Salina High School - Trail Yearbook (Salina, KS)

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activity attracted people to Salina by the thousands. Within the next score of years the pop- ulation of Salina was to increase approx- imately l5,000 persons. More businesses were added, houses sprung up all over the area, especially to the south, southwest and later to the southeast. Shopping centers began to be established, buses became a necessity, more streets, more of everything that goes to make a city. - Within this period of expansion, Salina was to build seven new elementary schools, many of them containing many more than the usual seven rooms, a new senior high school and to vote bonds for a new iunior high. All this within the short span of eight years. On Monday evening, October 27, T952, Superintendent W. M. Ostenberg presided at the dedication ceremonies for the new two and one half million dollar senior high school, erected on a site that had been a wheat field only two years before. On the following two nights, more than 10,000 citizens wandered through the new building to see what had been added to the Salina schools. The new structure was to have many new features compared to any- thing that had been seen in Salina high schools. A new gymnasium with a seating ca- pacity of approximately 3,000 was one of the first things to meet theinquisitive visitor. A library, second to none in the country, was ready to receive scores of new books, well equipped science laboratories for both biol- ogical and physical science was a part of the overall plan. A complete shop section with a feature never before offered in Saline County, rooms for vocational agriculture, and spacious quarters for allied industrial arts subiects. One of the show spots of the school was a new auditorium with 1,400 permanent seats from which everyone could see and hear any type of production which would be seen on the stage. This building, after five years of use, is much as it was then except that hundreds more students use the facilities daily than on the opening weeks only six years before. 'li

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government, the type that is still in exis- tence. Within the next few years the city also became the hub of transcontinental highway routes which are known now as highways 81 and 40. With the advent of bus traffic, this proved to be a stroke of good business for the city. As the city grew, naturally the pro- gressive citizens of Salina began to think more and more of their education problems. ln 1903 Phillips school was built to provide room for the elementary enrollment on west Iron. Within three years South Park was added to the elementary school plant. Two years after the building of Wash- ington, 1910, Hawthorne School was con- structed to take care of the expansion to- ward the northwest of the original townsite. Only two years separated the erection of Hawthorne until Lowell school became a necessity. The gradual overcrowding of elementary schools and Washington as well as the iunior high movement, prompted the building of Lincoln iunior high in 1915. The town continued to expand toward the west which made a new school necessary in that terri- tory and Whittier became a reality in 1919. The following year Roosevelt was built to 10 add to the junior high set up. This iunior high set up was to take care of all iunior high youngsters until the new building was under construction and is to be open by the 1958-1959 school year. Not only were permanent new schools built, but for several years so called tem- porary cottages were built to house the overflow for certain schools. lt happened that nearly all the temporary structures were in constant use from that day to this and in the meantime many others were built, a program that is still being followed. Following the construction of Roose- velt, Dunbar, Bartlett, Franklin, Oakdale, and additions to Roosevelt as well as to Hawthorne were all completed within the next decade. All this was completed by the year 1930, the year after the market crash and the beginning of the depression. There were no additions to the building program for a period of 17 years, until the construction of 'the Barn' in 1947. Following the declaration of war and the selection of Salina as a training base for the air force, the city began to grow by leaps and bounds. From a rather complacent city of 20,000, military personnel and laborers, contractors and allied lines of

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