2017 Tour of the Pennings Building & Grounds

Brett Dockry, class of '67, shared these photos on facebook from visit and tour he took of the grounds during his 50th reunion weekend in 2017.  The consensus of the comments on facebook was how similar things still look and that it brought back a lot of (mostly good) memories!

Here is the Reid Street elevation facing St. Norbert College.  This is where a lot of us went in first thing in the morning, although I remember buses dropping us off on Third Street and entering from the North (river) side sometimes.  The exterior of the building has not changed a lot.

This is still the South elevation, but toward the back of the building.  The middle row of windows would be the auditorium.  The top row would have been the balcony, but they had it closed off and turned it into a computer lab  (TRS-80s.)  The bottom row would have been to the balcony of the gym, which was a storage area in the 80s.  Mr. Bauknecht's senior English classroom at the upper right.

This is the North elevation facing the river.  I think I remember all the classrooms from the 80s.  Mr. Pigeon's junior English at the upper left.  Doc Coyle's History at the upper right.  Father La's math classroom at the lower right.  And was that Sister Janet's freshman algebra at the lower left?  I think so.

This is a nice shot of the front of the building through the trees.  A '70s graduate mentioned that at least two of the trees that are still there were planted to remember a student who was killed in an accident.  

Here's a nice shot of the front of the school.  I had just been doing some research on yearbooks and was pretty sure I had just seen a similar shot in one of the 1960s books.

Sure enough, I found it.  The 1967 Argos Editors used this shot in the front inside cover of the 1967 yearbook.  The windows are updated and the trees are a little different, but it is strikingly similar over a 50 year interval.  The cool thing is Brett Dockry was Co-editor of the 1967 yearbook.  I wonder if he remembered this shot when he framed the 2017 one?

On to the inside of the building.  It took me a minute to place this, but I think we are in the basement level looking South.  If so, my locker is one of those on the right.  Cool that it is still there!  The stairs on the left lead down to the gym and up to the main floor.  Dixie Davidson's art room was behind the lockers on the right.  And the cafeteria was at the far end on the right as well.

Let's check out the gym while we are down here.  This is looking East.  There is another post with some APHS Gym History, but you can see all of those features are still here.  Those wood panels above the backboard were pressbox or more spectator area.  Our weight room was behind the doors at floor level.

This is looking the other way, back towards the school.

Now Brett is upstairs shooting toward the back wall.  Notice the Squire Football Player and the Fighting Squire in the balcony to the left.  There use to be a wall there, and that was the football team's locker room.  Nice to see the wall art survived!

One more shot from the balcony looking back toward the school.

The last shot from downstairs is the cafeteria.  It has been remodeled and looks nothing like it did in the Pennings days.  But this is the space where groups of 75 Squires would come in to eat lunch and have a rollicking break in a busy school day.  It was usually pretty loud!

Now we are into the hallway on the main floor of Pennings.  Trophy cases built above and between the lockers.  The stairs to the auditorium are to the photographer's right.  Up and to the left are the stairs down to the rarely used main entrance, and the office just past those steps.  

Same hallway, with a better view of the trophy case.  I wish I had some pictures of those when they were full.  Except for the banners on the ceiling, this space has not changed much at all.

Here are the stairs down from the main hallway to the front entrance.  This was never used for anything when I was there.  It looks like they have made a little sitting area there now, but I remember it always being empty.

As long as we're here, let's check out the auditorium.  Here is the view from the stage.  The balcony was where Mr. Bauknecht (Director) and the lighting crew would be working the play.  Both of the sides used to be balconies too, but they were blocked off and used for other purposes.

The balcony on the South side was used for a very long and skinny computer lab where we learned to program in BASIC on a handful of TRS-80s, saving our work on to cassette tape.  If you were unable to retrieve your program from the tape (which happened quite a lot) Mr. Bauknecht would say your program was in the bitty bucket, and you'd have to start over.

Looking down from the back of the auditorium, that stage looks impossibly tiny.  Nat Zettel '83 tells me it was tinier until they extended it almost to the first row between Oklahoma '82 and Fiddler on the Roof '83.  That crowded the pit band into the lower right.  Father Peter (Ed) Funk said that when he played Jesus in Godspell, he had to get from the stage (when he died) to the back of the theater (when he rose) by running down through the gym and back up!

Finally we make our way up to the second floor.  If I have my bearings right, we are looking South. The stairs to the other closed off balcony, which had been turned into the teachers lounge, were to the left.  The Chapel (I was trying to remember what was above the main entrance, but it was the Chapel I think) is to the right.  Way at the end of the hall up some stairs was an office.  Mr. O's Disciplinarian office in my time.

Here is what was the chapel in the middle of the top floor facing Third Street.  It seems to have been turned into a little office now, but it still has the false wall with the stained glass.  I always thought it was sort of clever that they kept the outside looking like a school, but got that church feel inside.

If I remember correctly, the Library was between the Chapel and Doc Coyle's room also facing Third Street.  Mrs. Phelan was the Librarian in the 80s, she had a wry wit and was kind to us as she oversaw the books and the studying.

It looks like it has become an ROTC space now for meetings and books.  I like the old wood floors they brought back.  I remember an old, crappy, green carpet was in there back in the day.  Odd that I can picture that.

This was Mr. Tessner's Chemistry classroom in the Southwest corner when I was there, but Brett said that it was Father Frenzl's Detention Room back in the 60s.  By the 80s, Detention had moved to Mr. Oettinger's Biology classroom next door.

It's funny that it's pretty much still laid out like a Chem classroom, but the sinks and the Bunsen Burners are long gone.  Still has the chalkboard, but the Periodic Table of the Elements is no longer above it.  Did Father Frenzl teach Chemistry before Mr. Tessner arrived?

Finally we move to the grounds outside.  You can argue more has changed outside than in.  The Nicolet Paper building is still there, but it was sold to International Paper and then some Finnish Company.

And there's a brand new bridge crossing the river.  The West side is near where it always was, maybe a little closer to the school, but the East end is a block South of where it used to be.  It still weirds me out to see the dams on the North side of the Bridge instead of the SNC side.

Turning around, we see the North Elevation that faces the river.  More parking back here now, but I think it was all grass for outdoor gym class back in the day.  There was a chain link fence to keep balls out of the river, but it is gone now as we can see from the bridge picture.

Walking to the back of the building, Brett is standing about where the Band Hall was.  We had a student parking lot here too, but it was gravel.  No blacktop or lines for us, just squeeze your car in there and get to class!

And finally back to the the front and the main entrance.  Brett said it was used for guests in his day, but by the 80s I don't think we were using these doors at all.  It has the reliefs of the students holding books just like the other entrance.  That's a cool, unique, little feature of the building.

Thank you Brett Dockry for sharing these photos with all of the Squires.  You can find Brett's original post from March 2021 on the Abbot Pennings High School facebook site with some more stories about the pictures.