My old school: It's changed.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

CORVALLIS - Forget Thomas Wolfe. You can go home again, it's just that once you get there, you find everything is smaller, except the realization of how much time has passed since you left.

My old elementary school, Garfield, occasionally invites back alums who, ostensibly, have found a semblance of success in the world.

Having apparently come up empty-handed this school year in their search for such people, they called me.

At first, I wondered if it was some sort of trick - perhaps a clause in the will of my old principal, Mrs. Marr, to collect my overdue-library-book fines. Or a last chance for some retired lunchroom monitor to force me to eat the spinach I stuffed in my milk carton on April 12, 1962.

No, they just wanted me to talk about writing and how it was here at Garfield School where I decided to make a career of it, having realized that, after losing to Diane Varseveld in the 50-yard dash, I was not going to make a living, as I'd hoped, by being The Fastest Human Being on Earth.

"Welcome back," said Principal Lynn Lahey, at 52 almost the only person I'd see all day who was even alive back when I was a Garfield Gopher.

She gave me a tour of the school. It was like looking at a photograph of yourself wearing someone else's clothes. All these memories - knocking out Robbie Younger's tooth while playing line soccer, the news of President Kennedy's death, toxic Jell-O - are now decades out of context.

For starters, the school has shrunk. The blocks leading to the school have shrunk. Even the students have shrunk.

The classroom setups are totally different. I remember year after year of five-row, six-deep desks. I remember one teacher up front. I remember Mr. Brown reading "Black Like Me" about a guy who, in 1959, used medication to darken his skin so he could write about life from a black man's perspective. And Mr. Brown read it to a virtually all-white class.

NOW, ONE in four kids at Garfield is Hispanic. One in three arrives at school not knowing English.

"We have kids who arrive here speaking Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian, Turkish and others," Lahey says. "Twelve to 15 languages."

Forty years ago, in 1962, the classroom configuration was as standard as a bowling-pin setup.

Now, I tour classrooms where some kids are clustered in a corner with one teacher, a few others are reading books to "foster grandparents" and a few others are glued to computers.

In 1962, student writing had all the sophistication of gym socks. Now, I notice hallway posters featuring "personification," "similes" and "metaphors." "The fluffy cloud," one student has written, "is as soft as my bulldog named Eeyore."

In 1962, we didn't have other stuff that is now a ho-hum part of Garfield School: recycling, anti-drug posters, AlphaSmart 200 keyboards (a sort of poor man's Palm Pilot), an on-site advocate for the homeless and outside signs absolving the district of any liability should someone get hurt after school hours.

"How old are you?" one student asks.

"Forty-eight."

"Ouch," he responds without hesitation.

Indeed, the separation between now and then hurts in some ways; I feel like a stranger in a strange land. I mean, I have to explain Butch Wax to these tykes.

Ah, but then comes the breakthrough: I show them my old rusted Tudor Tru-Action Electric Football set, circa 1959, and explain that this is what led to my becoming a writer - once it broke.

``I realized it didn't need electricity to run on, it could run on - begins with an `I' ... ''

"Imagination!" a girl says.

"Yes!" I say.

Suddenly, we're off, imagination unlocking all sorts of things we have in common. We talk about Dr. Seuss. About school lunches. (`Did you have `Mystery Monday' back then, too?' one boy asks me.) About kids' dreams today. About my dreams back then - how I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and how Mrs. Wirth, my fifth-grade teacher, in this very room, granted my wish on Career Day to interview Oregon State basketball coach Paul Valenti. And how I interviewed him and wrote the story for the Garfield Chatter, our one-page student newspaper.

In my mind, it was a full-page spread. Mrs. Wirth mailed it to me a while back: It was three paragraphs long.

As I said, time obscures the proportions of the past. But it can't take away the memories or the places those memories were made.

In other words, once a Garfield Gopher, always a - well, actually the school's mascot is now the Geckos. But you get the idea.

Bob Welch can be reached by phone at 338-2354 or by e-mail at [e-mail].