Paul C. Norvell was the first Col-Hi principal. Some old traditions were maintained, such as the Nautilus yearbook and the Peppers girls' pep club. New traditions were also started, such as the "Deliberative Committee" which would serve as the student government for the next four decades. In 1944 Maurice W. Taylor became principal, followed by G. M. Roberts in 1946 and then Carl A. Ransbarger from 1947 through 1954.
1940s
Today's Bartlesville High School was once popularly known as College High and was constructed in 1939. Its official name was Bartlesville Senior High School and Junior College, and it originally served 585 students in grades 11-14. On January 8, 1940 those students, who had been attending Bartlesville's Central High School, moved 3/4 mile south to the new campus. The school colors were black and gold and the mascot was the Wildcat, all references to the town's dominant petroleum industries.
Students in these and subsequent years participated in long-lasting clubs such as Hi-Y, Y-Teens, Service Club, Trade & Industrial Club, and the B Club for lettered athletes. The B club sold Wildcat stadium seats and ran the concession stands at games, using the proceeds for an annual scholarship. New clubs in the late forties and early fifties included the United Nation Youth, Future Homemakers of America, United World Federalists, and Junior Red Cross. Foreign language clubs thrived, including the Latin Club & Senate (which later became the Junior Classical League), and the Spanish and French Clubs (sometimes grouped as the Modern Languages Club). Driver's education was first offered as an elective in 1949. Students participated in such annual traditions as the homecoming parade and bonfire and Sadie Hawkins Day.
Photographs
Facility History
The Original Campus
In 1939 the 20+ acre campus at 17th and Hillcrest Drive was valued at $25,000. It was purchased from John H. Kane and C.E. Burlingame for $10,000, which was the most allowed by the federal Public Works Administration's regulations. Another depression-era federal agency, the Works Progress Administration, built a sandstone rock amphitheater along with four tennis courts and other athletic fields to the east in the area occupied today by Custer Field. The amphitheater had a built-up stage in the center surrounded by three rows of seats in an oval shape, and was reportedly located below what is now the Freshman Academy and the Commons. This sketch at least shows a planned layout of the campus. A small brook meandered through the area and through the present-day Fine Arts Center, which at that time was a grove of trees.
Col-Hi's original design capacity was 800 students. The architect, John Duncan Forsyth, designed the building in the Streamline Moderne style, a late variant of Art Deco which peaked around this time and was commonly used in schools built with PWA funds. Forsyth had used the same style in his 1937 residence at 29th and Birmingham in Tulsa. Forsyth also was one of the architects for the 1937 PWA Moderne style Daniel Webster High School in Tulsa, which had many of the same interior architectural elements as College High. Forsyth was also the lead architect for the magnificent Marland Mansion built in Ponca City from 1925-1928. The general contractor for the construction of College High was the Ray Construction Company of Coffeyville, Kansas.
A 1939 photo of the western facade focuses on Col-High's main building, which housed the auditorium and academic classes. To the south was the field house, called the manual training building because it housed industrial arts classes and also had a stage for the band and orchestra and a gymnasium. The latter building was paid for by the Frank Phillips Foundation, and provided for some time the home court for the Phillips 66ers basketball team composed of company employees.
The exterior of the buildings were to have been brick, but a petition from 273 employees of the Dewey Portland Cement Company of the adjacent community to the north convinced the school board to build it of white-painted reinforced monolithic concrete to help the company as it struggled in the Great Depression. The white concrete was offset by windows with cherokee red spandrels; that color changed to light and then dark blue after 1982 with the merger of College and Sooner Highs.
The floors of the main building were marbleized asphalt tile, while the corridors had glazed tile wainscoting and terrazzo steps on the stairwells. No two classrooms were alike, each arranged for a particular purpose with beautiful birch cabinets and built-ins. The building once had two fireplaces. One was in a recreation room lounge in the office area with several couches and chairs; that area is now home to the principal's and principal secretary's offices. The other fireplace was across the corridor in an extensive "home-making" department, which was broken up into administrative offices after a new home-making department was built in the ground floor of the 1958 annex.
In 1940, 6,500 cubic yards of earth was moved by state highway crews to cut down "College High hill" and install temporary Macadam pavement for later asphalting. $27,334 in federal funds were to be used for an outdoor amphitheater to improve a gulch behind the Manual Training Building.
In 1948, the amphitheater and tennis courts, which had often flooded, were covered with dirt hauled in from the downtown Phillips complex (Adams Building site). From November 9 to December 11, 22,350 cubic yards were hauled 1.6 miles to College High. The district paid only for the haulage, which came to $8,940.