See You in September
Located on a sloping wooded lot near the town center, Methuen High School is a large, scored concrete bunker with a 125-foot smokestack. The main building, which resembles a graham cracker factory, is a two-level rectangular structure divided into north and south "houses" and containing the main office, guidance department, cafeteria, and academic offices and classrooms. Connected by an enclosed promenade are a full-sized ice rink, adjoining locker rooms, and a 2,000-seat assembly hall.
At the end of this ramped concourse is the 17,000-square-foot field house, which includes three regulation basketball courts, an eighth-of-a-mile running track, weight lifting and fitness area, volleyball courts, batting cage, and boys and girls locker rooms. The Athletic Director's office, Physical Education Department, Athletic Trainer, Music Department, and ROTC program are also located in or adjacent to the field house.
Dressed in a blue and gold polo shirt, dark blue chinos, and running shoes, phys ed teacher and hockey coach Joe Robillard confesses to a little nervousness as he looks over his class rosters at quarter to seven in the morning. Popular among students for his laid-back manner and dry wit, "Mr. Robes" has been an amiable presence at Methuen High for twenty-five years. Beneath his soft-spoken demeanor, however, Robillard is a determined, competitive man, a former goalie on the 1972 National Championship Boston University hockey team. During gym classes, where the energetic Robillard cavorts among varsity athletes and other kids, one of his favorite refrains is "I thought you guys were supposed to be good."
Robillard and his best friend and office partner, Fran Molesso, have been teaching and coaching since 1975, but they still get a few butterflies when the 1,700 kids come pouring through the orange doors of Methuen High for the first day of the 1999-2000 school year. At this hour the field house is empty, except for the over 100 royal blue championship banners draped on the walls, heralding past Ranger achievements in everything from baseball to wrestling.
In the boys' phys ed office there's a row of full-size lockers and tacked to the wall, hand-printed posters that read "Eliminate the Possibility of an Excuse" and "Do the Right Thing." While competing in one of the toughest leagues in the state, Joe Robillard's career record as a head hockey coach is 180-156-44. (He has coached 1,200 Ranger competitions over the past twenty-five years, in ice hockey, baseball, soccer, track and field, cross-country, and field hockey.) Inside his locker, Robillard keeps a tiny "W" with adhesive on the back that he awards to the biggest whiner in each class. At 48, he's trim and fit, a loose-limbed fellow with hazel eyes and a thick "cookie duster" mustache.
"Shame on me if I don't stay in shape," says Robillard, explaining how he participates in nearly every class while keeping a running commentary on the action. "On the football field, I'm Joe 'Willy' Namath. At tennis, I'm Ivan Lendl. Larry Bird on the basketball court--until I pull a hamstring."
My "job" at Methuen High is a loose mixture of substitute teacher, volunteer hockey coach, and self-appointed hall monitor. This particular building, with its ice rink and field house, opened in the fall of 1976, when I was a freshman at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. But watching an undersized Asian boy with cerebral palsy and bad skin totter to his gym locker, I'm reminded how tough high school is for some kids. Just trying to fit in can be a full-time job for someone who falls outside the norm. As a hockey player and above-average student, I had it pretty easy, dating cheerleaders and editing the school newspaper, and still thought I was in hell.
There's a controlled chaos in the main hallway leading "upstairs" to the academic half of the school, a huge chattering mass of teenagers in baggy jeans, faded baseball hats, long clingy skirts and wool sweaters. The office resembles an ant colony, with a line of teachers, students, and staff coming from one direction to drop off various bits of paperwork and another coming the other way, picking it up. Mimi Hyde breezes in, a petite, sandy-haired woman who coaches girls' basketball, and announces in her loudspeaker voice, "Everybody's having a good time."
Hyde, 48, personifies the athletic success enjoyed at Methuen High. A member of the Massachusetts high school basketball hall of fame and former Ranger herself, Hyde's overall record as varsity coach at Methuen is 393-83. Her teams captured state championships in 1985-86 and 1998-99, joining football and boys' track coach Larry Klimas, girls' head track coach Brenda Clarke-Warne, and wrestling coach Bob Fitzgerald at the highest level of interscholastic athletics. Methuen also produces a significant number of individual state champs, like senior Sean Furey, currently the top-ranked high school javelin thrower in the nation with a personal best of 227' 3. (The varsity hockey team reached the state semifinals in 1992-93 but has never won a championship.)
At center court in the field house is a six-foot caricature of a man in buckskins, waving a flintlock rifle. Methuen High's athletic teams are named for Robert Rogers and his celebrated band of guerrilla fighters, Rogers' Rangers. Major Rogers was born on November 18, 1731, near the intersection of Hampshire Road and Cross Street in Methuen. Although believed by many locals to have served in the Revolutionary War, Rogers' Rangers actually fought on the British side in the French and Indian War of the late 1750s. According to contemporary accounts, Rogers was "six feet in stature . . . and well known in feats of strength," and his daring winter raids against French emplacements on Lake Champlain and what is now Quebec are the stuff of legend. The Rangers sometimes fought in snowshoes and on ice skates and terrified their enemies by hatcheting and scalping prisoners.
A generation ago, kids who had struggled up from the sandlots and backyard rinks of Methuen considered it a privilege to wear that cartoon Ranger on their jerseys. But in this era of sophisticated youth sports, where the inflated expectations of some parents can ruin the experience for the child and the coach, becoming a Methuen Ranger is a different business. After greeting me in the office, Mimi Hyde asks, tongue-in-cheek: "How come you're not writing about my team? We won the state championship, you know." Then she relates a story about a woman who called her a few years ago, lobbying for a guaranteed college scholarship for her basketball-playing eighth-grade daughter. Mimi told the woman she couldn't promise her daughter anything, but if the youngster worked hard and earned good grades, she might get to play varsity ball at Methuen. Instead the girl enrolled at archrival Central Catholic and now, as a junior, sits on the bench.
