POCATELLO — Beautiful black, white and red balloons filled the hallways and adorned the auditorium at Irving Middle School on Wednesday as former and current students celebrated the school’s 100th anniversary.
Intricate displays were put up for guests to peruse that reflected the various decades of the school going back as far as the 1920s. The presentations provided windows into what life was like for students back then, highlighted the popular trends and movies of the various eras, and showcased vintage Irving memorabilia, newspaper clippings, yearbooks and more.
The idea to celebrate Irving’s centennial came about after Principal Stuart Johnson informed English teacher and yearbook adviser Michelle Lowry last year that the North Grant Avenue school would be turning 100 in 2025.
Lowry immediately got to work on planning the celebration of the school’s milestone, which included the 10 tables set up for Wednesday’s event each dedicated to a different decade of Irving’s history.
Lowry said, “We’ve got pictures, yearbooks and trophies, helmets, tennis rackets, anything that we could find that belonged to the eras and set them up on these 10 different tables so people can go through and just reminisce on the time that they were here at Irving.”
Lowry asked eighth grade students Evie Richards, Jaylee Johnson and Brooklyn Brown, who all work on the school’s yearbook committee, to assist in her endeavors for the centennial celebration and over the last several months they all chipped in and amassed a treasure trove of Irving artifacts.
“We were able to do a lot of research about Irving and the history and all of the different things that came with each decade,” Lowry said. “Irving burned down in 1948 and all of the students had to go to Pocatello High School for a year and a half before they were able to come back. Then in 1988 they remodeled, building this big gym connecting an old elementary school to the original Irving school and building on a cafeteria. We just fell in love with the history. As we got going and found more historical facts, we just kind of kept digging deeper and deeper and in taking it on we realized that we had a vision of what we wanted this (celebration) to look like.”
Lowry continued, “We went down into the old boys football locker room. We found old trophies and pictures and dust and scary things — not really — but you’re always looking around waiting for the ghost to come. It was just really exciting. The third trimester, I had to start teaching my sign language class, so these girls (on the yearbook committee) took everything that we had started and they took it all the way to what we have here today.”
After the Idaho State Journal ran an article asking for people to contribute Irving memorabilia for the celebration, Lowry and the other organizers were able to obtain vintage Irving items such as a letterman jacket, choir robe, band uniform and much more.
The students on the yearbook committee were surprised to learn about all the various changes at Irving through the years, such as the current library being the old auditorium despite its small size, the diverse variety of school clubs over the years, and the dramatic fire that nearly destroyed the school.
“We all worked together on all of (the displays),” said Jaylee. “We would just all take a different task and just try to get the work done one at a time. We’ve been doing this since the beginning of the school year up until this point, so we’ve gotten a lot, we found a lot and we’ve received a lot from a lot of people.”
Lowry was intrigued by the scope of the history at Irving, such as its construction, the aftermath of the devastating fire, and the many other changes at the school through the decades. The research that went into planning the centennial celebration also revealed the school was named after Washington Irving, a famous American author, historian and diplomat who died in 1859.
“I think what we discovered the most is that we need to be better at keeping our history here,” Lowry said. “During the fire, we lost a lot of things, some yearbooks and different information. But even beyond that, after the fire, there are yearbooks missing, there’s information missing. So we discovered that we have to keep a better history of what we are doing day to day here at Irving. I know this is our 100th year and that’s making history, but really every day we’re making history and we need to really keep track of that for our future generations.”