Looking Back—Handley and Handley High School

                               1938 Handley Downtown
            (showing businesses attributions for early 1960s & Hwy 80)

On December 20, 1849, Tarrant County was founded and named after General Edward H. Tarrant, who had been instrumental in driving out the Indians. Tarrant County was formally organized in August 1850, when the first elections were held. The railroad arrived in 1876 and the rail line that extended to the Dallas area resulted in Handley and Hayterville (later renamed Arlington) coming into being. Handley was named after Major James Madison Handley of Georgia. After the Civil War Handley moved to the area while employed as a traveling salesman.

The first Handley School was built south of the Texas and Pacific tracks in 1877 and was located at the corner of Daggett (now Forest Avenue) and Main (now Hart Street). It was initially an ungraded school with one teacher. Later the building was expanded to accommodate more students. About 1898 construction of a new school building began on the corner of Forest and Church Streets where the old Masonic building now stands. That school was completed in 1901.

That same year Tarrant County Commissioners approved the creation of the Handley Independent School District. It operated from 1902 until 1928 when it was annexed by the Fort Worth Independent School District. Seven men were elected as trustees for the new school district: John Joseph Ferrell, William Pitt Craig, William David Weiler, William Louis Hunter, Richard Ladd, Thomas Kell, and Jacob Cook. Each of these men were buried at Rose Hill Cemetery (established in 1928) Major Handley is interred there as well. In1909 a larger school, constructed of red brick with white stone trim, was erected at 3127 Chilton Street. It was used for both elementary and primary grades until 1922 when a second brick building was built at 2925 Haynie Street that housed the Handley School from 1922 to 1959 (when the last class graduated from Handley High School).

An essay in the 1928 Handley School Yearbook reveals that the yearbook (sometimes referred to as an annual) had its origin back in 1920 connected with the creation of a school newspaper to document activities of school life. The school paper was to be called the Skyrocket. However, when the publication came about it was named "The Guidepost," but only the initial issue was so named. Over the course of the next three years (1921, 1922, 1923), a semi-monthly publication called "The Skyrocket" was created to document school activities. It was in 1924 that the first annual, a "neat" fifty page booklet, was printed. In the year 1925, "The Skyrocket" appeared rather irregularly, but the best final edition that had ever been published, it was said at the time, appeared at the close of the school term.

At the beginning of the 1925-1926 term, "The Skyrocket" was discontinued because the Handley News began devoting a portion of the space to the school reports. However, popular demand among the students resulted in "The Skyrocket" being reinstated. Curiously, the 1930 yearbook was called "Greyhound," but the football team continued to be called the Rockets. Then for some reason the name of the yearbook was changed in 1931 to "Orion" while the sports teams began using the Greyhound emblem. The 1931 year seems to have been the only year for an Orion yearbook. The yearbook for 1932 took the form of a scrapbook. Except for the years 1933, 1934, 1935, and 1936 when no yearbooks were published, Greyhound continued both as yearbook and as the school emblem until Handley High School was closed at the end of the 1959 school year.

Around 2009 (the 50th anniversary of the last graduating class of Handley High School) an effort was undertaken to find and scan as many of the Handley yearbooks as could be located. A total of 28 yearbooks were located and scanned—essentially all that were produced except for 1926, 1929, and 1939 (and the years no yearbooks were produced). Two complete sets of the scanned yearbooks have been produced (both 4-volume printed versions and digital versions of the complete set) and have been deposited with the Billy W. Sills Archive of the Fort Worth Independent School District and with the Fort Worth Genealogical Library, respectively. A third set has was produced for depositing with a suitable repository in the Handley area whenever one is located.

The yearbooks provide a wealth of insight about the history of Handley people. In the 1927 yearbook you can read the interesting guidance from the School Superintendent to students and teachers. You can read about activity groups such as "Declaimers" and "Debaters." The 1928 issue of the Skyrocket boasts that "ninety percent of the 186 students who have finished here are or have been in college." That seems to be an amazing feat for those days. Are we that accomplished in these days? 

An index of all seniors from all of the years collected is included with the yearbook sets that includes in some cases burial locations of our deceased alumni in the form of Find-A-Grave memorial numbers. A document with links to each of the yearbooks for downloading can itself be downloaded at: http://tinyurl.com/qyy8yfh.

David McConnell, Handley High School Class of 1959

1950  Handley business district

Little School - We were poor, obviously neglected and deprived, and it was absolutely glorious.

 Little School Life
(aka Tater Hill)

Little School, now a modern facility known as JB Little in Arlington, is an old country school.  It was built probably not long after the turn of the last century.

