Miller Jr. High School has plenty of history — exactly 100 years of it — but Sunday, Jan. 28 ranks among the most monumental days at the oldest school of its kind in Washington.
Sights and sounds of 10 decades filled the school, including a proclamation from Aberdeen’s mayor, nods from some of the state’s top educators and historians, songs both new and old from student musicians and the sharing of decades of memories from former students.
Despite its significance, the day’s end came as a form of relief for Jerry Salstrom, a Miller teacher and administrator of 50 years, who was a lead organizer for the school’s centennial celebration which took months to plan.
That was also the case for current students, who worked to display decades of history and mastered musical performances honoring the school and town.
“They really rose to the top,” Salstrom said following the ceremony.
Salstrom said much of the preparations were about building a relationship between the students, the school and the broader community. In a packed gymnasium on Sunday, Aberdeen Mayor Douglas Orr cemented that bond with a proclamation of Jan. 28 as “George B. Miller Jr. High School 100th Anniversary Day in the city of Aberdeen Washington.”
The proclamation acknowledged the school is “the one place in our city where the majority of community members of the same age are gathered in one building at the same time for half the days of the year.”
Orr said in a speech, “It’s not just a school, it’s an institution in our city, and it’s a really valuable institution and I’m really glad it’s here.”
The spotlight on Miller Jr. High on Sunday stretched beyond the city of Aberdeen. In a video address, Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal called Miller “one of the most historic and incredible institutions in our state.”
“I get to go everywhere around Washington and very few districts can claim a 100-year-old school,” he said.
And only Aberdeen can claim the first junior high school in Washington — the work of early 20th century reformists with local ties who shifted the tide for secondary education across the state.
In the Miller gymnasium on Sunday, John Hughes, chief historian for Washington’s Office of the Secretary of State and longtime editor and publisher of The Daily World, chronicled that history and some of his own memories from middle school.
At a time when students attended elementary school for eight years and high school for four, one of the leading proponents of splitting those grade school years was Josephine Corliss Preston, who in 1912 became the first female statewide elected official in Washington state history as the superintendent of public instruction. Preston and other proponents at the time, Hughes said, thought that adolescents and young teens should be prepped for high school and college separately from elementary kids.
“The junior high movement was really rooted in the corrective mission that young adolescents had outgrown, literally and figuratively, the traditional elementary school model,” Hughes said.
Hughes explained that Preston began working with H.C. Crumpacker, the superintendent at Hoquiam schools, and George B. Miller, who was named superintendent of Aberdeen schools. Miller joined the district out of college, became a principal at age 23 and the top administrator at 29. The two men were a “tag team for secondary school reform.”
Student enrollment boomed in the 1920s, when Grays Harbor was the lumber capital of the world and Aberdeen, together with Hoquiam, made up the state’s largest city. Elementary schools were overcrowded.
“It’s true that Aberdeen’s new junior high was founded partly to relieve overcrowding,” Hughes said. “But building a new middle school was also rooted in Miller’s belief that a school more attuned to the needs of young teens was more appropriate than building just another grade school.”
Hughes said the new school, built on the northside near the old J.M. Weatherwax High School, “helped bring down class consciousness,” in Aberdeen as kids from all over town mingled on the hill, “where all the rich kids we thought lived,” he said.
“What I remember most was the sense of excitement … of feeling so much older and meeting so many new kids,” Hughes said.
Others who attended the ceremony recalled a similar excitement.
“It was just a real eye-opening experience to go from grade school to junior high,” said Joe Chicano, who attended Miller from 1966 through 1968. “When I went to junior high, it was like a reunion.”
The school took Miller’s name upon his death from illness in 1930. Hughes said he shared in his former newspaper editor’s view “that George B. Miller is the most distinguished, farsighted educator in the history of our community.”
The name stuck when the new Miller Jr. High was built on the south side in 1979, where it stands today.
“When it came time to move one day, they said, ‘Pick up your desk and put it on the truck,” said Roy Vataja, a Miller alumn and local historian.
Vataja and Erich Hahn recalled their “rock band” class in which they emulated a Saturday Night Live performance of “Soul Man” by the Blues Brothers, and sang “Hot-Blooded” by Foreigner and “Sarah” by Fleetwood Mac.
“They had the guitar amps and the drum set and everything,” said Hahn, who went on to become a jazz musician in Olympia.
The evidence that music was on Hahn’s mind in middle school lay on a table in the Miller library — a class exercise from his time at Miller in which students wrote down what they planned to do five and 10 years in the future. Salstrom saved many of the student’s assignments from the late ‘70s and ‘80s and brought them to the library on Sunday.
Salstrom’s teaching work aims to improve high school graduation grades by helping kids pass math classes. Dr. Carli Schiffner, Grays Harbor College president, which was founded a few years after Miller Jr. High in 1930, pointed out the role of the school, and Salstrom, specifically, in helping students reach college.
“Offering a pipeline for elementary school through college for close to 100 years is tremendous,” Schiffner said.
Salstrom closed the ceremony by sharing stories of student perseverance and self-confidence. It was a callback to the educational philosophy of Everett Shimmin, Miller Jr. High principal from 1924 to 1956. Upon Shimmin’s retirement, one newspaper noted he “has always believed, and proved it to his own satisfaction many times over, that if a teacher will search out even one quality that is admirable in the student and praise him for it, the teacher has laid the groundwork for helping the student to rehabilitate himself.”
Salstrom concluded, “We have to believe in our kids until they have the confidence to believe in themselves.”
Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.
Clayton Franke / The Daily World Members of the Miller Jr. High School orchestra perform a cover of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” as part of the school’s 100th anniversary celebration on Sunday, Jan. 28.
Clayton Franke / The Daily World Jerry Salstrom, longtime teacher and former principal at Miller Jr. High School, speaks at the school’s centennial celebration on Sunday, Jan. 28.
Clayton Franke / The Daily World David Mills, left, directs the Miller Jr. High School band in the debut performance of the “Miller March” at the school’s centennial celebration on Sunday, Jan. 28.
