By KATIE JOHNSON
Niles Daily Star

“If these walls could talk,” Niles Mayor Mike McCauslin said Wednesday night, “they would tell of the first class of 1939.”

Hundreds of people said goodbyes to Eastside Elementary during a community celebration, a bittersweet remembrance for 71 years of students, teachers and parents.

The celebration was planned after the community learned recently that the K-5 school on North 14th Street would be shutting its doors because of budget cuts. Elementary students must now either attend Ballard or Howard-Ellis schools. Many community members were critical of the decision to close Eastside, some even staging a protest outside the building weeks ago.

The father of two sons who attended Eastside, McCauslin said Wednesday the school is a “testament to what is good and right about elementary education.”

“This is not a celebration,” he said. “This is a requiem for a very dear and close friend.”
Incoming superintendent Richard Weigel was sympathetic to the emotions swirling in the building, but encouraged everyone to look forward.

“Let’s think about the future and what we want to do,” Weigel said. “Our future is unwritten.”

One Eastside icon, second grade teacher Aleta Styers, was remembered fondly by former students, who gazed at her class photos in the entryway from 1943 to 1970.

“Mom lived the zest of life,” her son, Steve Styers, said during the celebration. He recalled how she was a trophy-winning Charleston dancer and played a gangster character on the “Dick Tracy” radio show.

“I really liked her,” Clarence (Senny) Frantz said of Aleta Styers. Frantz attended Eastside from 1944 to 1950 and still lives in Niles.

“I have never left,” he said. “I have been within eight blocks of this school since 1939.”

Frantz said he is “not excited” about Eastside closing, but added, “most of the friends I went to school with (here) I still talk to.”

Many visitors were nostalgic yet unhappy about Eastside’s closure.

Harold Remus, 92, who retired from teaching at Eastside after 20 years, called the decision “ridiculous.”

Current school secretary Diane Weaver said she is going to retire after 12 years at Eastside. She also was a student there.

“I ended where I started,” she said.