ALUMNI CELEBRATION AND DEDICATION PLANNED AT FRANKLIN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Franklin Elementary School opened in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean. The school on the city's western frontier was bounded by a farm to the north and not much else.

"Kids from the whole neighborhood could look out and see nothing but fields," says Morton Estes, a first-grader in 1927 and now a resident at the Lutheran Home's Saxony Village.

The 79-year-old Estes and all of the school's alumni are invited to return to the school April 27 for a celebration dedicating the new gym and renovations, a $684,000 project completed last year.

The original cost of the building was $145,000.

Alumni and current students will have a chance to talk about the school at Louisiana and Themis streets and tour the new facilities.

Before classes started last fall, the school's library was converted to a computer lab and the existing gym was transformed into a library, art room and cafeteria. The gym was completed in December.

"It really serves our purposes well now," principal Julie Davenport says.

Chaffee artist Aaron Horrell is painting murals in the library and the gym. The school also has murals by Cape Girardeau painter Craig Thomas.

Davenport says the alumni and students attending the celebration could even sing the school song, written by Annie B. Siebert in 1927, which begins "Out on Louisiana stands dear old Franklin School."

Old scrapbooks found

During the remodeling, scrapbooks dating to the school's beginnings were found in the basement along with notes from the PTA and dishes they used for tea parties.

Students from the Historic Preservation Program at Southeast are helping the school restore the books. "They are very old and brittle," Davenport says, "but there are lots of pictures, invitations and awards."

Historic preservation students also are working on putting the Federalist-style building on the National Register of Historic Places. When May Greene and Washington elementary schools closed at the end of 1999, Franklin became the oldest elementary school in the Cape Girardeau public school system.

Estes' sister-in-law, Margaret Roberts, also was a student at Franklin in 1927. Then named Margaret Foster, she and her friend Mary Barber sang "Back Home Again in Indiana" for a program in the gym. The fad then was for girls to wear smocks.

"I had a red-checked one and I think Mary's was green," Roberts recalls.

She and her husband, Ben, lived in the South for 36 years before moving to Jackson in 1981. They now live at Chateau Girardeau. Morton Estes was a mechanical engineer in St. Louis for 40 years before moving back to the area in 1983 to be near family and old friends.

Ben Roberts and Lillian Estes, Morton's wife, are brother and sister.

The Estes family lived a block and a half from the new school.

He remembers his teachers: Virginia Willer, Mrs. Eugas, Mrs. Bohnsack, Mrs. Mabry, Mr. Smith and principal Nellie Krieger. Margaret Roberts remembers more teachers and Nellie Krieger, too.

"We were scared to death of her," she says. "It was a well-run school."