STEGER'S HOPE

HOPE WAS FOUND AT STEGER Steger Junior High School was an ideal, indeed an idyllic, educational situation for me, for our family, in 1963, the year when we moved to Eldridge Avenue in the Webster Groves School, Missouri, District. Our home was just four doors away from Rockhill Road, the street, two-lanes, that Steger faced, defined, refined, distinguished. Steger was almost new, a model of modern eco friendly architecture of glass, steel, stone, brick, concrete, asphalt, that looked like it might have been lifted from the drafting board of the great Frank Lloyd Wright. A rustic creek transversed Steger's 20+ acres of green acreage. The creek bound it, for the whites who lived west of it, for the blacks who lived in the east. Our large family of six kids loved books in 1963. Mama and Daddy saw to that. They brought books home from many directions of all kinds. "If you get something in your head, " they often would say, "can't nobody take it away." Repeatedly. I still love books as my birthright due to Mama and Daddy, now gone on. Up Rockhill Road, with me in the lead as the eldest, in single file we trekked to the public library in spring 1963. The Rockhill library was then located in a house, the new brick one , having not been built. We all checked out books; then we trekked back home down Rockhill Road to Eldridge Avenue. Rockhill, Missouri, is homeowners' haven, even today in year 2019, even though slick developers have brought in stores, shops, plenty of apartments. But, way back in the day, the black community and the white community consisted mainly of black-white two parent families of hardworking, homeowners with school-age children who were mainly enrolled at Steger Jr. High. The anomaly of the neighborhood school in the modern era that is, at once, also academically excellent, racially integrated, aesthetically beautiful; but that is a community resource all year round for all sports, hiking, sledding, exploring, kite-flying, golfing, voting, remote controlled airplane flying, cork ball-playing, is surely hard to imagine. But we can! We lived it. I did from 1963-1966. When I become critical of busing only for integration, or of family-shredding magnet schools, school vouchers, and all the rest of the modern educational gimmickry designed to get the public's money by untried or invalidated, non-corroborated, pretensions, whether by so-called civil rights groups or by innovation experts, it is because I know better! I know because I went to Steger Junior High School, in Webster Groves, Missouri, School District, in the early 1960s when hope thrived!