When I attended it was a single story white frame building containing 6 classrooms, grades 1 thru 6, and a principal's office.  The bathrooms had been added and were outside in their own building a few steps away. As I recall the lunchroom was also a separate building, as was a small auditorium.

The school served a very large area of rural Tarrrant County.  Some kids probably lived 12 or 15 miles from others. All kids were bussed, on several different routes, to school. Few or none walked and no mothers drove their kids to school.  For this reason there was nothing much in the way of before or after school activities.  The classes were small, probably 15 or 20 kids per grade.  Because of this small class size there were no real "cliques", just a mild gradation from more popular to less popular.   We were all generally even lower on the economic scale than the Handley kids.  Most of us lived on acreages or at least large lots.  Many families did some small scale farming and several still kept livestock.

Our school experience was almost 19th century.  Not very different  from that of our fathers or even grandfathers.  When school started the boys went barefoot until the weather changed.  Besides maybe a swing set and merry-go-round, our recess activities were ad hoc, unsupervised and generally very rough. We had no gym, we wrestled constantly and freestyle, played Red Rover, Crack the Whip and a vicious form of Dodge Ball.  A favorite contest of the boys was to climb to the top of the 30 foot flagpole. Minor injuries were common.  Everyone in charge of the school today would be arrested for what they permitted us to do daily.

Many of the families had lived in the area for generations and were inter-connected by blood and marriage.  There were often several sets of related kids at the school forming "clans" across class levels, for mutual support and even protection.  I had several uncles that attended before me, and had my younger sister and three cousins there at the same time.  A most important social grouping was formed by which school bus route you rode. The wait at the bus stop,  the long rides to and from school were  an important social time, and if you were lucky a few of those kids of your age would live within a mile or two and you could socialize after school and on weekends. 

There were essentially no organized activities for us either during the year or in the summer, unless a parent was willing to go to heroic efforts. The exception was a small  Boy Scout Troop. We were, I'm sure almost exclusively one car families, so no soccer moms were available.  No little league baseball, no peewee football, no shooting hoops after school, no available swimming pools.  We learned to swim sneaking away to a muddy pond in the woods, and oh, watch out for water moccasins.

Two events of the year were of supreme importance to us.  A school sponsored trip to the Fat Stock Show, and just before summer, a trip to Forest Park.  That trip to Forest Park was like a trip to Disneyland is now.  Then we were turned loose on the world for summer.  I was lucky in that there were a half dozen or so boys of close enough age,  that lived close enough to get together by bicycle.  We left home in the morning an returned just before dark.  We formed a small semi-feral pack that roamed the abundant woods for miles around, fishing the ponds, hunting with our (gasp!) BB guns and exploring the banks of Village Creek, this was before Lake Arlington. We were  searching for Indian artifacts that were found there. There were no parks with baseball diamonds or jungle gyms.  We did however have an area where wild grapevines had covered several acres of the tops of tall oak trees.  We would climb to the top of the trees 30 or 40 feet up and spend hours chasing each other through the dense canopy of vines from tree to tree.  We were poor, obviously neglected and deprived, and it was absolutely glorious.

What we were, was not very well socialized by the norms of the times.  When we were thrown into Handley and then Eastern Hills, it was almost like going to school in a foreign country, and we lived so far out we couldn't even try to participate in that social whirl until we got cars of our own.  By then it was just too late. We were more or less permanently marginalized.  We stuck together, hunkered down and survived. Very few of us actually thrived.  I was actually advantaged that I had moved around so often and attended all kinds of schools and was better prepared to cope.  I think many of my old Little, or as we called it Little's, schoolmates were just bewildered by it all. It was not a particularly positive or enjoyable experience. Maybe for that reason I was the only member of my "pack" to go on  to college as far as I know.  Most joined the military or went to work right out of EH.  Going to Little's School in the early 1950's was in itself a wonderful experience, and I sometimes pity my own boys who enjoyed a more "Meadowbrook" existence.  But the cost of that "idyllic" boyhood proved to be socially prohibitive at EHHS. 

 
Adios

Handley High School Scrapbook

1925

This post will illustrate some of the images of the Handley High School campus over the years it was in service before EHHS.  They come from a fine collection of early Handley yearbooks gathered together for viewing and download on the fine 1959 Handley reunion site kept by David McConnell. 

1944

A few of my EHHS classmates may have had parents that also attended this school. Let me know who they were. Dona B's Daddy graduated from here in 1937, went off to WWII, then came back to teach some of us at Meadowbrook Elementary. 

Miss O'Dell was a fixture in this building for many years before we encountered her at EH. 

Ted Harris' dad was a long serving teacher and administrator here, too. 40% of our first coaches came from here, and some of our most influential teachers also hailed from Handley.

