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Former students take final walk through WWR
By ED RUNYAN
WARREN
You can take a kid out of the West Side, but you apparently never can take away their West Side pride.
On the second and final walk-through Wednesday for the former Western Reserve High School on Loveless Avenue Southwest, scores of people with some sort of attachment to the building that opened in 1966 got to say goodbye.
The building is slated for demolition later this year.
“It was family. If you’re from the West Side, it’s family,” said Jim Devlin, a 1969 Reserve graduate and longtime booster.
When the school was being built, Warren students had an opportunity to create something brand new — the Reserve identity. They did that by choosing the Raider as Reserve’s mascot and black and gold as its colors because no other area school was using either of those, Devlin said.
To this day, when Reserve grads get together, they remember the pride they had in being from Reserve, Devlin said.
That’s why Charles Ciapala, who spent his freshman through junior years at Reserve, hated having to make the move to Harding in the fall of 1990, the year the school district turned Reserve into a middle school and consolidated high-school students into one building — the Harding building.
“What I remember is being dragged across town to finish at Harding,” Ciapala said.
“There was nothing like game night,” remembers Brad Ayres, referring to basketball games in the Reserve gymnasium, considered by some to be among the largest in Ohio, with a seating capacity of about 3,300 and a distinctive balcony on one end.
For Sharleen Humes Johnson, a 1979 Reserve graduate, one of the things that made Reserve so great was its storied rivalry with Harding.
“It was kind of like sibling rivalry,” she said. “They [Harding] always thought the East Side was better, but the West Side had pride, and that was our logo.”
Humes Johnson said she has many fond memories from her days in the building, especially of her art teacher, Alan Orr.
“He made art the most fun, not just learning. He was always so loving and encouraging. He cared about us,” she said.
Humes Johnson brought her four children to Warren from her home near Pittsburgh to see the school and keep that bit of her history alive.
“I’ll miss not being able to go by some day,” she said.
Lots of cameras and camera phones were in use as people took one last look.
“After they tear it down, they might realize the history — not just sports. Its education, too,” Dave Jorden, a 1984 Western Reserve graduate, said as he stood in the gym.