A Clock, A Gym, and Central’s History

    Sitting in my living room is an 1850’s steeple clock.  It is a couple of feet tall with two spires and has a hand-painted glass door that opens to reveal the swinging pendulum.  The clock belonged to the Goodrich family, my great-great-great grandparents.  It was given to me by my mother almost 20 years ago, the year before she passed away.
    This clock is not MY history.  It did not chime hourly in my home as a boy, but it chimed in the home of my grandpaw, in the home of his mother, and in the home of her grandparents.  This clock is my FAMILY history.
    In 80 years there will be no one alive who remembers playing basketball, attending prom, or graduating on the steps of Central’s 1927 Gym.   The building will no longer be the history of any individual, but it will still be CENTRAL’s history.
    I am still hopeful that next Monday night our school board decides that the preservation of Central’s history is important enough to actively support the efforts to “Save the Gym” and create a museum and cultural center.  This community will not cease to exist if its oldest building is demolished, but another piece of this community’s history will have disappeared.
    The Central community has defined us.  Our forefathers who died 50 and 100 years ago wrote a script that we follow to this day.  The things of importance to them then were family, faith, friends, honesty, generosity, and hard work.  Those priorities that motivated those pioneers to carve out a home and a living here in Central have been handed down as a legacy for generations.  Preservation of our history is one way we are reminded of that legacy, reminded of who we are.
    Why should we “Save the Gym” and make it a museum of Central’s history?  John Steinbeck said it well in The Grapes of Wrath:
“How will we know it’s us without our past?”