By Tom Kirvan
It was late summer 1969, little more than a month after Neil Armstrong took a lunar leap for mankind, when several friends and I took a trek of our own, wandering wide-eyed through the yet-to-be opened Ann Arbor Huron High School, which was to be our educational home for the next two years.
We felt privileged to get a sneak preview of its environs before the rest of the huddled masses set foot in the impressive edifice off Fuller Road. Such was the joy of knowing someone high up the educational food chain in the Ann Arbor Public Schools.
At the time, the new Huron was the crème de la crème of high schools, offering eye-catching design and educational features that set it far apart from the buildings of the day.
We were singularly amazed at the “spare-no-expense” approach to the construction of the building, which arose out of the need to alleviate crowding at the then Ann Arbor High School.
We certainly could attest to the sardine-like conditions at Ann Arbor High after spending the previous school year attending classes in split shift formation there. The “Pioneer” students had the joy of the six-hour morning shift, while we “Huron” conscripts trudged into school for the afternoon hours of learning.
Our principal was Harvard-educated Paul Meyers, a former chemistry teacher who was instrumental in planning the layout of the new school. As principals go, he received generally high marks from the student populace, most of whom admired his keen intellect and obvious desire to promote the concept of lifelong learning in a diversified setting.
Not surprisingly, he had his student detractors as well, many of whom were upset at his insistence that the school’s mascot be labeled the “Huron” instead of the much more popular “River Rat.”
Mr. Meyers, so the legend goes, had a particular aversion to rats after too many encounters with the rodents during his World War II service overseas.
The “River Rat” moniker was the mocking label the “Pioneer” students foisted upon “Huron” students while they were splitting hairs at Ann Arbor High in that ghastly school year of 1968-69.
Back then, the new school’s site along the Huron River wasn’t the park-like gem that it is today. Gallup Park was but a pipedream after a dam burst a year earlier during a summer monsoon, leaving the Huron River to trickle through a rat-infested wayside that was once a medical waste site.
It would take several more years before school administrators would warm up to calling themselves true “River Rats,” but the mascot name finally stuck, much to the relief of students and alums who likened the “Huron Hurons” to an unkind form of athletic stuttering.
Now, the school bills itself as the “Home of the River Rats,” a label that even someone as brilliant and insightful as Principal Meyers could have never foreseen.
All this serves as nothing more than historical prelude to another school tour I took recently, this time from the perimeter of Birmingham Seaholm, which is in the process of significantly upgrading its athletic facilities as part of a district-wide $195 million bond issue that was approved by voters in 2020.
Among the improvements will be a new 38,500-square-foot building housing concession stands, home and visitor locker rooms, training rooms, batting cages, a classroom, gymnasium, golf simulators, an elevated running track, and two outdoor balconies. The school’s track and seven existing tennis courts will give way to a new track surface and 10 new tennis courts.
A mile or so south of Seaholm, Birmingham Groves High School already has completed a series of upgrades to its football and tennis facilities with funds supplied by the 2020 bond issue.
The capital improvement projects in the affluent school district stand in stark contrast to all the school closings in Detroit over the past two decades. Gone are such high schools as Cooley, Finney, Kettering, Mackenzie, Northern, Northeastern, Redford, and Southwestern, serving as a sad reminder of the chasm that exists between the educational “haves” and the “have nots” in Michigan.
