Warren G. Harding
Elementary School
Hammond, Indiana
This is the Warren G. Harding
Elementary School prior to 1950. It is the school that Jean Shepherd
attended as a boy, growing up in Hammond, Indiana. You will even note that the
street post sign reads "Cleveland Street", the street where Shepherd family
lived in the Hessville neighborhood of Hammond. This is one of the very
few pictures of the school that exists. We checked unsuccessfully with The Times
(newspaper), the Hammond School Board who told us that each school kept old
photographs in their files; with the office of the existing Harding School who
told us that all the pictures were kept in the files of the Hammond School
Board. Yeah, right!
Here is the only photo that I know of that shows the infamous Flag Pole at
Harding School. (It is on the very far right of the photo). It verifies
that the flag pole mentioned in Jean Shepherd's The Christmas Story, was a real
flagpole! It does not appear
in the newer photo at the very top of the page perhaps suggesting that it was
removed because it came to be a hazard to kids.
What happened to the old Harding School building?
Former Harding School student Ken O'Neal reports
that the wooden building
was not demolished in the 1950s as we originally thought.
"The brick building was built as a replacement structure in 1949, but the
wooden building was not torn down until the summer of 1967.
It remained in use until the new
was opened in the fall of 1967 and the junior high/middle school
students
from Harding were sent to the old Morton building on
Beginning in the fall of 1967 all that was left of Harding
was the brick building with students from kindergarten to grade six."
Outside Harding School,
children pitch in to help the war effort by recycling
newspapers. This photo was taken on Cleveland Street during the 1940's.
Older wood frame school building is seen in the background.
Here, students inside the "new" Harding
School in April 1950 monitor the Lost and Found table.
Gloves, hats and scarves are sorted for easy identification by the owners.
Had this table been in place at the
old Harding School building,
no doubt Jean Shepherd and his younger brother "Randy" would have been frequent
visitors looking for lost items one more time before having to tell their
parents what happened to the new mittens they got at Christmas.
This is the
Notice the tail lights of the 1962 Chevy (probably Biscayne model) in the left
foreground.
The person who posted the photo originally stated that it was taken
during the winter of 1966-67, just a few months
before the building was torn down.