Life at RAFB before RHS

Jerry Ball was wondering about what things were like in the years before he arrived at RHS. Well, I had arrived myself in the fall of 1960, so maybe there is a story here.

In the fall of 1960, I was a freshman at Dover High School in Dover, DE. I had gone to school there with the same group of students since second grade, when we had arrived there from Hickam AFB, HI in 1953. At that time, the base was in the early stages of being re-activated after having been closed after the Second World War. There was no base housing so my folks had bought a Levittown-like house between Dover and the base for us to live in. Every single one of the houses in the subdivision was laid out the same; the only difference was that half had the front door on the right, half on the left.  My dad had been sent on a remote assignment to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1959 and we stayed in Dover. When he got back with orders to transfer to Randolph, we packed up the family station wagon and hit the road. I had just finished my first six weeks in high school and was a totally sullen, rotten teenager who must have been the worst possible company in the long drive down to San Antonio.

When we got to Randolph, my dad found out that we could get base housing, but would have to wait a while. My folks looked around for a place and while searching, we stopped for lunch at the Old Bossy in Schertz. Me, being the rube that I was, looked at all the guys in there with their cool S-C letter jackets and wondered why so many University of Southern California students were in a small town in south Texas.

But my folks couldn't find a place and therefore rented a house in San Antonio, near the Austin Highway, while we waited for our base housing to be assigned. Since the house was in the Northeast Independent School District, my folks took me over to MacArthur High School to enroll me. But to my horror, a ninth grader in 1960-1961 was not a high school student and was instead enrolled in John Nance Garner Junior High. Garner was just one of the wings of what is now MacArthur High, but it was  junior high! I had had to leave everyone I had known to come to Texas and was now being sent back in social standing to junior high. I was not a happy soul,

But when we moved onto the base later that fall, things got a whole lot better. The first thing that was better was our wheels. The base had contracted with a charter bus company (I think it was Kerrville Bus Co.) to take us kids downtown to school at Garner/Mac. And the buses that carried us were not the cheese buses that everyone else had to ride. Oh, no, we were special. We were delivered to school in silver, Greyhound-like buses. I might have been the only one who thought it, but I was pretty sure that I was cool.

It seemed when we arrived in the fall of 1960 that base leadership was willing to provide transport to a variety of schools. Some went to Schertz, some to Central Catholic, some to Alamo Heights, and some to Mac. I don’t think anyone went to Judson. But in those years, Judson was a tiny school. Randolph eventually was a small class AA high school, but Judson was a tiny class A high school. I suspect they didn’t have much to offer beyond very basic schooling. Schertz was a bigger AA school, Alamo Heights and Mac were AAAA sized schools.

 I don’t know how the kids got to Schertz or to Alamo Heights, but suspect it was something similar. The problem with the bus from Mac was that if you wanted to stay for after school activities, your folks had to come into town to get you and that was a 15 mile trip. Mine were never wild about doing it.

We were all pretty pumped when RHS opened. Some of the kids who were going into their senior years decided to stay at Mac or Schertz or Alamo Heights, but those of us who were juniors were ready to go to the new school. Even if we had to leave our cool rides behind, the future looked bright and we really should have worn shades.