Methuen High principal Ellen Parker also starts her work day early, buttonholing students as they pour through the main hallway at 7:15, telling them to clip on their ID badges and take off their hats. She's forceful and direct but pleasant, a small woman with a booming voice she honed during ten years as a varsity coach.
This is Parker's second year of what she calls her "ten-year plan" for improving Methuen High. Trying to get a grip on what sort of kid grows up in Methuen, I'm reminded of the mild inferiority complex that seems to run through all of the town's doings. In a box somewhere I have a photograph of my father wearing a lacquered cowboy hat and a corny red, white, and blue golf shirt emblazoned with "I LIKE METHUEN." He's manning the grill at some sort of municipal barbecue circa 1977, and every time I see that old picture it strikes me funny that the motto isn't "I'M CRAZY ABOUT METHUEN" or "DON'T YOU JUST LOVE IT HERE?" It's as if living in Methuen is an endurable necessity, like taking your pretty cousin to the prom. But then I recall that love for a town or an old hockey rink or a set of playing fields is like the sun shining in the sky. You never look at it. Hardly do you remark upon it. But you always know it's there.
After twenty-five years as a teacher and administrator in the region's poorest and its most affluent communities, Mrs. Parker says the issues for all teenagers are the same: "Hazing, discipline, drugs, boy-girl relationships, and things that happened at the mall that are brought into the school." Still, she believes there's a tremendous amount of work to do as principal of Methuen High. Although the school is bright and cheerful and bustling with chatty teenagers, a tour through the building illustrates the wear and tear of twenty-five years: missing ceiling tiles, torn carpets patched with duct tape, and unkempt stacks of papers and boxes littering the teacher's area.
"We need more pride," says Parker. "Look around. We're average. In every way, we need to be better."
Comparing MHS to other local schools, Parker says that some systems are better than others at hiding their problems from parents and the media, that's all. Methuen High is an open building--there are no metal detectors, routine locker searches, or heavy police presence. "This is not a prison," says Parker. "The kids are my best lifeline to the street." A single police officer is assigned to the school, Methuen High graduate Jim Mellor. "I use Jim if I need to enforce 'the law.' Other than that, he's a presence in the school."
While wandering through the north house, a number of things I learned in high school come drifting back. Like osmosis, the tendency of fluid to pass through a semipermeable membrane. How the circumference of a circle equals its diameter times pi. And how to unhook a girl's bra with the index finger and thumb of my left hand. When I attended Methuen High, there was one black kid in the school and a handful of Latinos. Today students from twenty-four countries fill the hallways, bringing with them an equally diverse constellation of academic preparation, family background, and cultural expectations. But the experience of high school, for better or worse, remains pretty much the same.
During our rounds, Parker and I stop into the "Behavioral Resource Room," a barren, graffiti-scarred area off the cafeteria that houses a dozen sullen, listless kids who are staring at the wall, and a bored middle-aged woman who's staring back at the kids. These individuals cannot get along in the school's general population and sit here in a kind of purgatory, measuring off their adolescence with curses and sighs. Parker tells me of a dangerous, profane encounter she had with one of these "students"--a showdown reminiscent of her hardscrabble childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts.
"I'm a firm believer that all kids can learn--but not always in my building," says Parker. "We're not supposed to be in this business."
Near lunchtime Fran Molesso and I stand in the hallway outside the main office watching the stragglers and con-artists ducking in and out of class. The ex-college gymnast is trim and muscular, with shining olive skin, dark hair, and a well-kept mustache. Molesso reminds me that the overwhelming majority of students are where they're supposed to be, doing what they're supposed to be doing. Although disgusted at how grubby the school looks on the first day, after twenty-five years Molesso says he's still impressed by how polite and easygoing Methuen adolescents are in general.
"They're fun to be around," says the gym teacher, who grew up in Northport, New York. "Maybe it's because they're brought up mostly blue collar, so the parents have to work hard. But they're always respectful."
Half a mile from the high school, Pleasant Valley Street divides Methuen into the old and the new. Heading east, you'll pass through a complicated set of traffic lights and then an apple orchard will start running on your right, forty-five acres farmed for well over a hundred years by Charles Mann and his descendants. On the left, construction gangs are building a new shopping and entertainment complex known as "The Loop." It looks like an archaeological dig at Cheops: great misty mountains of dirt, men with pry bars heaving slabs of granite, and here and there across the vast dusty plain, tumbled piles of Mesozoic rock and huge sections of drainage pipe standing on end like cisterns.
Built on the same site in 1973 was the doomed edifice of the Methuen Mall; before that it was all cow pasture and apple orchard. I remember when Pleasant Valley Street was a country road and my cousins the Leonharts and I would cross the meadow to steal apples and douse each other in the brook. When the mall went up, a cheap, low-rise structure that contained a hundred stores, hockey pal Gary Ruffen and I applied for set-up jobs and worked at places like General Nutrition Center and So-Fro Fabrics. Over the years, I bought clinging polyester shirts at Chess King, science fiction novels at Lauriat's, and ate inexpensive T-bones at York Steak House--notions that I no longer ascribe to, and stores that are no longer in business. So when the mall closed a few years ago, I didn't lose any sleep over it.Copyright 2002 by Stephen R. Datz