, and the teachers knew each parent by name.

In recent years, when he returned as a school volunteer, he couldn't help noticing some changes. "It's got to do with respect - they don't have it anymore," Reim said. "The students don't respect the teachers as much, and neither do their parents."

Discipline problems were handled differently years ago, he said. In his classroom, he had a paddle, and sometimes he used it - even on junior high-aged kids.

One student, he recalled, got into trouble and Reim called his mother at home on their family farm. "That boy's dad didn't even take time to put away his tractor, he just unhitched it and headed into town," he said. "When the boy looked out that window and saw his dad coming on the tractor, he knew right then that he was in REAL trouble now!"

Today, he said, parents won't always come when they are called, and they blame the teacher when their child gets in trouble. "And that's too bad, because teachers can't do it all. They need to have that support."

Mary Beth Manning taught kindergarten in Huntley in the early 1960s. The population boom that local schools are experiencing is nothing compared to that era, she said, when the "baby boomer" generation came along.

Manning had between 70 and 80 students in two classes that met - one in the morning and one in the afternoon - in the basement Sunday school room at the Congregational church.

The average class size was 35 to 40, and it was months before the school board hired a teacher's aide to help her. "They talk about class size today, but we really knew what that meant," Manning said.

After a few years, she quit work to have her children, then returned later on to teach in the Marengo-Union schools. "In those days, we didn't have maternity leave," she said. "If you were going to have a baby, you had to quit."

Gloria Christensen taught fifth-graders for most of her teaching career.

"At that age, kids are starting to think for themselves, and 'directive' teaching doesn't work," she said.

"You couldn't just tell them to do something, you had to convince them."

For 38 years, Vern Heine worked in maintenance for Huntley's schools, starting in the mid-1950's when the new elementary school (South School) opened on Lincoln Street.

Now that the Huntley Park District has renovated the old high school, Heine approves of the changes to the building he maintained for so many years.

"I was glad to hear they wanted to do something with it," he said. "That new Cosman Center is really beautiful, and the gym looks great too."

Retired superintendent Robert Bunt ran the District 158 schools for 16 years, from 1978 to 1994. Then, as now, budgetary crises were nothing new, he said. Whatever the size of the school district, cash flow is always a concern. In his first week on the job, Bunt said, he learned that the district didn't have enough money left to meet its payroll and would have to issue working cash bonds in order to pay its teachers.

"Some people in the community didn't like to hear that, but we leveled with them," he said. "We told them what was going on, and they accepted it."

Another time, state inspectors informed him that asbestos was found in bricks inside the high school.

"They said it was so dangerous, they had to remove it right away. They sent people in wearing masks, and they were carrying those bricks out so carefully. Then I went out and looked, and there was this guy just tossing them in the back of a pickup truck. I thought that was kind of funny."

A good superintendent must be a good manager who works well with others, he said.

"We had all kinds of board members with their own agendas. I found them all a joy to work with. I would say probably 80 to 90 percent of our recommendations were approved."

Today, Bunt said, Huntley's school district need to restore community trust after the recent referendum controversy.

"What you have to demonstrate is competency and truthfulness," he advised.

"The school district has to level with the community, to be open with information and treat people honestly. I think it's going to take time to heal it."

The individuals attending this year's Huntley school reunion were Vern Heine, Joe and Mary Beth Manning, Donna DeVita, Eva Isenhart, Judy Hansen, Marie Fettes, Helen Marlowe, Julianne Peterson, Betty Anderson, Carol and Wayne Donahue, Gloria Christensen, Bob Frenz, Bill Leggee, Ed Ream, Jim Skomer, Robert Bunt, Vi Williams, Lorraine Lid and Mary Ellen Moerke.

Source: Daily Herald; Arlington Heights, Ill.

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