20 years ago today (as this is written on October 5, 2019), the Cardinal Brennan Jr/Sr High School gymnasium was dedicated by the Bishop of Allentown..
There was much fanfare of the Middle States audit taking place that school year.. Principal Fr. Frans Berkhout ensured that students were prepped and ready for spot checks .. for the stresses that come with a grand review of an entire campus..
Along with it was a capital campaign aimed at raising money to build a new field house since the existing one had seen its day..
New computer labs were built in 99, new math classrooms, and the crowning jewel: The new gym..
The stage was set.. the Bishop was in town..
Edward Cullen offered his blessings on the new gym during a school mass on October 5, 1999.. People were “grateful and relieved,” the Pottsville REPUBLICAN HERALD reported…
But the rest would soon become history..
Berkhout was out after the capital campaign..
By August 2000 the football season itself was canceled due to lack of players–a first in Brennan history.. Writing began to form on walls…
While the Lady Chargers won their first basketball District 11 championship in history in March of 2003 and 2004, the number of students in the school begins to diminish..
In 2006, the entire football program is suspended…
February 2007L: Letters were sent to parents inviting them to talk about enrollment i the school..
March 2007: The Diocese did not send the bishop as they did in October 99, but instead a representative to talk to more than 400 people at a meeting about the future of Cardinal Brennan. No congratulatory applause about $600,000 capital campaigns.. just a quiet and slow death.
On March 25, 2007, the final March in March occurred.. as students cried in hallways, the announcement was made that Cardinal Brennan would close its doors. (https://coalspeaker.com/2007/03/25/the-final-march-of-cardinal-brennan-high/ ) .
All of this melancholy and infinite sadness was captured in stark difference from the hope, hype, and spectacle of the October 1999 moment..
Back during the previous century, as the gym was being constructed, I was attending Cardinal Brennan and concluding my teenage years in the amazing school…
When I graduated in 1999, prior to the finality of the new gym, the valedictorian of the school had a profound message that could be reconsidered given the circumstances of years that occurred after its delivery,
“Each of us are a single thread to complete the larger tapestry, each one of having different strength, texture, and color. Each one by itself does nothing and exist only as a single strand. Yet when we are all woven together, it will have one strength throughout, one uniform texture, and the colors will blend. Only after each thread is in its proper place will we see the whole picture through different eyes. Let us not stray from the course the weaver wants us to follow.”
The valedictorian went on with pros… stating,
“Dried petals lay beneath the sand. Flowers in sand preserve, let our memories be those flowers, and the rest of our lives from this moment forward be the sand, but let us never once forget.”
The words mean as much now (or more) as they meant then.
The gym is now property of North Schuylkill…
All of those tears, hugs.. and long embraces between friends in front of that gymnasium in the summer of 99 are just history… memories are the flowers… forward in the sands of time..
