Airways Junior High School Passes In to History

I just learned that my junior high school in Memphis, Tennessee is closing and it will be taken over by a charter school. That means it will never carry the name Airways Junior High School ever again. It gives one pause when things that you loved are disappearing. People, places and things change constantly and we lose those that we love, but I never thought that the places that I loved as I grew up would disappear.

The little house that I grew up in and the streets all around my home were bought by the Memphis Airport Authority and all the homes were demolished. Absolutely nothing of the home that I grew up in exists and I have come to terms with that. The school that we went to in our neighborhood is no longer Airways Junior High School but was changed to Airways Middle School many years ago. I could live with that.  Now it's going to be a charter school and will no longer carry the name Airways. Now that is just inconceivable to me.

The first day that all of us entered our brand new school in 1969 for the first time to start the journey of the next three years of our lives was a challenge, to say the least. It was something different we had never experienced before. We were all the biggest bunch of misfits you had ever seen in your life. We were uncoordinated, uncouth, and a bunch of children without a clue of what awaited us in this new school of ours. Most of our teachers were young and it was their first permanent assignments. I'd be willing to bet that they had no idea what was in store for them either.

I think I was much like all of the students that went to this brand-new school that was built for us. I was bound and determined to be a major part of its history. I just never knew that I would outlast the history of our school. I knew that I didn't have the talent on the baseball field to be a star player, but I was 6 foot tall and 175 pounds in the seventh grade, so I knew that I could be a top football player in junior high school. No one, absolutely no one was ever going to cheat me out of being a starting player on that first football team at Airways. I never worked so hard in my entire life. I did everything that was asked of me by my coaches and their staff and I always tried to give them even more than what they asked for. We butted heads sometimes about some of the stupidest things but I respected and loved these men that I called coaches, Coach Winters, Coach Ramsey and Coach Bacon I would have walked across hot coals for these men and I still would. God bless them and keep them and give them the highest rewards in heaven because they deserved it for making men from little boys.

Every teacher that I had and even those I didn't have seemed to care about us. I truly don't think that they were there just for a paycheck. None of them ever gave me that impression. I even had some teachers that took extra time with me when I needed it. I never had teachers after I left Airways that ever did that. It's not that I think the teachers today don't care as much as they did. It's just that I think they were just as bound and determined to make something of this school just as we were bound and determined to make something of it ourselves. It takes both the students and the faculty with the backing of the parents to make a school work and without these three elements working side-by-side any school is bound to fail. We had the three elements, we had a great group of teachers and an eager student body and parents that were determined to make Airways Junior High School a great school for their children.

I started a Facebook page so that we, the alumni, of Airways Junior High School could reunite and talk amongst each other about the days when we were young and beautiful, back when the teachers were just as eager to learn as they were to teach us the wonders of the world, life, math and sciences. I dedicated the Facebook page to those of us, both students and faculty, that are no longer with us because we love them and miss them.

I found out that it's not the places that make the difference and is not necessarily that the people that you loved are still by your side, it is that the memories and love are embedded in your soul. If I only do one thing in my life, I wish it would be that I impress upon people that it is the memories of some of the most important things in life and that the people that made those memories made us who we are. The history that we made is only as great as the friends that walked beside us through our journey of growth and understanding. It is actually amazing that we all became friends because we were all so different, our loves and our passions were as different as night and day. I honestly think that that made us stronger and bound us together as a group.

Our school had all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of races and we didn't care. We were taught not to care about what we were. We were taught to care about who we were. For that I am thankful.

So when I tell you that I loved the group of kids that I went to school with at Airways Junior High School I mean it. They were not only my friends, I grew up with them as if they were my family. Their parents were my parents and we all respected each other and each other's parents as if they were our own family. We did things for each other. Our parents did things for us and all of the kids in our neighborhood. My parents and my friends parents all worked hard to make money so that our junior high school would have things that we needed that were not going to be supplied by the Board of Education.

They even continued working for Airways Junior High School after we had left so that the kids in our neighborhood would still be able to have the things that they never had when they went to school. That's what made Airways Junior High School in our neighborhood work back in the days when we were growing up in the Charjean, Bethel Grove and Cherokee neighborhoods that united into one group when we all walked through that door for the first time at Airways Junior High School. I always felt like our neighborhoods had become one under the flag of Airways Junior High School.