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So this is Jenna Barry. This is June 18th, and I'm interviewing Mary Grace De Martino and Doug Packer about their memories of the fire at the high school. When I was in junior high, um, it was in the fall, and at that time Medford High School

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was located right next to the, um, post office andre Valley Auditorium on Forest Street. And that afternoon I forget what the source of the fire was, but the high school caught on fire and it burned for well over 12 hours and the smoke was very acrid.

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um, we live up in Fulton Heights, you could smell it you could see embers in the air and it was devastating for the whole community because the kids who were at the high school loved to leave at lunchtime they go frequent the little places in the

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square and they would come back and it was just a hub of of activity. Um, so when we lost the high school. They were at a loss as to what to do and the kids actually went into 2 or 3 split sessions for 2 or 3

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years until they could build the new site up off of Winthrop Street, um, and that was when they made the 4 year high school up on Winthrop Street. I was actually in the last 9th grade class that was junior high because at that time junior high

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was 789 so I was the last 9th grade class at the Roberts and we were the first sophomore class in the brand new high school um but those few years when it took them to build the new high school was devastating for the whole community, um,

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just to raise the funds and the logistics of where to put all the students and the teachers and working on, you know. 8 hours, more than 8 hour days I think they were going to like 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon at the time because of

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the split sessions. It was really tough. Do they know what caused the fire? You could probably find it in the Medford Mercury, but I forget what actually the cause was. um, did it happen during the school day or it was right after the school day concluded,

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so there were still students that could have been personnel and people in the building at the time, but if you look back through the Medford Mercury to see the, the, the aerial photos at that time was devastating.