Basic grads repaint hillside B

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 1997 | 10 a.m.

It took determination. It took hours of physically demanding rock arranging. It took a cranky paint sprayer. Saturday, on a hillside in Henderson, something old became something new again as a band of anonymous Basic High School grads repainted the crumbling school letter near the old campus.

The result: One killer B. "It looks so cool," says Name Withheld, class of '83. She organized the paint-a-thon after a whimsical SUN article called attention to the letter's decay.

"I got (the article) on computer from a friend. I'd always thought it should be repainted, so I got fired up about it, and I showed it to a friend who got fired up about it -- we all got fired up about it!"

The painting project became their modest attempt to preserve a bit of Henderson history amid the clangor of booming new Henderson. More important, it was meant as a tip of their caps to the generations who attended the school prior to 1973, when Basic was moved across town. "It's from the last 25 classes to the first 25 classes," Name Withheld says.

Why the no-name policy? To keep attention focused firmly on the past. "We thought we should do it for the older crowd who can't do it anymore," says Identity Disguised, class of '84. "You know, a lot of those people built Henderson."

For some pre-'73 alumni, the ruined, ancient B, neglected for decades, was a sad symbol of their past -- and the city's -- slipping irretrievably away. While the letter brought back jolly memories of high school and homecoming (traditionally the time of year when students repainted it), it also reminded them of all that has changed since those Mayberryish days.

You can't bring back the past, but you can spiff it up a little. The site, on a Black Mountain foothill just west of U.S. 95, was "pretty trashed," Name Withheld says. Several participants met there the previous Saturday to begin arranging the rocks into a reasonable B.

"It was like a little tiny reunion," Identity Disguised says of the paint party. "We had a barbecue and listened to old songs we knew."

"There were four families up there, with kids running around the desert while we painted," Name Withheld says. "People were driving by honking at us. It was pretty cool."

Someone had brought along an intermittently functioning paint sprayer and generator, with which they were finally able to spray paint donated by Skip's Ameritone Paint Center and Frazee Paint and Wallcoverings. "We finished in the dark," Identity Disguised says, but it sounds like a good time was had by all: "When we got all done, we sang the Basic fight song and had kind of a toast. Then we barbecued."

"Hot dogs and baked beans," Name Withheld reports.

"On Sunday we called some of the older people and told them what we'd done," says Identity Disguised. "They thought it was pretty nice."

"That's pretty cool," says Basic grad Terry Lee, class of '73. As with most old-school alumni, the gesture comes as a pleasant surprise; she'll make a point of driving by to check it out. "I hope they had as much fun up there as we did," Lee says. With hot dogs and baked beans, fight songs and old music -- of course they did!

So give them an A for their B effort. Of course, if they were truly up for a challenge, they could have painted the old old B. "That B we painted is not the original B," says Basic's current school banker, Stephanie Wurzer, class of '63, who happened to join Saturday's paint-fest. She says there was an even larger letter on the flank of Black Mountain itself, but it was abandoned when it proved too dangerous to get to.

"We used to, in my day, call it Big B and Little B," she says. On Saturday, as people who weren't yet born when she graduated worked to invest old ground with new meaning, Wurzer and her sister studied Black Mountain, looking for the old site. "We could almost sorta see it," she says. Well, one letter at a time.

Meanwhile, on a hillside east of town, Basic's current B -- baby B? -- glistens with a fresh coat of homecoming white.