Paschal, Poly, Trimble and more. Fort Worth’s high schools each have proud histories.

The Beach Boys said it best back in 1964: “Be True to Your School.” Brian Wilson wrote a hit record and created a catchphrase for generations of high school students.

Fort Worth High School opened in 1891, and a proud tradition was started when it was proclaimed “the finest school building in Texas.” Its students — the boys in ties and jackets, the girls in dresses — were a little short on other traditions for the first few years. (African American kids did not get their own high school until Fort Worth Colored High School opened in 1910.)

Seventy years after the first high school opened, Fort Worth had half a dozen, each with its own traditions, memories, and mascots, and each with a cadre of beloved teachers who impacted our lives long after we graduated. Some of them taught more than one member of a family.

This walk down Memory Lane does not pretend to be comprehensive. It only covers a few of those schools with a bow to faded memories. Regardless of which high school we went to, we come to think of those times as “the good ol’ days” eventually.

R.L. Paschal students knew we attended the best high school in Fort Worth. What other school had “charity clubs” (minor league sororities and fraternities) and allowed students to “run” for classes (i.e., pick our teachers)?

At least 99% of Paschal students went on to college; it was written into our DNA. In 1947 Paschal was recognized nationally when Look Magazine devoted six full pages to the senior class prom at Colonial Country Club. The Paschal stage band was named “national champion” in 1965 and 1966.

Paschal pranks included turning rats loose in Mr. Huff’s English class. Of course, no one ever fessed up. The Paschal basketball teams of Charlie Turner regularly beat up on the other Fort Worth schools – at least until I.M. Terrell and Coach Robert Hughes joined the UIL in 1967. The Paschal Panthers’ crown was taken by the I.M. Terrell Panthers, and Paschal basketball was never the same afterward.

Southwest High School spent its first year (1967-68) squeezed into temporary buildings on the Paschal campus before moving into its own building on Altamesa Boulevard, which was the edge of the world at that time. Before McDonald’s and Jack in the Box opened on West Berry, Dairy Queen and Griff’s Hamburgers were the favorite after-school hangouts for Panthers.

Paschal had a historic rivalry with Arlington Heights High that climaxed with Heights’ homecoming in 1963. A Paschal student borrowed his father’s airplane, and he and his buddies water-bombed the Heights bonfire pile at Benbrook Lake. The prank made national news, and when President Kennedy spoke in Fort Worth on Nov. 22, 1963, he recognized Fort Worth for having the only high school with its own “air force.” The Kennedy connection extended to Lee Harvey Oswald, who went (briefly) to Heights. On a prouder note, Heights also gave the world John Denver.

In 1968, Carter Riverside, the namesake of Fort Worth’s biggest civic booster and founder of this newspaper, had the best football team in the city with a quarterback who was the son of a member of TCU’s championship 1938 football team. They were the best until they ran into Azle High in the first round of the playoffs. It has been all downhill for Eagles athletics ever since.

Polytechnic High School opened in 1912 and had an all-class Centennial reunion in 2012. The famed “Marching 100” band was considered the best high school band in Fort Worth if not Texas, and entertained JFK and Jackie on Nov. 22, 1963. Band boosters bought eight herald trumpets for the band in 1956 that were lost for decades until being rescued in 2012.

After school, Poly students gathered at the Clover Drive-in. Romantic couples preferred the dim-lit dining room of the Italian Inn. Poly gave us Mike Nichols, long-time Star-Telegram columnist, and Kenneth Copeland, nationally known evangelist, among others.

O.D. Wyatt High opened in 1969, drawing from the Poly and Paschal districts. It was named for a former Paschal High School principal and counted a chess club and debate team among its extracurricular activities. Wyatt was also one of the first schools to offer a “computer math” class, cutting edge stuff in the early ‘70s.

The school we know today as Green B. Trimble High opened in its current location in 1955 as Fort Worth’s first magnet school, that is, able to accept students from anywhere in the district. That is because Trimble was a vocational (technical) high school whose mission was to train students in the trades, not send them to college.

Tech was the first Fort Worth high school to offer a real career path to African American students after their school years. Although those behind the creation of Tech still did not consider college a viable option for most African Americans, it represented a step forward compared to a life of unskilled jobs.

All these schools were segregated until the 1967-68 school year. That was the year when FWISD finally got around to desegregating the city’s high schools. It had fought the court-ordered change since Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. Thirteen years later, in the fall of ’67, four Black students started classes at Paschal. All was quiet on Forest Park Boulevard that year, although the Paschal Four were reminded how unwanted they were every day of class.

Today, the old gang and current students at all these schools can pass like two ships in the night. It is at class reunions that old-timers reminisce and mourn absent friends — while current students can’t wait to graduate and move on.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.

This story was originally published December 12, 2020 at 6:00 AM.