Thursday, February 04, 1999
School memories dusted off
Visitors can see Grandma's class photo
BY KRISTINA GOETZ
The Cincinnati Enquirer
COVINGTON — Betty Lee Nordheim thumbed through her Holmes High School yearbook and reminisced about when she and her friends sang along with the band at football games, and the year she left a Ping-Pong ball to a teacher in her senior will.
That was around 1947.
Ms. Nordheim told all manner of stories about her days at Holmes — as a student and as a teacher — as she and others prepared a special exhibit called “School Days: A History of Public Education in Covington” that will open Tuesday at the Behringer-Crawford Museum.
“There are enough people in Covington who have gone through these schools, or their families have, who would want to see it,” Ms. Nordheim said.
The museum is celebrating 174 years of public education and Holmes High School's 80th birthday.
“This is the first time this collection will all be shown together,” said Laurie Risch, executive director of the museum. “We hope that if children come in with a parent or grandparent that they'll see that some of the same things happened to them when they were in school.”
Ms. Nordheim is the guest curator of the exhibit, and has been instrumental in bringing the artifacts to the museum, along with the Covington school board and Holmes High School. She is a member of the museum's board of trustees.
And she should know something about Holmes High School. She was a student and an art teacher there for 22 years. Even her parents attended the school.
“They used to tell me all about it,” she said. “That's one reason why I'm so interested. I grew up with it.”
She tells how children in her seventh- or eighth-grade class knitted wool squares that would be assembled into blankets for soldiers during World War II.
“The boys knitted as well as the girls,” she said. “We'd have races to see which rows could finish their squares first.”
And she followed the high school through the 1960s during desegregation, when she was an art teacher. She remembers when two lines of students, one black, one white, met in front of the school.
“They all shook hands and walked into the building,” she said.
Ms. Nordheim retired in 1990, but said she has always been interested in preserving the history of the schools and hopes that the exhibit will spark others' school memories.
Some other displays of interest are of the Lincoln-Grant School, a segregated school. A papier mache doll made by one of its students and a 1925 class picture will be on display. There also are pictures of several area school football games and copies of some old plays.
RECEPTION
The museum will hold a reception from 2-4 p.m. Feb. 13 to kick off the exhibit, which will run through March 28. For more information, call 491-4003.
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