The Historic Old Main

The featured image for this post is the Old Main School building in Nicholas County West Virginia. This is where the notorious bat incident of 1983 took place. I mentioned it in a previous article but in short a young man that was taking a class in introductory literature misused his borderline criminal genius to add some realistic excitement during a reading of Homer. Unfortunately as an adult I’m actually held responsible for my actions today. It’s just as well, at her age the teacher probably couldn’t handle the shock. The yard you see in the foreground is one of the places where we would have lunch. In the Early 80s there would have been two or three boom boxes powered by large (by today’s standards) battery banks. You would have seen some Walkman radio/cassette payers. These bright yellow boxes were carried on the belt or in a pocket. Today we do everything on our phones but when I roamed the halls of this building a mobile phone was the size of a shoe box (or larger) and had to plugged into a car. When I attended classes here the building was heated by steam pipes and occasionally we would see large accumulations of Ice near the vents.

The historic building is one hundred and fifteen years old. It serves as a center for the arts now. Perhaps one day day I’ll see a play based on the the Odyssey there. But, I’ll bet that when the adventure gets to the river Styx they don’t have real bats for effect.