Memorial High School Burns

   When I first started concentrating my writing on local and regional history about 30 years ago (previously I'd written about first one thing and then another), I didn't like to write about anything that I could remember happening, because it just didn't seem as much like history to me. However, as I've gotten older, I've had to reassess and modify my definition of history. Otherwise, I'd have to exclude, as topics for my writing, a lot of events that happened when people who are now 50-60 years old weren't even alive. I still prefer not to write about recent events (things that happened in the past 10-20 years), but I no longer use my own lifetime as a litmus test as to whether something is history or not. With that in mind, today I'm going to write about something that happened "only" forty years ago, the time Memorial High School in Joplin burned down.
   Well, it didn't actually burn down, but it suffered considerable damage. And this is not actually history but more of a personal reminiscence, because I was there.
   It was Thursday, January 28, 1982, around noon. If I recall correctly, it was the fourth hour of the day. The room where I taught was located in the northeast corner of the three-story building on the second floor. I was standing or maybe sitting at my desk at the front of the room, where I had a clear view of the hallway that ran west from my room on the north side of the building. The offices and a central stairway leading outside through the front exit were located on the north side of this hallway, and the auditorium was on the south side of this east-west hallway, taking up the entire middle part of the square-shaped building, with hallways surrounding the auditorium on every side. The main entrance to the auditorium was located on the hallway that I could see from my room, while the stage was at the south side of the auditorium.
   As I stood there in front of my class, I happened to glance down the hallway and saw smoke seeping from underneath the double doors leading into the auditorium. It wasn't a lot of smoke, but it was enough that I could tell that most of the auditorium was probably filled with smoke. Why else would smoke, which normally rises, be coming out beneath the doors unless there was so much of it that there was nowhere else for it go?
   "Class," I announced in a voice that I tried to keep as calm as possible, "we need to get out of here. I think the school is on fire." Even though we had fire drills periodically throughout the school year, I quickly reminded the students how they should exit the building and where they should reassemble on the far side of the street that ran along the east side of the building.
   Some of the kids may have been a little skeptical at first, thinking I could be pulling some kind of weird joke, but they got up and started filing out of the room in orderly, if somewhat aimless, fashion. As the ones in front started through the door, they could see the smoke coming from beneath the auditorium doors, just as I did, and they knew now that this was no joke. If any doubt remained, it was quickly erased when the fire alarm sounded about the time the last of my students filed through the door. They quickly shifted gears from a desultory promenade to a determined march, but they still proceeded in an orderly fashion, because we could clearly see we were in no immediate danger and had plenty of time to exit the building.
   Not true for some of the Memorial students and teachers that day. Those in two or three classrooms on the second and third floors in the southwest section of the building, where the fire originated, barely got out of their rooms in time, before the intensifying blaze would have blocked their exit.
   Fortunately, though everyone got out okay, and students and teachers huddled together in groups on grounds across the various streets surrounding the building to watch the fire in awe. The fire department arrived within a minute or two after every one was out of the building and soon had the fire under control. But not before smoke and water had inflicted extensive damage to the building. Enough that some of us had already guessed we would not be going back to school in the Memorial building any time soon, even before administrators came around and announced that school had been canceled for the rest of Thursday and all day Friday. Even though the fire was now under control, we were told to go on home without reentering the building. Only if we absolutely needed to retrieve something from the building were we allowed to reenter the building and then only with an escort.
   Over the weekend a plan was announced to hold Memorial High School classes at crosstown Parkwood High starting on Monday. From about 6:30 a.m. until approximately 11:30 a.m. Parkwood students would attend classes in the building, and then after a half-hour break to allow Parkwood students to vacate the premises, Memorial would hold its classes from about noon until about 5:30 p.m. Both schools would run on an abbreviated schedule with classes lasting 45 minutes or so instead of the usual 55 and no lunch break for either school.
   We (Memorial) stayed at Parkwood for about two months while remediation and renovation work on the Memorial building took place. Looking back on that time now, I recall it as one of the best periods of my teaching career. I've never been an early riser; so, I liked the idea of being able to sleep in and not have to be at work until almost noon. And I liked the shorter periods and shorter school day. Partly because it meant working fewer hours, of course, but also it seemed easier to keep the kids motivated to study and learn. Going to school seemed to take on almost a sense of adventure. Maybe that's just me looking at the experience through rose-colored glasses, but that's how I seem to remember it.
   We went back to the Memorial building in the early spring, but some of the repairs that had been done were just temporary until we could finish out the school year. The rest of the work was completed over the summer, and we started a new school year in the fall of 1982 with the old building almost as good as new.
   In the meantime, an investigation into the fire had determined that it started in a hallway closet on the second floor just off the stage at the rear or south side of the building where drama students stored costumes. Investigators said the fire had been intentionally set, and, as I remember, the culprit was tentatively identified because he'd supposedly set another fire in downtown Joplin just a week or so before the Memorial fire and his teacher stated that he was absent from class with a hall pass at the time the fire was thought to have been set. However, I don't recall the kid's name, if I ever knew it. I do remember some of the other teachers calling him Freddy the Firebug, but I don't know whether Freddy was his real name. And I don't know whether he was ever positively identified as the arsonist or what punishment he might have received, if any.