Basic grads bemoan decay of hillside B

Scott Dickensheets

Monday, Sept. 15, 1997 | 9:25 a.m.

You can tell it was once a B, although after decades of neglect it looks more like a smeary D. "It's sad to see it," says Terry Lee of the huge, whitish letter crumbling down the flank of a Black Mountain foothill in Henderson. It was once a proud symbol of her school, Basic High, but that was decades ago.

After Lee's class of '72 graduated, Basic moved from its digs on Van Wagenen Street to a new building across town, on Palo Verde Drive, with a giant hillside letter of its own. And the old B began its long slide into disrepair. The old campus became Burkholder Middle School, which, despite having a name conveniently beginning with B, doesn't maintain the letter.

So the old B clings to its hillside, slipping into indistinctness one whitewashed stone at a time. Its decrepitude is easily visible to drivers whizzing along U.S. 95 on Henderson's western edge, beneath the shadow of the broadcast towers on Black Mountain. Just look above the home sites that -- and this was unthinkable in Lee's youth -- are being graded only a few hundred yards from the once-remote area. For some alumni, the aging letter is a forlorn reminder that the small-town Henderson of their high school years is long, long gone.

"It's very sad what's happened to B hill," says Basic alumna Colleen McGinty, class of '59. "We've talked about it. It was such a big part of our high school time."

"It makes me very sad, too," says Linda Sloan, class of '58, McGinty's co-worker at Dooley Elementary School. "We had some wonderful times there."

For some reason, the Clark County School District doesn't keep records of such important matters as big whitewashed letters, so it's unclear how old the old B is. "It was there when I moved there in '56," says Mike O'Callaghan, SUN executive editor and a former Basic teacher. But when you note that -- thanks to a shortage of convenient hillsides -- many of the city's high schools don't have hillside letters, the crumbly B is presumably among the oldest around.

To many an alumni mind, it brings back the halcyon daze of youth, always linked to homecoming hoopla: Basic students repainting the B every year and snake-dancing down Water Street during the parade; beauty pageants and game-night bonfires; burning the other team in effigy. Old Basic hands like to think of it as a more innocent time, when an excess of school spirit didn't violate notions of cool. When, for instance, underclassmen could be "sold" as "slaves" to do menial tasks for upperclassmen, and it would be taken as harmless homecoming fun.

"I'm nostalgic," says Judy Pitchford, class of '64, a former Basic cheerleader. "That's my Black Mountain hill. It's what Henderson was all about when I was growing up. Of course, it's not anymore."

Ah, memories: "Once (during a B-painting expedition)," says McGinty, "I decided I could get my '56 Ford up the hill. The boys literally had to pick it up and turn it around." Probably every year produced a story like that. Or this: "One year, the Industrial Days beauty pageant was held the night of the day we painted the B. Half the contestants were burned to a crisp! You could spot all the patriotic ones who'd been out painting."

For Lee, memories of the B predate her Basic years. "Even before I was in high school," she says, "I'd look at it and go, 'As soon as I'm a freshman, I'll get to go do that!'" Painting the letter was a rite of homecoming, the natural order of things, upperclassmen bossing underclassmen around, whitewash splashed everywhere. School spirit demanded no less. To Lee and her classmates, to B or not to B wasn't really a question.

"It was way out there in the boonies," she says. "You had to walk all the way up there and all the way back, with all that whitewash, and it ended up all over you. It was fun!"

And now ... well, time passes, and not just for large letters painted on hillsides. "We're all older and crumbling like the B," McGinty says. "I guess it comes with progress. Pretty soon, people will be living on our B!"

A lot of things get lost with progress, too; this is what the ruined B means to Carl Henderson, class of '62. His sensitivity perhaps heightened by the shared name, he notes that a lot of old Henderson has been scraped away to make room for the new: the city's first elementary school and civic center (leveled by a new City Hall), the old movie theater (now a parking lot); the neighborhood where he grew up (knocked down ages ago).

What is there of Henderson's Henderson that he can show his grandkids? "We need more or less to save something," he says, and he thinks the old B would be a dandy start. "If we could get it back up again, that would be great. I think we need something for Basic, as a history-type situation."

Save the B? Nah, says Terry Lee's husband, Dave, class of '63. He doesn't share all this big-letter sentimentality. "It doesn't make me sad," he says. "It makes me think, it used to be so far out there, and now there's a road right by it!

"For me, it changed a long time ago," he says. "When they moved the high school, that was the end. The B hasn't been the B for years."