Chuck Oates
18 June 2008
Norman, Oklahoma, USA
Oh, Please! Say It Ain't So
The Amarillo High School building on Amarillo's Polk [Main] Street burned in 1970, shortly after I graduated in 1966. I was in college at OU at the time, so I didn't see the news videos of the disaster. I just discovered the news reels posted on the AHS Class of 1953 website. I almost wish I hadn't seen them. It still hurts almost 40 years later. :'^(
http://www.ahs53.org/FireHS55.htm
A spontaneous congregation of then-current and former AHS students, as well as a good many students from Amarillo's three other high schools, gathered and saved many of the trophies, books, and memorabilia from part of the AHS building that was not, at least for a while, endangered by the fire. Before long, fire department officials very correctly determined that the students were putting their lives in jeopardy and ordered everyone out of all parts of the very large building.
The fire, started in the wee hours of a Sunday morning by a malfunctioning boiler, burned for almost a whole day before it could be brought under control. False ceilings, installed during an extensive remodeling of the building in 1963-64 when I was a sophomore, gave the fire a path through the halls and into classrooms that made the presence of the fire hard to detect. By the time the fire was discovered, one side of the building was heavily involved, and finally most of the main building was destroyed.
Some of the peripheral buildings, as well as spaces loaned by several surrounding churches, were used to complete the school year and provide a home for the Golden Sandstorm ("Sandies") until a new facility could be completed in far southwest Amarillo in 1973, where AHS is housed today.
When I visit the old downtown site, now a parking lot next to the Amarillo Senior Citizens center, I am still often moved to tears. A lot of my life's early history and that of thousands of other Amarilloans (since 1923) had been made in that beautiful building.** And it's gone forever.
Oh, please! Say it ain't so.
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** It was a lot better looking before they put in those gosh-awful aluminum windows with the orange panels during the remodeling of 1963-4.
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