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.

Handley Junior High Superlatives

Handley, in 1959-60, was in its first year as a stand alone Junior High school; the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades were moved to the new Eastern Hills school building.  The yearbook in which these pictures were published was a paperback publication, Meadowbrook didn't have a similar book.  

And following just behind us were members of the future EHHS Class of 1964 who shared the halls with us for a couple of years.

Adios

Handley Junior High - Cheerleaders 1959-61

 

A Facebook friend loaned me her copy of a 1960 Handley JH yearbook a few weeks ago.  It has provided some additional insight into our Handley classmates' schooling before joining our Meadowbrook contingent at EHHS.

    

Three of these girls, Suzanne Hoffman, Dianah Barton, and Brenda Haire, went on to become EHHS varsity cheerleaders during our years there, 1960-63.  I knew all these girls at EH but didn't know that Cheryl Spain, Peggy Anthony, Sherri Rogers, and Sharon Parks had led cheers at Handley.

Like so many of us learned at EH, the larger high school student population provided more competition for about the same number of recognition opportunities.  So, having been a Junior High star wasn't always a guarantee of continued success at EH.  And each class at EH had only 2 spots available for the girls in that class to lead cheers. 

So, when Suzanne and Dianah won the Sophomore spots at EH, we may not have fully appreciated just how special they were...they had some tough competition.

The boys are Charlie Rigby and Danny Tekstar, both from Meadowbrook JH, neither of whom had ever before been a cheerleader.  All 4 of these youngsters went on to be our Class of 1963 varsity cheerleaders during our Junior and Senior years.  Personality-wise, I recall Charlie and Suzanne as being vivacious extroverts, while Dianah and Danny were more reserved.

And next year, 1960-61,

Adios

Handley Junior High - 1960

This Handley Junior High class of 1960 contributed a number of its members to what would become the EHHS Class of 1963.  I count about 195 which is substantially more than attended HJH the year before, in 8th grade.  Don't know where the influx originated.  However, similar to Meadowbrook, where quite a few students went to Poly after this year, quite a few of these students must have gone to Arlington, since I don't recognize a lot of these kids or their names.

Their Meadowbrook Jr. High counterparts.
  

Adios

Handley & The Interurban

In 1900 the Ft. Worth population was 27,000, Dallas – 43,000.
In 1930 the Ft. Worth population was 164,000, Dallas – 260,000 (+500%)

I’m not sure I knew in ’63 there had been an Interurban rail line that ran through Handley, but until doing a little study for this piece I really never knew what an Interurban was. The Ft. Worth – Dallas line started in 1902 and shut down in 1934—well before our time. If any of our parents recalled it, it would have been from their childhood.

It was a 29-mile electric line that whisked passengers along at 5-mph during its early days, but had upped the speed to about 65-mph by the 1920’s. The Handley power station out by Lake Arlington was initially built to feed the power needs of the rail line, not in its present configuration of large generating units, of course, but the 2 older, small units at the north end of the power block might have been used for the rail line. They’re no longer running.

Highway 80, or East Lancaster as we knew it in our neighborhood, started out as a portion of the Dixie Highway that ran from Los Angeles to Savannah. The Dixie Highway was constructed over a period of years from 1915 – 1927. The Interurban predated the highway by a couple of decades and no doubt was the principal means of transportation between Dallas and Ft. Worth.

The picture collage above shows some net grabs of the Handley-Ft. Worth area involving the Interurban. The park was built by the traction company as a tourist attraction at its Lake Erie which was later made a part of Lake Arlington at the northern end. Lake Erie was initially built to provide cooling water for the power station condensers.

For some interesting reading about the ultimate demise of passenger rail transportation, Google Great American Streetcar Conspiracy for a number of discussions about something I first heard in Los Angeles in the 1960s when the last of their Interurban cars were still running.
The picture below shows a restored Handley business district as it likely looked before automobiles whizzed by. A map of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Interurban line can be found HERE.



All Aboard

Handley Junior High - 1959

And for better or worse, here some of us were as 8th Grade Handley Pups in May 1959. Another year and we would be EHHS Sophomores, starting out at the bottom of the pile once more.

These pages were published in the 1959 Handley yearbook. At Handley, grades 7-12 were combined into one school facility so the yearbooks portrayed those 6 classes. Enjoy the memories.

I counted 121 pictures here which would be about 1/3 of the 1963 EH senior class. However, a fair number of these kids went elsewhere to high school and we picked up a larger contingent from Meadowbrook at EH.


Feeders:
East Handley Elementary
West Handley Elementary
Little Elementary (now part of Arlington ISD)
Meadowbrook Elementary
Adios