Organizers of a Washougal High School 100th anniversary party are looking for more student and staff memories. Contribute yours online at www.surveymonkey.com/s/BGNGB69 by Friday.
The end of this school year marks a major milestone for Washougal High School: the 100th anniversary of the school’s first commencement.
Washougal’s class of 1914 had just four students, and only three graduated from the school the following year. But they were the first of many to come as the school endured a drastic transformation over the following decades.
A century later, Washougal High School remains relatively small, with a student population of about 900. Administrators expect about 180 of them to earn their diplomas in June.
But the high school is in a completely different location, as 101-year-old Vernon Campen can tell you. The only surviving member of the class of 1931, Campen is the school’s oldest living alumnus, and he’s spent most of his life in Washougal, watching the place grow and change.
In his school days, Washougal High School was located in a small brick building on the corner of Main and 24th streets downtown. It had no gym or cafeteria, and it eventually became the New Horizons Church after the new, larger campus on 39th Street was established in the late 1950s.
In some ways, though, Campen’s high school experience wasn’t too different from those of today’s high school students. There were dances, and just about everyone loved to go to football games. Campen said he was a star football player; he intended to go pro after graduation, but an injured ankle derailed those plans.
Like many students, he did well in some classes, and, he said, “lousy” in some others. And he remembers high school as a particularly unpleasant time.
“Happiest day of my life (was) when I got out of school,” Campen said.
Decades later, he still groans and laughs about a dreaded poem he wrote for an English class while milking the family cow: “Oh, English Three, oh English Three, why torture me with book reports and poetry?”
Like the students of today, Campen had no promise of a decent job after earning his diploma in the early years of the Great Depression.
“The hardest of times it was when I graduated,” he said. “Well, it was right during the Depression, so I tried to stay out of starvation.”
Nearly three decades later, the current Washougal High School campus opened. Today, a group of a dozen women from the campus’ first graduating class — 1958 — meets at Heller’s Restaurant on the second Tuesday of every month to grab some lunch, catch up on life and reminisce about old times.
The ladies take pride in being the first to graduate from the new campus. Rae Craig, who worked in the school cafeteria for 25 years after graduation, remembers those early days, before Washougal had a football stadium.
“Our football field was a pit across the street that was always flooded,” Craig said. “No stadium.”
Many of the ladies’ favorite memories of high school are of the times they skipped class to smoke cigarettes or get their hands on some beer. Kathleen Bogert laughs when she thinks about getting away with skipping class with one of her best friends, the principal’s daughter.
Life wasn’t so complicated back then, said Andrea Martinez, a graduate of the class of ’58 who left Washougal after graduation and moved back in recent years.
“Kids minded their parents, and when they got out of school, they either went on to school or they got jobs,” Martinez said. “People are so mobile now that they probably get spread all over the world.”
The Washougal Old Timers and district officials plan to highlight stories such as these at a celebration to commemorate the 100-year anniversary from 5 to 8 p.m. April 24 at the school.
