Memories flooded the minds of a few members of the Ferndale High School Class of 1965 as they walked through the doors of Old Main for the last time on Monday.
They reminisced about how the library used to be the school gym, and how there used to be a hole in the ceiling where a person might have fallen through. They remembered the way the floor seemed to roll on the second story of the old brick building when an earthquake hit. They laughed about putting the former librarian’s Volkswagen on top of the two-story structure. They recalled where they sat when the announcement of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination blared over the loudspeakers.
One of those former students, Nancy Haugness, said her class was the largest the school had ever seen and the first to graduate on the football field.
“We were the baby boomers,” Haugness said with a laugh. “They’d never seen a class like us before.”
And, the building will never see a class like them again. The Old Main building — erected in 1936 — and other surrounding structures will be torn down in January and February 2023, and students and teachers will transition into the new building following the winter break on Jan. 4.
“It’s just really crazy to think about how many generations and all the history that’s been here, and how it’s just all being torn down and how sentimental it is,” current student Amelie McKeon said during Monday’s walk-through. “It’s also a new beginning and a new school with new history and new memories formed there.”
Dozens of community members came out to say farewell, shuffled through the halls, flipped through old yearbooks and looked at old photos hung on the walls. Some took tours and others ran into old friends and classmates they hadn’t seen in years or decades.
Overwhelmingly, there was a feeling of gratefulness for the building and how it had housed so many students and employees in Ferndale. Some felt more apprehension toward the idea of the building that they, their children and sometimes even their grandchildren attended being rendered. Others felt a sense of joy and readiness to leave behind the dark yellow hallways and the leaky windows, and begin a new chapter in a fresh building with a view of Mount Baker. Most felt both.
“Nobody cares more about history than I do, but it also means we need to progress because that’s how things grow and evolve in history,” said Peggy Lupo, a Ferndale history teacher, 1997 graduate and parent who met her husband while in high school. “It’s bittersweet saying goodbye to this building, but we have so much to look forward to.”
In 2019, Ferndale passed a bond to fund the building of the new school and other capital projects due to the increasingly derelict state of the old school. As of Oct. 31, the district had spent $79 million out of more than $125 million budgeted for the new school.
“It’s crazy to think that in generations to come, people won’t even know this existed,” student Harleen Malli said about Old Main. “They’ll just think of [the new] building as what’s always been there.”
