School Planetarium

In past entries, I’ve referred to the school I attended from the fourth through twelfth grades. Actually, this consisted of two schools, both run by the same group but with one as the grammar school (first through sixth grades) and the other the junior high and high school (seventh through twelfth grades), separated from each other (then) by a large field (the site that they were built on was originally an airfield). The high school campus had a small planetarium on it, at the end of one of the science buildings. I vaguely remember at one time in grammar school walking across the field with my class to the high school side to see a show at that planetarium. This was during the Gemini-early Apollo period during the late 1960s before we landed men on the moon. I thought then that it was pretty cool having a planetarium like that. After actually beginning junior high over there, I rarely had any opportunity to see any shows there, though. As a matter of fact, although the planetarium remained there with a faculty member assigned to direct it throughout my tenure at this school, the last show that I (or anyone else, as far as I know) was given an opportunity to attend was during my eighth grade. That means that for a period of about four years, the planetarium just sat there unused. I heard that it had fallen into disrepair as well. The teacher in charge of this place, at least through my junior year, was an elderly gentleman who decided at some point to take the visually impaired students on campus under his wing. That last planetarium show I saw was actually produced by them. From the ninth through almost all of the eleventh grade I neither saw nor heard anything from him or his precious planetarium. Then, in late April 1973 I went down with my sister and a friend of hers to the Miami Space Transit Planetarium, where we saw a show, narrated by Leonard Nimoy (pre-recorded), about the future of the space program now that the Apollo missions had ended. That got me interested in astronomy again, and the next day at school I walked into the planetarium to discuss it with the planetarium’s director. Only he was too angry too discuss anything like astronomy with me. Seems that he was retiring a little earlier than planned, and all he wanted to do was talk about how no one showed any interest in his work and that we students were just too apathetic and unworthy of this fine planetarium with its poor unrecognized director. All I did then was stand there and listen sympathetically to him ranting and raving, and I was angry, too, that all those students out there weren’t pounding down his door to “get involved” somehow. It was only years later when, looking back on things, that I came to the conclusion that this man, whom I hadn’t seen for years at a stretch, could have simply stepped out of his comfortable little “hobbit hole” of a planetarium and engaged in conversation with some of those “apathetic” students out there just sitting around on benches between classes and on their break periods. But he decided early on that he would only devote himself to a few visually-impaired students and ignore the rest! Feeling the way I do now, if I could have relived our final conversation, I would have had a few fine morsels of rebuke to lay on that dude!

Early in my senior year, I went back to the planetarium to see about joining up with the school’s astronomy club. The planetarium had a new director, a science teacher who was only too happy to leave his classrooms to set up shop there as the new “resident hobbit”. And the planetarium was still broken. The last I saw of it, one of the nearly blind students had a giant swath of electrical wires pulled out of the projector’s main component and was switching some connections around as if he knew what he was doing. And the new director was just placidly letting him play around with this expensive equipment like it was a toy. That aside, for a few weeks at least, it was fun to hang around some fellow students who were interested in the night sky. Unfortunately, I missed a few weeks of school that fall because of an operation I had to undergo. After coming back, I let the astronomy club go and concentrated on other things to close out my senior year there. But I did enjoy it, though. It’s too bad the people in charge there left the planetarium in such a state of neglect and disrepair for so long. Even today, I wonder whether anyone ever got it going again.