Robert T. Hill and William H. Gaston Junior High Schools, and Their Namesakes

Bryan Adams’ two feeder junior high schools are Robert T. Hill and William H. Gaston. According to Google, they are just 3.1 miles apart. I propose to take a quick look at these educational institutions and the men for whom they were named. Since I never set foot on the Gaston campus and went to Hill (September 1966 through May 1968), I will cover it first.

Let it be said that the Highlanders and Warriors were arch-rivals; any athletic defeat of “that other school” was especially sweet. Nonetheless, I remember at least a few teenage romances in which she was from Gaston and he was from Hill, or vice versa.

Hill opened in 1957 at 505 Easton Road in Dallas’ Lake Highlands area, not too far from White Rock Lake. Red and green are its colors, and the mascot is the Highlanders. The girls’ drill team was the Lassies, decked out in berets and plaid sashes. I use the past-tense form of the verb because I am not sure whether they are still in operation. At any rate, during our time there were grades eight and nine (six through eight these days), and about 900 kids walked its halls.

The Highlanders and Lassies shared a Scottish theme; I doubt any of us gave the slightest thought to the sad history of the Scottish highlanders. Here it is, in a nutshell. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the English government and aristocratic Scottish landowners conspired to remove most of the doughty people who had lived there for centuries so that sheep could graze instead. The “highland clearances,” brutal and unjust, devastated northern Scotland, resulting in large-scale emigration to the USA, Canada and Australia.

Our alma mater was named after Robert Thomas Hill (1858–1941), a native of Nashville. He was quite an interesting character. Orphaned at the age of five during the Civil War, he soon moved to Texas, living in Waco, Comanche and Uvalde. He worked for his brother’s newspaper, drove cattle up to Dodge City and was part of a survey crew. Hill studied the land and was a self-trained geologist even before he went to Cornell University in 1882 to seek a bachelor’s degree. He published widely—specializing in the Cretaceous period—and was soon on the faculty of the University of Texas, followed by a stint with the U.S. Geological Survey. Hill led a six-man expedition that explored and documented the canyons of the Rio Grande’s Big Bend region in 1899.

He conducted field studies in Mexico, the Caribbean, Nicaragua and Panama, and provided expert testimony in a boundary dispute between Texas and Oklahoma. Decided by the Supreme Court in 1923, it resulted in 450,000 acres in the Red River valley being “given” to Texas; the land contained major oil deposits. Hill, who had business interests all over the United States, spent the last decade of his life in Dallas. He wrote feature articles for the Dallas Morning News that conveyed scientific information to lay readers. Before Hill’s death, Baylor and SMU bestowed honorary degrees on him.

What is now Hill Middle School is still rocking along, with faculty and administrators doing their best to educate its students, of whom just 4% are European-American. Sixth-graders wear red polo shirts, seventh-graders wear dark green, and eighth-graders wear black; all wear khaki pants. Corporal punishment—I got a few butt-blistering licks back in the day—has been abolished by the Dallas Independent School District. The principal sometimes has to reassure parents that her school does not have a gang problem, despite appearances to the contrary. Hill got some publicity or should I say notoriety in 2003 when a 12-year-old female student was caught on video giving mouth-love to a 14-year-old male student in the back of a science lab while the teacher was out of the room. About 20 students and an adult security person sat and observed. Good heavens! Some wild things took place during my two years at Hill, but nothing like that.

The aging facility got a long-overdue $8 million expansion/renovation in 2010. Parents’ and students’ reviews I have seen range from glowing to profoundly negative. The elementary school which I attended, Victor H. Hexter, is just down the street. In 2013, only 16 of its 77 fifth-graders went on to Hill, their parents choosing other educational alternatives. One media source came up with a list of DISD’s worst schools, measured by 50% or less of students failing the math, social studies, science, reading and writing parts of the TAKS test. Hill was among them, although to be fair it was quite a long list—indicative of the woeful state of public education in Dallas, Texas.

As indicated above, I did not attend Gaston. I would have, since I was at Edwin J. Kiest Elementary School through fourth grade. My family moved a few miles northwest in the summer of 1963, putting me at Hexter the next three years. I cannot pretend to speak about Gaston with much authority, so I hope my critics will not be unkind.

First, a word about mascots. Hexter was and still is the Hawks—not offensive or politically incorrect. But Kiest was the Indians while I was there; it’s now the Stars. The Gaston Warriors? That simply would not do. It has been the Panthers for several years now. As with the Hill Lassies, I am not sure whether the Gaston girls’ drill team, once the delightfully named Shy-Annes, is still extant. I suspect it is not. The colors (blue and gold) are unchanged. Gaston Junior High School opened at 9565 Mercer Drive in 1954, when I and my cohort were toddlers. I can only assume that graduates moved on to Woodrow Wilson High School before BA opened in 1957.

William Henry Gaston (1840–1927) is no less remarkable than his counterpart, Robert T. Hill. Born in Alabama, his family moved to Anderson County in east Texas when he was nine. His father owned a large plantation and served two terms in the Texas Legislature. With the start of the Civil War, Gaston joined Hood’s Texas Brigade and fought at Antietam and in other bloody battles. His brother was killed—darn those Yankees!—and he had a bout with typhoid fever but survived. Gaston later worked as a purchasing agent for the Confederacy, honing his skills as a money-maker. This guy had the Midas touch, as most of his ventures paid off handsomely. Although Gaston was one of Dallas’ first millionaires, he was civic minded, as we will soon see.

“Captain Gaston” got married and in 1867 moved to Dallas, then a community of just 3,000. He and a colleague formed a bank that evolved into Republic National Bank before he branched into the even more lucrative fields of real estate and railroads. As owner of a large plot of land in east Dallas, he allowed a fair to be held there in 1876. Of course, that became the State Fair of Texas, of which he was one of the directors. Two expansions of the fairgrounds were due to land sales, on generous terms, from Gaston. In gratitude for all he had done, in 1924 the City Council offered to name Fair Park after him but he declined the honor. Perhaps it was after his death that Gaston Avenue was named after him as well as a certain school.

Gaston Middle School, as well as Hill, has undergone a demographic sea change over the past half-century, with a student body that is a negligible 4% European-American. It, too, made the list of “worst schools” in the DISD since test scores are abysmal, and gangs, bullying, drugs and an undisciplined environment are the daily reality; teachers use megaphones in the hallways to corral students and get them to their respective classrooms. There are accusations that in so doing, they curse the students. There are also accusations going the other way. Such information, I should add, is somewhat obsolete. Maybe things have changed and Gaston students are now respectful, diligent and eager to learn—kids destined for Yale, Stanford, MIT, Cal-Berkeley and Oxford after three years of further polishing at BA. But I doubt it.