August 2019 : Volume 19 - Issue 11

Newsletter for the Alumni and Friends of
Hicksville High School Hicksville, New York

The Editors:
Buffalo Bob Casale '61	Linda (Piccerelli) Hayden '60
Pat (Koziuk) Driscoll '56	Bob (Gleason) Wesley '61

Contributing Editors: Bob Gillette & Walter Schmidt

Webmaster: Roger Whitaker

To contact the editors, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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HICKSVILLE VIETNAM WAR ERA MEMORIAL - PROJECT UPDATE

The final Confirmed List of Names, organized alphabetically by graduating class year, just as it will appear on the actual Memorial is what we will continue to publish from this point forward! To review the final list, please go to this month's Update in the Honoring Our Veterans tab of this issue of HixNews.

Construction progress continues to be excellent!! In addition, another $1,000 was received in new donations in July! For details, please see the July 2019 Update, as noted above.

Since our last UPDATE, the Memorial's Center Stone has been mounted on the previously poured concrete footers. Note the picture below, taken by John Tranchina, HHS '64, just after it was mounted.

As always, should you wish to make any comments on the Project's status, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

On behalf of the Project Team,
Joe Carfora, HHS 1962

The Newsletter

Photo Gallery

Places that have Gone Bye-Bye

Birthdays & Anniversaries

Memory Lane

Emerson High School, Oklahoma City

Contractors began work on four classrooms of Emerson High School in Oklahoma City , they knew their remodel would improve education - but they never expected it would impact local history. This what they found hidden.

Looking to upgrade the rooms with new whiteboards and smartboards, the workers had to first remove the outdated chalkboards. But when they began to pull away the old boards, they made a startling discovery.

Beneath the current boards rested another set of chalkboards - untouched for nearly 100 years. Protected and totally undisturbed, the century-old writings and drawings looked like they were made just yesterday. Here, a November calendar rolls into December. A turkey marks the celebration of Thanksgiving.

Look at the top of this blackboard!

A multiplication table gives us a glimpse into the curriculum and methods taught in 1917, techniques perhaps lost in the passage of time. When regarding a wheel of multiplication, Principal Sherry Kishore told The Oklahoman, "I have never seen that technique in my life."

But Oklahoma City school officials aren't just shocked by what is written, but how it is written. Penmanship like this is clearly a lost art. This board reads, "I give my head, my heart, and my life to my God and One nation indivisible with justice for all."

Within each of the four rooms, the subject matter and lessons mirrored one another - indicating, as an Oklahoma Public School Twitter caption reads, "aligned curriculum in 1917."

And though the boards' style and subject matter might be unfamiliar to younger folks, they certainly resonate with older generations. Principal Kishore told The Oklahoman what it was like to show her 85-year-old mother the boards: "She just stood there and cried. She said it was exactly like her classroom was when she was going to school."

But these boards actually predate Principal Kishore's mother by 13 years. Two dates were found on the boards: November 30, 1917, and December 4, 1917.

Some of the writings and drawings were done by students, while others were made by teachers - but I'm not always clear whose is whose.

Regardless, the work is a striking look into days long gone. While reading the boards - like this one listing "My Rules To Keep Clean" - the past comes alive in a very personal way.

English teacher Cinthea Comer told The Oklahoman, "It was so eerie because the colors were so vibrant it looked like it was drawn the same day. To know that it was drawn 100 years ago. it's like you're going into a looking glass into the past."

Built in 1895, Emerson High School has seen many renovations and improvements throughout the years - but nothing like this has ever been discovered.

When removing old chalkboards in the past, contractors have only found broken pipes and wires, so this is a shocking surprise. Oklahoma City and the school district are now working to preserve these beautiful boards.

Hopefully, the spirit of these teachers and their students will be enjoyed for many years to come. Who knew that scribbles on a chalkboard could become such a precious piece of history.

Casale's Corner

Boy doing his homework under a streetlight goes viral, and a millionaire takes notice

PERU, BOYThis modern fairy tale inspires hope. It sounds like a fairy tale or maybe the plot of a Charles Dickens novel, but it's a true story. It began when Victor Martin Angulo Cordova, an 11-year-old boy from Moche, Peru, caught the attention of the officers monitoring the city's security cameras. A street camera captured video of the sixth grader sitting and lying down in the road under a streetlamp doing his homework.

Soon the images and the back-story went public on news outlets and social media. As reported on the Perfil website, Victor's family didn't have electricity, but the boy was determined to get an education so he could grow up to be a police officer to "fight corruption, thieves, and drugs."

According to Perfil, the reason the family didn't have electricity was twofold: a lack of money to pay the bills, and more importantly, the fact that they didn't have documentation to prove the ownership of their home, which was needed for the contract to install electricity.

The first person to come to the rescue was the mayor of the town, Arturo Fernandez Bazin, who brought Victor a package of school supplies and helped the family get the paperwork done so they could acquire the deed to their property and get electricity installed.

That in itself was a big step forward, but only the first. It was then that Yaqoob Yusuf Ahmed Mubarak entered the scene. He's a 31-year-old millionaire importer and chocolatier from Bahrain, who during his childhood wasn't lacking money, but affection. According to the Clarin news site, Mubarak saw some of his childhood friends die from drugs and crime in his youth and he suffered from depression.

Mubarak's painful background gifted him with empathy and a desire to help others, so Victor's determination to study and be responsible in the midst of poverty moved his heart. In an interview, he says that under the same conditions, he never would have had the motivation to study. So, Mubarak traveled from his small island country (a quarter of the size of Rhode Island) in the Persian Gulf to Moche, Peru, to meet the boy in person.

Photos of the encounter show the Bahraini businessman hugging Victor, posing with his family, and lying on the ground reading books with him, apparently imitating Victor's position when he was caught by the security cameras studying by streetlight.

Mubarak was struck by the poverty in which the boy and his peers lived and studied. He decided to rebuild Victor's family's humble dwelling as a two-story home, help Victor's mother start a small business, and give $2,000 to the boy (in his mother's care). Victor pointed out that he has many classmates who are in a similar situation, so Mubarak also pledged to remodel and expand the school Victor attends, adding, among other things, a modern computer lab. The only thing Mubarak is asking in return: that Victor continue to be a humble, extraordinary person who loves his mother and works hard at his education.

Reportedly, Mubarak is having some difficulty making the donation to the school, due to bureaucratic obstacles on the part of the Peruvian government. Let's hope that the obstacles can be overcome so this fairy tale can fully come true.