SPASS

I want to blog about the awesome shiny new SIGNED copy of The Deathday Letter that I received in the mail yesterday because I won it on my good friend Michelle McLean's blog last week and Shaun David Hutchinson was kind of enough to offer it up as a prize. AND sign it. But I feel that I must take a nice photo for you all to feast your eyes upon, so I will try to share about that tomorrow.

Today I'm going to write about the place I went to middle school as well as 9th grade. Falen and Palindrome have probably heard of it.

It's called Saint Paul Academy and Summit School. It's a pretty snooty college prep K-12 private school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It has a lot of history. We'll get to that in a second.

The current school is actually a merger of two schools: Saint Paul Academy, an old boys only military academy, and The Summmit School ... you guessed it, a girls school. My mom and all her family attended these schools as kids, mom and her sisters at Summit and her brother at the Academy. When I went there in the 90s they had merged so that the old Academy campus is now the High School and Middle School and the Summit campus is the elementary. I think I've heard that this has changed since I left.

I enjoyed it there because they had things like Latin (though I took German), Pottery, Creative Writing, Computer Science and lots of other cool elective courses. I didn't enjoy it because my aunt was a teacher at the elementary school and there was a lot of pressure on me to succeed. I was always a pretty decent student but the other kids there were BRILLIANT. Most ended up at Harvard, Stanford or Brown. I got sent off to boarding school in 10th grade.

But this is not about my personal problems as a pissed off grieving and trouble-making teenager. This is about the ghosts that travel the halls at 1712 Randolph Avenue.

The most famous and by far the coolest Alumni of S.P.A. is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who actually did not graduate, but ended up being expelled for "neglecting his studies". I'm sure you know who F. Scott is but just in case you don't he is one of America's most famous authors who is most well known for having penned The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise. I didn't really know back then that I wanted to be a writer, but I DID enjoy writing, so it was kind of cool to know that he had stalked those very halls.

Ann Bancroft actually did graduate, in 1974. She is also an author, but she is more famous for being the first woman to extensively explore BOTH the arctic AND antarctic. She was an also a Wilderness Instructor at YMCA camp Widjiwagan where I often spent my summers, though regrettably not while I was there. She is also famous for some other awesome stuff but I won't discuss it here because I don't want to alienate anyone. Look her up if you would like to know more.

SPA was also kind of famous for being a soccer powerhouse (at least among prep schools). They won two MN State Championships while I attended but I played football so was not involved, except as a spectator. We got the day off to go watch the final at the Metrodome one year though, which was pretty cool. The coach was Buzz Lagos, who later became the coach of the Minnesota Thunder pro team, until it dissolved. The most famous player from SPA was Tony Sanneh, who was a few years older than me, and who played every minute for the United States in the 2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan.

So anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a boastful post, so I hope it doesn't sound that way. It's not like attending there for a few years makes me cool or educated or intelligent anyway, since I left after my freshman year (not that it would have meant any of those things if I had stayed either). It is kind of fun to look back over the years though, and to dream that one day my books will sell well enough for my name to be mentioned in the Wikipedia Article, along with those other notable alumni/ae.