Prologue
Kensington Central High School was founded privately in 1820 by the Reverend John Cecil Kensington, a wealthy clergyman of indistinct denomination, whose objective was succinctly stated in the school's constitution as "the providing at a moderate cost of a decent Christian education to the sons of working class members of the neighborhood," a not overly subtle reference to the well-established fact that the area around Kensington was rapidly degenerating into what later generations would callously refer to as a slum. The Reverend Doctor Kensington dished out Christian morality at a moderate cost to the sons of the working class until 1839 when he died and the school was taken over by the city to operate at public expense; and while the good Reverend's Christian morality was no longer included in the curriculum, the tuition was abolished in accordance with a civic ordinance which stipulated that public instruction would be provided free of charge to the "generally underprivileged residents of this area in an effort to raise the general standards of culture and citizenship in the community. "
As the decades rolled by, the neighborhood surrounding Kensington Central staggered under the impact of one set of homeless, impoverished and normally illiterate refugees after another. The thrifty but hard-drinking Germans who had originally settled the area were driven out by a wave of Irishmen who were equally hard-drinking but somewhat less thrifty; these in turn yielded to Italians and a motley assemblage of Central Europeans who stayed for a generation or two before the invasion of American Negroes and Puerto Ricans began. Candidates for mayor of the city routinely promised the voters that "something" should be done about what had come to be called the "Ken Central Problem." but nothing ever seemed to change until the ugly but picturesque wooden building erected by the Reverend Kensington burned or was burned to the ground in 1931 and had to be replaced by a cement building which was equally ugly and resembled an anti-aircraft emplacement in design and appearance. In 1939, a city councilman introduced a bill calling for the abolition of Kensington Central as a school and the conversion of the building into a jailhouse. The motion was defeated by two votes. In 1952, the local city police station was assigned two extra patrolmen since it was found necessary to maintain a minimum of two men on duty during school hours for the protection of female students and faculty from juvenile delinquents. After the mayoral elections in that same unfortunate year, Kensington's principal was found guilty of having certain moral defects in his character as far as his relations with little boys were concerned and was replaced by a more righteous man, Herman Parsons, who knew virtually nothing about the administration of a large metropolitan school but had married the mayor's ugly daughter, this in one masterful stroke demonstrating himself to be a loyal party man and a practicing heterosexual. Mark Hanson, who had been for one season a talked about quarterback for a professional football team, took over Kensington's Physical Education program in 1967, starting the school on its way to a long way to a long string of football championships in the city-wide competitions. He was joined the following year by Philip ft'? 'thews, M.A., whose poetry had appeared in several women's magazines, but beyond Hanson and Matthews ( who hated each other) the faculty was totally undistinguished.
In 1972, Kensington mourned the passing of Wanda Billings, who had taught biology at Kensington for nearly a half century without having once mentioned the word "sex" and the Board of Education assigned Miss Kathleen Barton to fill the vacancy. Due to an administrative error. Miss Barton reported for her first teaching assignment after graduation from college a week after classes had already begun.