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David Merrick (1970)
Awesome Fellow PHS Classmates:
Thank you to those with the time to read this long entry!
I believe I posted this years ago, but it bears repeating. My understanding is that after "the baby boom" generation passed, and the San Leandro high school student population declined, Pacific High School was scheduled to be sold off as a trade school [A General Motors Training Facility used to be directly across the street] or as an extension to Chabot Jr. College (thus the round academic building.)
Without going into detail, when one thinks about it, Pacific High School's basic design was a bit "over the top" for a 1962 public school.
As a result, Pacific High School, as a public school, therefore, was never "finished." The class rooms on the south side of the arts and crafts/home ec wing was never constructed. The "second floor" was concrete with a chain link fence open to the outside.
There was no overhead cover between the academic building and the gym. We [1968-1970] used to complain about having to walk through the rain to get to gym class.
There was a layout for an olympic sized swimming pool between the boys and girls gym that remained a weed laden plot of dirt. Never built. It was not considered economic for SLUSD to complete the swimming pool facilities at a building scheduled to be eventually sold off when John Muir Junior High had an olympic sized pool with a diving alcove only a couple of blocks away (try to convince our humiliated swim team of this logic!)
I was working on asbestosis cases for a major San Francisco law firm [it was known as far back as the 1930's that exposure to asbestos could cause a form of lung cancer called mesothelioma but kept confidential by asbestos manufacturers until this "dirty little secret" was "outed" in the early 1980's] and in 1988 I happened upon a file regarding a class action lawsuit for $1 Billion filed by The San Leandro Unified School District on behalf of all national school districts who had to remove asbestos from their schools or, worse yet...tear the schools down because the effective removal of asbestos from a school was extremely tedious.
Major asbestosis lawsuit files were shared, nationally, by law firms involved in the lawsuits. Our San Francisco law firm was not directly involved with the SLUSD. We simply had a copy of the "pleading." I can say that no other national school district filed such a lawsuit or we would have had a copy of it.. It was the SLUSD only.
Remember that white powder on the ceiling of the academic building? Guys like to flip pencils up there to see if they could get them to stick into it. Ocasionally there would be left a white powder on the hallway floor.
That powder over your head, and uder your feet included raw asbestos.
This included the asbestos in the overhead acoustic tiles in the classrooms.
Before anyone reflects on attending up to three years in a building with raw asbestos hanging overhead, [and that was only the asbestos you could see] bear in mind you have probably inhaled more asbestos from the ambient ffiliments in the air secondary to automobile drum brakes on public streets and in fireproof floor tile than ever at PHS! There was no significant health concern at PHS. It just seemed "politically incorrect" to maintain a any public building, within which students were REQUIRED to attend, laden with asbestos. And if indeed my claim is accurate, that PHS was designed to be eventually sold in the first place, the cost of asbestos removal just reduced PHS's eventual sales value.
My theory as to why PHS was torn down, [with memory being what it is I have to present this as simply an educated theory now] and the property sold minus the building complex that used to occupy it, is based on my understanding that the building designed from the beginning to be eventually sold anyway. If there were favoritism to San Leandro High, that favoritism would have been in place before the first shovel of dirt was turned in the construction of PHS in the early 1960's. Was Pacific High School destined, from the very beginning, to deny its graduates class reunions in the building where they attended high school? Was our fate predestined to have to eventually have to stare at our [former] high school as a [former] Western Careeer College, [former] HEALD, or an extension of Chabot College?
Or, as now, a Nordstrom Rack mini-mall?
If the Vikings of PHS were "sold down the river," it might have been with a process that began in the planning stage before the school was built, not necessarily a 1980's decision
If anyone has conflicting information I would like to hear about it. Twenty-two years would have been a long time for the SLUSD to continue a plan for the fate of a building designed in the early 1960's. [Remember the steel louvres over the windows in the academic building? They would have protected us from an atomic bomb blast. Is that 1960's or what???]
If the SLUSD truly felt the need for two permanent hgih schools, and PHS was not designed to be eventually sold, from its inception, and in lieu of being sold, it had to be torn down, then why was it not replaced? If the the SLUSD was not angry at having to tear down the building, rather than sell it, then why was The San Leandro Unified School District , only one of thousands of national school districts with asbestos laden buildings, the one district upset enough to file that $1 Billion class action lawsuit about the same time PHS was closed?
GO VIKINGS ! ! !
YOU CAN TAKE AWAY OUR BUILDING BUT YOU CAN'T KILL OUR SPIRIT!
David Merrick
Class of 1970
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