At first I was scared to be a freshman at FMPHS. Only 13, small, and nearsighted, I'd heard the rumor that on the first day, upperclassmen grabbed new freshmen and did terrible things to them like painting their faces with lipstick. The outside of the school didn't worry me because it was so familiar that I hardly saw it. I'd walked past it four times daily for nine years going to and from school # 48 on Edna Street. Besides, I had enough to think about with the snow, the ice, and the abject cold which necessitated wearing wool, funny-smelling-when-they-got-wet snowpants during the cold months. (We kids hated wearing them.) I didn't know anything about the huge building's Beaux Arts Italian Renaissance style, egg and dart molding, glazed terra cotta walls, or the swag on the tower. What worried me was the mysterious INSIDE of FMHS. I braved it through the first few weeks and began to look around me as the classes changed and I trudged the daily route on the three floors: to my beloved band room, to the dark, scary, claustrophobic locker room, to the auditorium for assembly, to the cafeteria in the basement, to the gym, and to many kinds and sizes of classrooms, always keeping a death grip on my notebooks and books for fear I'd drop them. There were mysterious rooms on the third floor we kids talked about but they were never open. The inner courtyards we could see out the tall hall windows looked interesting to explore but no one was allowed out there. I for one longed to see the inside of the faculty room. What did the teachers do in there? I doubted it was fun. A number of my teachers were impossibly old. One was so feeble that her legs were taped up with thick elastic bandages from ankle to knee and her diction was strange--German, I think. Gradually the vast interior became fun to move around in. What became most important to me about the inside of the building were the friends I made there (and still have), the band led by its excellent conductor and teacher Carroll Geiger, and the English class in which I learned to appreciate literature and found I was good at analysis, and in which, one day after class, my beloved teacher Dorothy Pierman counseled me never to teach in high school. I learned also what the concept of "excellence" meant. FMPHS was a place where hard work and good grades (the real thing, not inflated) were encourged and appreciated. I also learned there to distinguish between which teachers were good (in my case teaching me well with a love for the subject) and poor (those who had no facility or enthuiasm for teaching and were biding their time until they could retire). And more. Inside that most beautiful building, I formed habits of thinking and learning and striving to master subject matter which have lasted me all my life. It's not too much to say that the inside of the school and what happened there caused me to lead a life of teaching and writing.
I haven't touched on the building's fascinating background in this entry. At one time the original burned. (I attended the second FMPHS). For more, you might want to go to this fine website: http://www.buffaloah.com/a/north/186/hist/1bldg/1bldg.html
-Marilyn Fisher
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