Buried Treasure

Did the class of ’35 bury something beneath that patina-colored bronze cap or is the bronze cap simply a plaque left in commemoration by the students?

It’s been 75 years now.

At the front steps to what was once Beaumont High School (now the Beaumont Civic Center), the class from long ago left a “marker.” It reads simply, “35.”

Small-town mystery

We’ve all walked right past the marker while going about our business. For decades, a canopy of tall, stately deodar trees with feathery, outstretched branches has shielded the marker from nature’s elements.

But what (if anything) did the class of 1935 put away for some future generation to rediscover? Graduates from that class would now be in their 90s.

Back in the 1930s, the approximately 150 students at Beaumont High made their own fun. They tried to catch a greased pig at the Cherry Festival. They watched hometown farmers pit their finest draft teams against one another in pulling contests. Before a big game with Banning High School, Beaumont students would light a flaming, celebratory bonfire fueled mostly by abandoned outhouses. Girls would sell lilac blossoms along Highway 99 (now Sixth Street) for 50 cents a bunch. Wendell Wallace, from Beaumont High School’s class of 1938, remembers crowds of teenagers hanging out at the Standard station hoping to catch a glimpse of movie stars in fancy cars on their way home from Palm Springs.

Long ago secret

But there’s still the nagging mystery about what the classmates of ‘35 had in mind when they cemented that marker solidly into the ground. They weren’t the first graduating class. A plaque on the front wall proudly proclaims that Beaumont High was “erected in A.D. 1928.”

Did the class of ‘35 bury newspaper clippings, photographs or maybe some quaint souvenirs of small-town life? Seventy-five years later, should we let the past stay buried for others to discover in some distant time, or should we open a window to the past? Perhaps sometimes it’s best to let the mystery live on, so that we can always wonder what might be there as we walk near those steps in front of the Civic Center.