It’s been many, and I mean many years since your correspondent’s Boy Scout campout days in the wild jungles of Northern New Jersey.
At these events, one of the traditions was for our leaders and their assistants to tell stories around the evening camp fire, and they almost always involved ghosts, and for good measure, the ‘lizzie monster.’
So it is with some nostalgia that we read of goings on at the new elementary school, and our imagination cut itself loose to dream up all sorts of explanations. The events reported involved driving rains and furious winds, and those always provide the right conditions for mischievous spirits to wreak a little havoc on unsuspecting humans.
Given Brunswick’s penchant for all sorts of exotic ‘spirituality,’ it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the new school just may be a haunting ground for the departed spirits of those with close ties to the location and its former glory.
Before the old school was torn down, I remember taking a couple of tours, and hearing about the leaking windows in the old building. As we walked around, we always had the uneasy feeling that we were being watched and followed, but we never saw anything specific.
Just the same, you couldn’t avoid thinking of the thousands of prior graduates from the Old High School, now passed on, who spent some of the best days of their lives in that building. It’s not much of a stretch to believe their spirits, if there are such things, are not happy with what happened to their old and cherished Alma Mater.
The report we are talking about recently appeared in The Ostrich. The gist of the item is this:
The manufacturer of 161 windows installed in Brunswick’s new elementary school has proposed a “very expensive” repair after more than a third of the windows leaked during heavy rainstorms last fall.
That fix, should the school department accept the proposal, would come at the expense of the window manufacturer and general contractor Ledgewood Construction after architects and school officials — and the school attorney — met with representatives of Bonneville Windows of Quebec late last month.
Sixty-six of 161 windows installed last summer at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School seemed to weather ordinary rain just fine, architect Lyndon Keck of PDT Architects told the Elementary School Building Committee earlier this month.
But after a number of storms bringing gales of up to 45 miles per hour in October, some of the multi-component windows began to leak.
This is not an appropriate time to revisit the serious ugliness of some of the installed windows; we’ll follow up on that another time. But it is an appropriate time to suggest that all those professionals in charge of the project, including the architects, construction firm, and assorted sub-contractors and suppliers should be the finest available. After all, this program is being overseen by State Government, and if we can’t trust them, who can we trust?
So the notion of ghosts of classes past wreaking havoc on the building is appealing, especially since it would link the new building to the old, which was discarded because of numerous such problems that were just too much to take on.
What’s next: saplings and scrub brush growing out of cracks in the masonry near the roof-line? This could just be a monument to the ‘green’ spirits that undergird the entire project, so we would caution those in charge not to carelessly yank out the offending plant life; they might just be an omen of peace with the departed graduates.
Oh….and we hear reports that the new school’s population at opening will be in the 300’s, rather than the 500-600 range as projected earier. We’ll have to run down the facts, but if you have any info, please forward it.
Sounds like the spirits of classes past will have plenty of room to make themselves comfortable.
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