The principal at Goddard High School wants me (or somebody) to uhhh, redo the mural they got there.
My first thought was, “Aaaww, that old mural is kind of dull & flat & I could come up with something really spectacular on the same theme & make everything better & be an art hero here in Roswell & it’d be fun & stuff…”
So I ran up there to take some pix of it with my nice little digital camera. I walk up to it & start looking at it & almost immediately this guy comes up, well actually I think it was more like he sort of floated by & mumbled something as he went, until I showed some interest & then he was there.
“My grandfather was the head architect on this.”
Robert H. Goddard High School is named after, well, Robert Hutchings Goddard, who did a lot of experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets in Roswell after he had to leave New England because he kept setting his neighbors’ fields on fire & they didn’t like that much.
“Robert Goddard used to build rockets in my grandfather’s garage.”
Goddard High School was built in 1964, when Roswell was still a thriving Air Force Base town. It is Roswell’s 2nd high school. Roswell High School is about 7 miles south of here.
“There was nuthin out here at all back then.”
“Just cows wandering around, an jackrabbits, right?”
“Yeah.”
They were real proud of it. It was state of the art. It was Tomorrowland. Actual military rockets on pylons out in front, sticking straight up. The offices, the gym & the cafeteria (no longer used as such) comprised the ground floor. The classrooms were (& remain) all below grade. They are underground. There are no windows, oh wait, there might be windows like in the doors that look out (in) from the classrooms into the subterranean hallways, but no openings to the outside world, no way to admit either fresh air or sunlight.
It was 1964, at the height of the Cold War. And this was Roswell. Home of the 509th Operations Group, the guys that deliver atomic bombs. A military target. So they built their new school as a fallout shelter. At my high school in Bakersfield, California in 1964, they just stuck little cardboard signs up above the entrances to hallways with one or more stories above them, transforming existing structural configurations into ‘fallout shelters’, at least in our minds. But this place was built that way, to be exactly that: a fallout shelter. A good one. Nobody thought it was weird, they thought it was smart.
And the mural was apparently Original Equipment. I spotted a signature, of sorts; Helvetica letters hand painted about an inch high, saying ART CLUB, right on top of the wing of the space shuttle.
“They don’t even have an art club any more, do they?” I asked.
“Naw, they got this one guy, he teaches an art class, but he’s, well, y’know…”
“What?”
I think they don’t have music classes there any more, either.
Wait a minute. There was no space shuttle in 1964.
“The space shuttle was added later.”
“Yeah, I guess so. ”
Okay, so the Art Club did the shuttle much later on. Who did the original mural? Did they do it as, or immediately after it was being built? So who were they? Kids from Roswell High? At any rate, it’s historical; this mural was Original Equipment. It wants to look like it did back in ’64, I guess. It’s a preservation/restoration job. Oh boy.
