Handley High School – Class of 1955

I don’t know any of these people, they are 8-years older than the EHHS Class of 1963.  However, after running across some remarkable Handley Elementary class pictures of the future HHS Class of 1955, there appeared to be a convenient way to illustrate Handley’s scope in our years at EHHS.  

As a relative newcomer in 8^th grade to the Meadowbrook crowd, Handley, to me, was just a school name on a ribbon that we had to go out and beat in a football game.  Unlike some of my Meadowbrook classmates, I had had no experience with the Handley kids while playing summer Little League, or at church.  When I first saw the Handley contingent at EHHS, fall 1960, they were just another group of strangers.  I never had any idea how many of them there were…all the way through EH.

 

All I knew was that there were some new good-looking girls to add to the pool that came in with us from Meadowbrook and some big new boys to compete with for a spot on the football team. 

Thanks to the amazing work of David, a HHS’59, who has posted full scans of Handley yearbooks going back into the 1930s, it’s relatively easy to visually illustrate Handley.  This 1955 class consisted of 75 grads which was at the upper end of a usual range of 50-75.  By comparison, George Bradford reported that his EHHS Class of 1960 consisted of 60 Handley cohorts who came over to the new school to become about half of the first EH graduates. 

The elementary class pictures of this same group of kids may illustrate something else that I’ve been told by others; that being, Handley was generally considered by the Meadowbrook parents as being poorer and that it offered a lower quality education than did Meadowbrook.  Note in a couple of the class pictures that some of the boys are barefoot (grades 3 & 5).

 

 

That the Handley neighborhoods of the time were more rural than Meadowbrook was a fact.  Also, that the houses tended to be smaller is a fact.  However, insofar as I can determine from observation and conversations with others, the education the Handley kids received might actually have been somewhat better than we got at Meadowbrook…it was at least on a par.

>>Now, if one of you Handley Dorks who graduated as a '63 Highlander will get off your duff and scan a series of Handley Elementary class pictures of your classmates, I can do another posting like this one, only with familiar faces !  (A '62 or '64 would be fine, too!)<<

How the Handley kids fared at EHHS will be included in an upcoming series of the EHHS social order. 

Adios - By the way...those barefoot boys look exactly like I looked from the last day of school each year until they dragged me back to start again the next fall.  I think I have a very faint recollection of the teachers permitting barefoot boys on the last day of school at least a few of those years.  So, maybe it was some kind of tradition in certain circles.