George F. Longino School 1946-1948

College Park, Atlanta, Georgia

I came to Longino School in the third grade in the fall of 1946. My sister Jane was in kindergarten. I lived on Rugby Avenue, about three blocks from the school. I went to Longino School for the third and fourth grades, and then we moved away (we were a military family) and I never lived in Georgia again.

The school building was a brick structure, painted white, set back on a hillside with concrete steps going up to the front door of its single floor. You can see it in the background of the third grade photograph. I believe it went from kindergarten through the seventh grade.

[miss lawrence.]

My third grade teacher was Miss Sara Lawrence. I remember Miss Lawrence mostly as a music teacher. She had an old piano in her classroom, and every morning we sang and she played the piano. Miss Lawrence introduced me to Stephen Collins Foster, with "Old Folks at Home" (with the unaltered words), "Old Black Joe" (which still makes me cry when I sing it), and "Oh Susannah". A few more familiar songs, and a great many I've never heard again, some of them appallingly racist (for Brown vs. Board of Education was still several years in the future). Miss Lawrence was also the school librarian, and I still have two books that were discarded by the school library, one of them Hugh Lofting's original "Dr. Dolittle" before Disney got hold of it many years later.

[fourth grade.]

I remember my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gladys Powell, much less well. I remember a reading book, "Singing Wheels", that I saw a copy of in a glass case in an antique mall a couple of years ago, apparently too valuable to put on display, that I remember mostly for a dumbed-down version of a Laura Ingalls Wilder story I read when my children were young, many years later. That year the school acquired a music teacher (whose name I remember but choose to forget), and we had daily "Glee Club" in the school auditorium, truly dreadful songs.

I remember the cafeteria (what child would not?), where we were supposed to be quiet but never were, and the fifth grade teacher, Miss Hughes, spent the entire hour screaming at us to be quiet. Milk - for one aluminum cafeteria token - came in little round bottles with waxed paper caps held together by pieces of wire that, somewhat painfully stuck in a pocket and smuggled out, could be used for the dozens of things an eight year old boy can find to do with a small piece of wire. I soon learned not to tell my Northern mother about the cafeteria food, much of it new to me, like Brunswick stew (without squirrels, I think), blackeyed peas, and hominy. Mother thought you could catch pellagra just by being the same room with hominy.

I would not bother to post these memories on the Web, except that I still remember the names of most of the children in my class. I've listed the names I can remember here, not in the order they appear in the pictures. (I am the boy wearing glasses on your left in each picture.) Perhaps one of my classmates of more than fifty years ago, searching for Longino School or for their name with a Web search engine, will find this page and write to me.

I remember my best friend Jimmy Lyle, and all the hours we spent - sometimes with some of the other boys - wandering in the woods (for much of the area was undeveloped) and poking around in the mud and gray clay of Camp Creek. I remember children who lived in what seemed to me to be fabulous estates, in nice middle class homes, and in cabins with dirt floors. I remember children so retarded they could not write their names or were several years older than the rest of us (it wasn't called "mainstreaming" then), and children who had been crippled by polio. I won't say which of these children was which.

Boys: Robert Richmond, James Lyle, Erwin Lyle, Lee Largen, James Mason, David Porter, Raymond Parrott, Mackey Weems, Ernest ?, Robert Durden, Donald Payne

Girls: Mary Grace Palmour, Harriet Gunn, Martha Kendrick, Manya Creel, Patricia Nesbitt, Marie Eskew, Betty Jean Belcher, Jean Tippitt, Shelley Woodcock, Diane Tucker, Gloria Chupp, Patricia Chupp, Carol Barbour, Maxine Morrow

What happened to the George F. Longino School? The school no longer exists, and the building was torn down in 2006. According to information formerly on the Fulton County schools Web site, it was succeeded by:

College Park Elementary School
2075 Princeton Avenue
College Park, GA 30337
(404) 669-8040

The success of College Park Elementary, Georgia's first year-round school, has led others to follow. Now in its sixth year, the south Fulton school is one of four year-round schools in Georgia.

College Park has served a community rich in history and takes pride in its outstanding graduates. College Park is housed in a renovated high school and was formed when four small neighborhood schools (Newton Estates, Beavers-Thomas, Sophie M. Avery and George F. Longino) merged in 1987.

The building was acquired by Woodward Academy (formerly Georgia Military Academy, from 1900 to 1966), which presently (summer 2003) uses it as a storage facility. I photographed the building when I visited College Park in the summer of 2003. College Park now is a historical preservation area; in fact, there's a brass plaque on Jimmy's house proclaiming that!

In the spring of 2006 Woodward Academy tore the old school building down, since it really wasn't serviceable as a present-day school building.

George F. Longino was mayor of College Park from 1914 to 1918, and his great-grandson Jack Longino has been mayor of College Park since 1996.

By August 2004, I have located several of these classmates, though I have not yet contacted most of them: Douglas (Mackey) Weems, Harriet Gunn, Mary Grace Palmour, Donald Payne, Elva Maxine Morrow, Raymond Parrott, Eleanor Timmons, James Mason, Martha Kendrick, Manya Creel

To find out more about me, go to the site map for my Web site, and read whatever you fancy.

Bob Richmond
Knoxville, Tennessee
E-mail Bob Richmond

Posted to the Web January 9th, 2000
Updated July 6th, 2006