Tearing down Crestmoor

We got together to celebrate the 18 years Crestmoor was open and mourn the tragic and short-sighted decision to close it in 1980. For most of the next four decades, it remained a grossly underused site for a continuation high school and some classrooms that were leased to a variety of nonschool entities.

The San Mateo Union High School District finally agreed to sell the property in 2020 for $84.3 million and sometime after that they shut the whole place down. It is fenced off. Waist-high weeds surround the school buildings and even grew in the swimming pools, where I spent a sizable portion of my high school days.

It is enough to break your heart. One reason why: The school was nowhere near the end of its useful life. Indeed, as the newest of the district’s seven schools, a lot of life remained in the place. Ultimately, the district Board of Trustees was faced with closing Crestmoor or Burlingame High School, the latter holding all the political cards. Crestmoor never had a chance.

It is a shame for another reason, which was broadly evident at the reunion. It was a good school, populated by smart, energetic students and a talented faculty. We were struck, in retrospect, at how young the teachers were. Although they seemed so much older, some of them were barely five years older than we were. Some of the teachers — Sam Goldman, John Christgau and Chuck Kent, to name a scant few — left lasting impressions on us. Some alumni talked openly about a teacher or an administrator who changed their lives for the better.

What is it about high school? It is only four years. Among those of us at the reunion, it is a fraction of the time that has passed — a half century for some of us.

But we can remember the friends, the events, the moments and how it felt to be there as if it were yesterday.

One attendee — interestingly, not an alum — answered succinctly: It is four years when we move from childhood to adulthood. We learn to drive, start dating, leave a safe and familiar environment for the larger world. We set lives, careers, even families in motion. We grow — in my case, almost a foot, from short, awkward and pudgy to a tall, confident writer and athlete.

My contemporaries and I lived through and were touched by the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, protests, the emerging hippie scene, youthful rebellion and dramatic changes in fashion and clothing. One of my classmates on the high school newspaper wrote a column denouncing nonviolence as a means of social change. And it ran in the paper, by god. One day, after lunch, fully a third of the student body staged a sit-in, refusing to go to class in protest over a restrictive dress code. As a direct result, girls were allowed to wear trousers to school and boys could have facial hair. One alum could recall in detail the endless grief he received over the length of his hair. In a lovely moment of defiance, a photo of this individual ran in the yearbook in full color. He was resplendent in a paisley shirt.

From the outside, Crestmoor resembled a penitentiary. Inside, it was home.

According to the latest information, the site will become housing. The fields will be preserved for community use. San Bruno gets to make this decision, not the district, so it might actually happen that way.

But someday relatively soon, they will knock down the place. That’s fine. This is America. We tear things down and build new things all the time.

Crestmoor will live on only among one another. That’s fine, too. Last weekend, old friends were happy to gather together, to laugh together, to remember and to transport themselves once more to a time and place that, really, no longer exists, except in memories. And those cannot be torn down.

It was a time. It was our time. And we were immersed in it.

LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN: It is always a joy when a correction requires a correction. An item last week about Ann Schneider not running for the San Mateo County Board of Education should have described her as soon-to-be former Millbrae councilmember.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.