Here are some photos of the dismantling of the oldest building at my high school (Dee-Mack High School in Mackinaw, Illinois). Most of the other buildings have long been town down and replaced and this one was the last to be torn down and replaced. These photos are over a year old now.
It’s been over 20 years since I hung out in this portion of the building with all of my high school friends. Some of my fondest memories from this particular building include working and goofing off in the computer lab, ditto in the yearbook staff office, ditto in geometry class, and ditto the library and in study hall. Oh, and I almost forgot all about the cafeteria in the basement. Well, it was a lunch room anyways. Calling it a cafeteria implies that they actually cooked food in there. And who could forget the big Shuttle mural. Thanks to my high school art teacher, Mrs Schultz, for forwarding these great photos to me. Click on a photo to see a full sized version.
Please add your comments below to tell me (and the 3 people who read this blog regularly) what your favorite memories of old Dee Mack are!
It says “Mackinaw High School 1914” on the front of the building.
Kurt;
I had no idea they were tearing down the old high school. Are they building a new high school in it’s place? Where are the kids going at present? Is the gym going to remain in it’s place?
Myron
Hey Myron! I added some more words to the post cause it was a bit misleading the way I originally wrote it. All the torn down portions of the school have been rebuilt with new modern buildings. This portion was the oldest building and the last to be torn down and rebuilt, I think. These photos were from 2008. Anyone out there have a recent photo that you can send me? I’ll post it here if you send me a recent photo of the school!
Dude!
Did you do this?! Was this another one of your crazy engineer Dee-Mack pranks gone awry? How sad!
I engineer one harmless little prank in high school and I never get to live it down! Thanks for continuously reminding me of my one and only poor decision from my youth, Joe! 🙂
http://www.cafepress.com/deemack88float
One memory I have from the computer lab was the Tandy TRS-80 computers that we had in there. These things were high tech in the mid-80s! Some of them even had floppy disks in addition to the old cassette tape drives for storage!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
My biggest memory about the cafeteria is that my traditional lunch entree was one of those pre-packaged microwavable sandwiches … the McRib type sandwich. They fed us junk back then that is hardly even fit for vending machines these days. Today’s nutritionists would probably faint if they saw what they fed us in school back then.
Also, the lunch room was so small that most of us had to get our food and eat it in the gym.
My greatest memory of Dee-Mac High was during drivers ed. I can’t remember the teacher but I do remember what he said to me one day while I was driving. We were on a back road and some chickens run out in front of us, I brake and try to avoid hitting them. He looks at me and says “It would be better killing the chicken than yourself, so next time run it over.” I got the biggest laugh over that but have never forgotten it.