Central Campus Block Party Boasts Variety, Wonder

A “future” Central Campus student gets a close look at one of the aquariums in the Marine Biology program.

Things started sedately enough on Monday night with the opening of the 14th annual art show. But last night the circus came to town at the Central Campus Block Party and there were a lot more than three rings to it.

Poets in the commons; sea monsters in the 3rd floor aquarium; trips back in time in the Tech High Hall of Memories; Ivy Leaguers in the board room; scavenger hunters everywhere (pause for a deep breath); ROTC cadets directing traffic, working out in the gym and parading the halls with bags of free popcorn like waiters do with trays of champagne at swanky adult affairs; fashion designers, commercial photographers, filmmakers, culinary artists and nursing assistants all demonstrating tricks of their trades (these are all students we’re talking about here). Plants were for sale from the district’s in-house greenhouse. Speaking of plants, there was a Tree of Knowledge in the Downtown School where a 20th anniversary is being celebrated. Just across the catwalk at Central Academy potters were selling their wares for the benefit of the Young Women’s Resource Center and the stairwell was lined with six-word memoirs penned in the award-winning CA creative writing program (“Just give me a minute, Dad”). There were welders welding and builders building. Fresh t-shirts were hot off the presses and finishing touches were being put on the runway in the auditorium where the annual fashion show will take off on Thursday night.

Hard as it was to know where to begin it was just as difficult to call a halt. So many programs and languages and samples, so little time. But that’s kind of the idea, according to Julie Rosin, Assistant Director at Central Campus. “We do this in the spring because by that time of the school year there is so much outstanding work by students to build the event around,” she said. “This is a fun way to promote everything we have to offer.”

She got that right. Think carnival midway with booths from the Career & Technical Institute where the rides and rigged games would normally be.

Visitors stood at the railing along the walking track that overlooks the gymnasium and watched ROTC cadets below take turns on a punching bag gizmo that measures impact and is the equivalent of the classic sideshow test of strength involving a sledgehammer and a bell. Watching them line up to take their shots the question occurred as to how you measure the punch packed by the Central one-two: Campus and Academy. One way is to note that Yale, MIT and Brown were all making pitches in the multipurpose room. They’re lofty, faraway places but you can certainly reach them from here. Why would they go to the trouble? Because they know it makes sense to cast nets where the big fish are. Kids come here as middle-school minnows and leave like something cultivated in the nationally renowned marine biology/aquarium science program[s] upstairs.

Take away the popcorn and the sno-cones and the karaoke, though, and it’s really not a circus or carnival they’ve got going on at 1800 Grand this week. It’s business as usual, the latest and greatest incarnation of a building that began as an assembly plant for Ford Model-T’s like the one on display in the front lobby. Later it started cranking out graduates ready to take on the world, first as Des Moines Technical High School. The Tech Hall of Memories was an out-of-the-way attraction at the Block Party. Many of the trophies could use a good buffing. There are old championship footballs and basketballs, deflated now like rotted fruits. But one of the mementoes there reads especially relevant to current events. It’s a reflection on “Tech in the 1950’s” written by Boris Yaro, Class of 1956. He went on to attend USC and from there became a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer for the Los Angeles Times where he covered pivotal events like the Watts race riots and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

He recalled shoes selling for ten bucks a pair, dime sodas, girls in dresses and skirts at school and tennis shoes worn in gym class and nowhere else. And then he had this to say: “Our Class of ’56 came away with an earned sense of self-worth and more importantly, something to offer the world.”

The more things change…

View more photos of 2014 Block Party

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