Slamming his foot into the renovated hardwood flooring of the historic McCalla School building, Andy Ruff, 62, mimicked the thunderous boom in his memory of his teacher’s deafening presence.
“We called her ‘Earthquake’ because she’d stomp her foot when she got mad to get the class disciplined,” Ruff, now a Bloomington City councilmember, said.
He spoke to Jim Lammey, another McCalla former student, age 73, who smiled in recognition of the teacher’s old antics. The men’s voices rose in volume as they found common memories — a ping-pong of peers’ and teachers’ names, of “Do you remembers?” Ruff and Lammey, along with others, gathered at the McCalla School on Tuesday morning to begin building a memory archive.
Other names come up as well: Mrs. Spangler turned Mrs. Strangler and a Mr. Long nicknamed Lurch, a clever moniker coined by the students due to his uncanny resemblance to the character from “The Addams Family.”
The McCalla School has been a building of reinvention since its opening in 1907, functioning as an alternative high school for a brief stint in the 1970s, a wood and metal production shop for the IU School of Art, Architecture and Design and its current role as home of University Collections. But its longest, and perhaps most memorable, iteration was its first: an elementary school.
Emily Zarse, events and engagement coordinator for the University Collections, is driven by ensuring the building's abundant history is celebrated by all who pass through its historic halls.
Her current project is gathering past students of the elementary school, which served Bloomington for 66 years, and preserving their artifacts and memories.
“We'd like to piece together and have almost an installation,” Zarse said. “Really set the stage so that when people come in, they have that sense of the past and the present all at once.”
Tuesday marked the first of several meetups Zarse is putting together to gather artifacts and stories that will lead up to a larger celebration the weekend of June 13. The first session served as a generative event to begin gathering oral histories.
“We're working towards having a full on reunion, a big celebration,” Zarse said. “But these first events are really important. We would like to have the people whose stories we’re telling from the very beginning and get their contribution.”
Black and white photos, meant to spark visitors' memories, were scattered across large tables pushed into a square in the middle of the room.
A couple, Mike Mobley and Sharol Branam Mobley, aged 77 and 76 respectively, sat in matching evergreen turtlenecks on one side of the table talking to Zarse about their time at McCalla. Married in 1983, Mike was a grade older than Sharol in school.
Generations of the couple's family have attended the school; Mike’s mother and grandmother and Sharol’s father were students throughout the 1900s.
“I know my grandmother went here,” Mike said. “She was 7 when she started school in 1912, and her diploma is dated 1920.”
Sharol carried a gallon Ziploc bag and pulled out a yellowing report card and several photographs, which Zarse gently asked if she could touch and take pictures of to begin documenting the attendees' histories.
“This will develop over the next couple months,” Zarse said. “I'm going to do at least two or three more of these sessions, we’re aiming to do proper oral histories, to more formally document the stories. Whether it's a book or a digital archive, we're hoping to have it accessible to the public ongoing. We’ll have the big event but it won't be the end of it, it will be a living archive.”
The next meetups will happen February 26 and March 26, 11-1 p.m.
