Filing cabinets and boxes line the walls of a 20-by-15-foot room, fondly named “the vault.” Stacks of paperwork also make their home in the room at Brandon Central Services. Off to the side, sits a heavy wooden chest. And tucked inside the 4-foot-tall box are class composites, dating from the ”20s to 1992, when the last class of Generals graduated from the school.
Before recently, the doors of the chest were hardly ever cracked. In the early 2000s, then-Columbus schools Superintendent Therrell Myers made a push to collect the composites from Lee High School, digitally reproduce them and bind them in a book. This volume also calls the chest home. School officials now are looking to do the same for Hunt, which was an all-black high school until 1970, when Lee, the all-white school, was fully integrated.
Both schools, opened in 1953, have rich history.
Fifty-one years later, Irma Jones, still remembers how it felt to walk into a new school.
“To go back and remember our beautiful new school, with a cafeteria and a gym, that we didn”t have before. Those memories, after all those years, are something to be cherished,” Jones said.
Irma Jones graduated from Hunt in 1959; her husband, Marion C. Jones, graduated from the school in 1956. She was among the first students to have class in the new building; prior to then they met in the old Union Academy schoolhouse, formerly on 10th avenue.
Classmates, especially during the years before integration, were a tightly woven group, said Tommy Prude, a 1964 graduate of Hunt.
“To understand why it means so much, you have to understand the times. The ”50s and ”60s were hard times” to grow up in, Prude said.
Athletics and other after-school events also helped foster camaraderie, George Irby said. He also graduated from Hunt in ”64. In those days, the entire community would turn out for ball games. And Hunt High brought together students from the city of Columbus as well as areas such as West Lowndes and New Hope in the county.
“The school was the only thing that brought people together like that,” Irby said. “Without it, we didn”t know anyone from the country, and you don”t really have anything now that brings the community together like that.”
Class composites and other mementos from school are more than reminders of fond memories; they are history, he said.
Without them, “You have an oral history, but you don”t really have a historic record,” Irby explained.
Prude and Irby”s class is planning to turn the oral history of Hunt into a written history, so it can be preserved long after the storytellers are gone.
“That”s going to be our class project,” Prude said.
Records weren”t as well kept for Hunt as they were Lee, and much of Hunt”s school materials were hand-me-downs from Lee. Of the few keepsakes left of Hunt when it became a sixth- and seventh-grade school in the ”70s, some are kept at central office; others seem to have disappeared.
“Once it became Hunt Intermediate, nobody cared about that stuff,” Irby said.
Preserving the past
“The most interesting thing is the passion people had for their high school graduation, even so many years after, that you don”t really see now,” said Janet Lewis, public information officer for Columbus schools. Lewis fields about 10 calls a month, sometimes more, about class souvenirs, “99 percent” of which are about composites.
Composites are in various states of preservation; some are water damaged; others are discolored from the sun or torn, and some are near flawless. Lewis has talked with archivists at the library, about keeping the original composites and documentation, once bound volumes are complete.
“We are preserving it; we”re not throwing it away,” Lewis assured.
But keeping up with composites has been a chore.
“We have had people check out composites for class reunions and never bring them back,” she said. Others were unscrewed from the school walls and removed.
Bob and Judy Herron, who graduated from Lee High in 1963 and 1965, respectively, have kept impeccable records from their Lee days. Judy Herron was able to offer her smaller personal copy of the 1965 class composite, which was missing, to be added to Lee”s bound book. The Herrons are a three-generation Lee family. Bob Herron”s father lettered 16 times there — four times in four sports. Bob and Judy Herron”s son, Mitch, a baseball player, was in the last class of ”92.
“One of my most vivid memories is playing football my senior year under Coach Billy Brewer (a ”55 graduate).” Bob Herron recalled over the summer, thinking back on the Lee Memory Walk, held in June. “The grueling practices and the initiation of the first week-long football camp at Camp Pratt are unforgettable — they made the game itself a breeze!”
Judy Herron, who returned to Lee to teach, looked back on pep rallies, the Magnolia Bowl and a North Big Eight Championship her senior year.
“Someone chartered a plane for the team to fly to the coast for the game with Gulfport. I remember the players had maroon blazers and gray and maroon striped ties to match for traveling,” she said.
Freda Dismukes also returned to her alma mater to teach. She was in the Lee High class of 1981 and is planning for the class” 30-year reunion.
“I want to try to get some of these things, so we can have it there,” she said, standing in a room at Lee, surrounded by trophies, certificates and photos.
Plans for trophies
More than a hundred trophies won throughout the generations at Lee are on display in a small nook in the band hall. By January, those trophies and photos, dating as far back as at least the ”30s, will be moved to Brandon. Lewis plans to have a shelf built around the back of the stage in the central office cafetorium, to display trophies.
At least one significant trophy is missing from the collection. The trophy, game ball and a framed description of the 1935 game when the Lee High Generals, under the direction of William B. Saunders, won a national championship is housed at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in Jackson.
Hunt and Lee will see their last days as instructional space for Columbus Municipal School District in January, when student are released for he MLK Day holiday. Sixth-graders at Hunt Intermediate School and seventh- and eighth- graders at Lee Middle School will move to the new Columbus Middle School, on Highway 373, just north of Columbus city limits.
When news began to travel of the impending closure of Lee and Hunt, former students flooded the school district with calls about the schools” memorabilia.
From composites to trophies and yearbooks, classmates wanted to know where their treasured school souvenirs would be.
“Mainly, they just want to know that they”re taken care of,” Lewis said. “Any yearbooks that were ever put in our possession, we have (at central office). From the ”80s up, we have them all.”
In 1970, Lee High School won the Big Eight Championship in football, the first year the school was fully integrated. Prude suggests integration is what changed the nostalgia for class tokens. By then, Prude said, “Our heritage was left at Hunt. We became a part of Lee.”
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