I discovered a YouTube video of my old elementary school, Ravinia School, with footage from the ’50s. I started kindergarten in 1957. The video shows the Robin Hood mural by the office and kids playing on a piece of playground equipment that was taken down just before I was old enough to try it because some kid broke a collarbone. (I’m still bitter.) Ravinia now has 300 students; at the height of the baby boom, when I was there, we had more than 500.
About Joanne
I can just imagine the parents there with their brand-new Super 8 movie cameras, capturing bits of childhood innocence which had just barely become affordable to film for the first time.
What they’d have made of today’s jaded-by-every-phone-having-video-capability generation, we can only guess. What was once rare and precious has become vulgar.