Old Lincoln school holds fond memories

All right, I confess, I was never an “Abraham Lincoln kid.”

Growing up at 94 Congress St. during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, I lived on the wrong side of Broadway Park to qualify for attendance at the old Abraham Lincoln School several blocks away on Palm Street.

So off I trudged, from grades two through six, to the big brick Mary Snow School on Broadway, a fine place, to be sure, but I always envied my Abe Lincoln counterparts. Unlike my newer, flat-roofed school, theirs resembled a castle, complete with its own city common, Chapin Park.

“You know, I used to walk to school in the morning, home for lunch, and then home again in the evening,” my mother, who truly was an Abraham Lincoln kid, used to reminisce proudly.

In my mind’s eye, I can see young Frances Duran in the 1920s threading her way back home each day, violin case in hand, eager to tell her parents about winning the prestigious Charles E. French medal for academic excellence or performing “The William Tell Overture” in the school orchestra.

She and her brother, Eugene, valued their years at Bangor High School, but I always sensed their hearts belonged at Lincoln, a true neighborhood grammar school with strict teachers and a blackboard ambiance missing from many modern schools.

I dropped by the public library the other evening and learned that the original Palm Street School, renamed Abraham Lincoln in the 1920s, was built for $70,000 in 1895 and contained 20 classrooms, with 45 students per room; a third-floor assembly hall seated 250.

When the landmark was razed in 1973 to make way for the present school, an estimated 7,000 students had attended classes there. The memories flooded back for many former students. Some might have recalled the day in 1917 when 13-year-old William Striar collected pennies and dimes from his 42 classmates to help the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, rocked by a harbor explosion that killed more than 2,000 and injured many others.

And who could forget the day, in 1978, when Donna Chaput’s second-grade class raised more than $7,000 for a White House meeting with President Jimmy Carter and his daughter, Amy.

My friend, Patricia Parkhurst Pickard of Barrington, R.I., remembers having the school as her neighbor when she entered fourth grade in 1940. Living at 27 Forest Ave., she stepped out through her shed door onto a tarred playground.

“My fourth-grade teacher, Lucie W. Preble, became my lifelong friend,” Pickard recalled. “Occasionally she would give me 10 cents to go to Miller Drug Store to buy two ice cream bars – one for her and one for me. She did this, she said, because I helped her.”

The teachers and principals, from past and present – McKenney, Eaton, Swett, Beaupre, Proctor, Parent, Vose, Rumery, Carson, Blanchard, Lovley, Houlihan and so many others – will live on in the hearts of every “Abraham Lincoln kid.”