On the front wall of each classroom, above the teacher’s head, was a large clock framed by carpenters into the plaster wall. There were a couple dozen classrooms in the building, all with identical clocks, and all their black hands were stopped on white faces at the same clock time. We were told they were frozen by the floodwaters of the Ohio River in the 1937 flood.
In 1971, hearing that, I could turn my head to my left while sitting in my schooldesk and see, out the open window in warm September, the earthen floodwall that had been built by the Army Corp Of Engineers as a response to that 1937 flood. The Floodwall was two stories high, and grassy. It was thick as a street at the bottom, with a flat terrace halfway up, just wide enough to pause for breath as you did vertical sprints in track practice. At the top it was wide enough to run 6 abreast in your underwear on a dare by your friends.
It stood so high you couldn’t see anything beyond it from my desk except the tops of trees whose roots, on the far side, snaked out into the river water. But it blocked the view of the river itself. It was such a visual barrier that there were few spots in town where you could stand and see the steady strings of coal barges floating down the Ohio. So we no longer thought of ourselves as a river town, even though everybody in town constantly said things like “the street next to the Floodwall”. Beyond the Floodwall was just garbage and driftwood and winos. Outer darkness and gnashing of teeth. Carp. Barges. Coal scum outlining wet roots.
The Floodwall ran the length of town, out of sight upriver and down, to other towns. We didn’t care about those. They were just football rivals.
As I say, the clocks were framed into the wall. Even in 1971 I tried to imagine in what world were wallclocks framed into schoolhouse walls by carpenters. By my time they’d have just hung plastic clocks from Japan on screw heads in drywall, and called it done. Of course, there are not even wallclocks in schools now. Time is a number on a screen. No hands move in solar cycles on faces.
The institutional green of the walls had been painted many times over the years, so we couldn’t see a stain from a waterline, which must have been higher than our heads to stop those clocks.
I now realize I first heard the clock explanation less than 40 years after the flood, but it’s now been more than 40 years since I last saw those clocks.