Shreveport Times [LA]
23 August 2013
Written by John Andrew Prime
[Instructor] Lisa Levermann stomps on the wooden floor
of the dance studio at the rear of C.E. Byrd High School and the echo is like
that of a big bass drum, deep and hollow, like a mournful moan from the beyond.
In a way, it is. The studio floor was built on top of
an ornate pool in 1937, some say after a drowning there. […]
As for the girl said to have drowned, and the pool,
most who have looked into it think it had to do with money. Some accounts say
the Olympic-sized pool, shown on the original plans for the school now on file
at LSUS, was salt-water, which due to the corrosive nature of the water are
much more expensive to maintain. That, and no pool was planned for Fair Park
High School, so fairness issues came up as well.
According to the official school publication “Glimpses
of the City of Byrd,” in spite of the Great Depression, “a modest building and
renovation program occurred at Byrd in the 1930s. The Caddo Parish School Board
agreed to the construction of tennis courts, lighting of the football field,
adding a music room, and in 1937 flooring the swimming pool so a gym could be
installed.”
Principal Jerry Badgely […] thinks an additional
concern influenced closing the pool.
“Polio was a big concern and that may have weighed
in,” he said. “It’s not a concern any more. It was probably as much a
maintenance issue as anything. You have to look at the trade off. What we got
out of it was a gymnasium that wasn't part of the school when it was built.” […]