(If I may interrupt for an aside: Originally, the "Academy Street School" was "The Laconia Academy" -- the only school in town, for all grades. And it was so important that the street that it faced was named "Academy Street." That was its claim to fame -- it was the Laconia Academy's street. Then Laconia grew, and Academy Street became more than just "the street the Academy was on." It became a major thoroughfare. It became "Academy Street" -- a fixture in its own right. And as lots more (and more modern) schools were built, that school, the one that originally gave the street its name, well, it became just that school that happens to be located on Academy Street. And what would you call the school that happens to be on Academy Street? The "Academy Street School," of course. So the school came to be named for the street that was originally named for the school. And why is it that I never realized, while I was growing up, the cosmic irony of a school that was named, effectively, "School Street School"?) ...past Academy Street School to Union Avenue and the Courthouse, and then across the footbridge by the old Dam and the Mills. Then up Main Street to Railroad Square and the churches, the train station, and the library. Then down Church Street to St. Joseph's Church (where I was an altar boy) and St. John's School (where I attended elementary school). Then further down Church Street to Normandin Square, past the old Scott and Williams plant (where my mother and father worked, and met for the first time) to Sacred Heart Church and Rectory. And then turn around and go back up Union Avenue, over the hill, and back down Academy Street to our car. That was the plan. They say the best plans for war don't last past the first shot fired. Never having been in a war (or planned for one), I can't say, but I can tell you that our plans didn't last past the first opening of the car door and the first blast of cold winter air. It was cold. Too cold for us Floridians. And the wind was bitter. Too bitter for us Floridians. It probably didn't help that we had just finished lunch, and we had both had iced tea. Okay, okay! We're Floridians. We started at Academy Street School, and made it across the bridge past the Dam to the Mills. That was it. Judi sat in a convenient coffee shop and drank hot chocolate while I took some pictures of the Mills. Then I bailed. Man, it was cold. ("Cold," BTW, was, according to the weather channel, 34ºF with a wind chill of 31ºF. It must have been the ice tea, I swear.) Seriously, Laconia is a neat place. Though economically depressed. I wonder if it has to be. Economic depression may have been accompanied by a depression in the vision of it's leaders, going all the way back to when I lived there. Is it that when the economy turns south, the best and brightest move away, and so the leaders have to come from... well... what's left over? I don't know. But while we were there, there was a article in the newspaper about the fate of the Allen-Rogers complex -- a classic brick factory building that sprawls the length of Water Street. The proposal was to tear it down and replace it with fancy-dancy condos, which, given the depressed economy of the region, no one is going to buy. The smart thing to do would be to preserve the factory and renovate it into condos, keeping the historical/industrial feel of the walls, floors, and windows. For that, people would really pay. I would. Diatribe over. I'd like to include some remarks about Laconia that I received in a message from my-brother-Glenn. When he mentions the "picture you took" he's referring to a postcard of the Laconia mills at their height, and when mentions politicians stopping, he's referring to a '50s era visit to Laconia by then-President Eisenhower:
Laconia's recent evolutions are also fascinating to me. When the picture you took was taken Laconia was (if I understand the era correctly) a much more important and vital town - a local hub of the industrial northeast long before the term 'rust belt' was invented. Since then much has changed: the factories that made the town an economic center have disappeared and the state itself has more than doubled in population while Laconia has maintained just about the same population. The economic, political and social center of the state has drifted to the southeast corner and many of the problems that used to be characteristic of the northern part of the state are moving south into the Laconia area. I find it all fascinating. Perhaps today the politicians would stop in Gilford instead? I have one final story regarding the Academy Street School. This is a story from my youth. My very young youth. If my mother were still alive, I wouldn't even tell this story, but (very sadly) she is not, and so I can tell it without fear of causing a heart attack and depriving the world of a truly wonderful human being. So this is this story: When I was very young, my paternal grandmother lived maybe thirty feet behind the Academy Street School (which was still a school, then). With two working parents, I spent a lot of time at her house, and had a lot of friends in the neighborhood. At that time, the school had a flat-roofed, one-story room added onto the back, I guess as a storage room. It isn't there any longer -- I looked -- but in the old days it was pretty easy to climb the bricks on the side of the building and get onto the roof of this addition. That's what we would do, me and my friends. And after we got up there, we would play Blind Man's Bluff. You know the game: One player is blindfolded, and wanders around trying to locate and identify the other players. So get the picture: The blindfolded player (me a lot of the time) was wandering around on a roof that he or she could easily have stepped off of, killing him or her self. And we thought this was so much fun. I don't know why no one was killed or injured. But this memory tells me two things: 1. Parents then were just as stupid as they are now. It's really not any worse. 2. Children are way more resourceful and resilient than we give them credit for. |
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