Muscatine Iowa Central Junior High School May 1971 and miscellaneous color photos from around June 1984 ~

This was my first time taking a camera into a school.  The photos reflect my experience as a 9^th grader nearing graduation from junior high school.  The building was ancient, from the late 19^th Century.  It had begun life as Muscatine’s high school.  The stairways were wooden and would have gone up like a torch.  The fire escapes were wrought iron bolted loosely to the brick skin of the school.  They rattled ominously during our fire drills.

The classroom pictures were in Miss Reid’s room.  She tried to teach music.  The class was out of control.  I once wrote “Miss Reid has the nubs!” backwards in chalk on a piece of paper and placed that paper on her chair.  She sat down on it in her dark blue wool skirt and the chalk printed the phrase across her bottom.  Her neighbor across the hall, Mrs. Greenwald, later informed her of the problem.

This series captures a time that classmate Kevin Genung locked a series of other students in the supply cabinet, and of Miss Reid grabbing uninvolved observers Brian Leatherman and Tom Hinrichsen to discipline them.

If I could reach Miss Reid, I would apologize to her.  It wasn’t her job to keep me entertained.

This is also probably the first series of photographs that I took of a woman I was interested in.  Here that would be a girl, Rhonda Hagen.  She was cute and conversational.  I also learned that she was LDS and I was not and that made a difference so I never saw her again after 9^th grade. 

I continued taking photographs of women friends.  The color pictures include one of my current partner Cathy back when we were friends enjoying a picnic.  The color photo of me is her first of me.  She looks as though she’s trying to bat me off like a pesky fly.  Perhaps I was.

A few of the color photographs are of Vicki Rush’s mother, Karen Voge Rush, in the derelict shell of the house she grew up in.  She said that former Iowa governor Robert Ray had lived there too as a child.

You can go back to the main menu’s entry “Photos by Number” to track down the images referenced in this essay.