Former Students Remember First Walking Through Wheeling Park High Doors In 1977
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If Rick Armstrong needed a reminder he would finish his high school career in a school quite different from the one he was used to, all he had to do was look down at his hand.
Balfour had come to Triadelphia High School his junior year to take orders for class rings. Yet those rings would not have "Triadelphia" etched into them. It would be a school the doors of which had not yet opened - Wheeling Park High School.
Armstrong would be part of the Wheeling Park High Class of 1977, the first graduating class of the new high school that brought former Wheeling, Warwood and Triadelphia high school students under one single roof with one single name and one single set of school colors. The graduating class would be part of the 2,250 students who made up the student body its first year.
While those new digs were a little overwhelming for those students to navigate at first, they quickly learned about some of the huge advantages that came with moving to WPHS - most significantly, the new and much wider curriculum choices they enjoyed.
It was another signal WPHS would be a different environment from what Armstrong and his classmates were used to, he said.
"We were handed a manual at Triadelphia and you got to choose all these different classes," he said. "We never had all these choices. You had, like, triple the amount of classes to choose from. It was incredible."
One of those new classes Armstrong chose was broadcasting. What eventually became the high school's radio station, WPHP, had not yet gotten its license to broadcast. Students went through the motions of broadcasting until that license was procured.
Armstrong remembers that first day WPHP could broadcast, and they wanted to test how far the signal would reach. So the station played Eric Clapton's version of "I Shot The Sheriff" on loop as students drove around the area finding the limits of the signal.
"I think someone was even over in Bellaire on top of a hill," Armstrong said, before adding with a laugh. "To this day, I don't ever want to hear that song again. If I hear it, I turn the radio off."
Those new opportunities were available for every student. Sharon Cappiccie, another Class of 1977 graduate, remembered being able to attend class at Wheeling Park for the first half of the day then head off the hill for the second half to work, an option she said she didn't have at Triadelphia High, her former school.
"That was really nice," she said. "It was amazing the things you could do. And nowadays, oh my gosh, there are so many different things to choose from up there."
While they were navigating those new class choices, they also had to navigate the new building, three levels of classrooms constructed within nearly 273,000 square feet of space. Both Armstrong and Cappiccie remember walking through the school halls trying to find classrooms in a building so much bigger than they were used to, while working their way through masses of student humanity they had never before witnessed in their old high school halls.
What they also both remember was the color coding system in the hallways, an invention of assistant principal Phyllis Beneke, who would later become head principal. Different sections of the school had different colors assigned to their classroom signs -- red in one section, blue in another and yellow and orange in others.
"It was easy because they had everything color coded," Cappiccie said. "You knew at least in what direction you were going. I don't remember it being that bad."
Another pleasant surprise, the former students said, was the lack of old crosstown rivalries bubbling up at the new school. Part of that, they said, was the fact everyone was in the same boat trying to get a handle on their new surroundings. Another part, according to former Wheeling Park assistant principal and Warwood High School principal Frank Blake, was many students had already been working together through the McKinley Vocational and Trade School, which also had been enveloped into WPHS.
Before Wheeling Park opened, on football game days, Blake said you would see students in Triadelphia, Warwood and Wheeling jerseys working side by side in vocational education. By the time everyone got to Wheeling Park, many people already knew each other.
And this included those who didn't made friends quickly, Cappiccie said.
"There were so many people and so many friendships developed," she said. "I met lifelong friends who came from other schools, people I still keep in contact with. It was like we went to school together forever."
As far as regrets from his short time at WPHS, Armstrong said one of his few was his time at the school ending so soon.
"It offered so many different opportunities," he said. "I wish I could have gone all three years there."
There were plenty of students in the original group who did enjoy multiple years at Wheeling Park High. Among them was Michael Romick, a junior when he came from Triadelphia High to Wheeling Park. For him, the gift was the opportunity to learn all the aspects of theater in a brand new facility.
Triadelphia had a stage, Romick said, but it was nothing compared to WPHS.
"Here we had all the things we read about in the books," he said. "The ellipsoidal (lights), the Fresnel lights, a brand new soundboard. It was really cool. Everything was state of the art."
Romick immersed himself in the theater program. He was part of the first performance on a Wheeling Park High stage, "Godspell," done that fall.
Those advantages were found in the classroom as well. He remembers nine-week mini-courses in English he took. One was "Man: Sinner or Saint?" where the question was posed at the start of the class whether man is born a sinner or saint, then students read and discussed coming-of-age novels like "Lord of the Flies" and "Catcher in the Rye." Another was "On Death and Dying," where the class read Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' book of the same name, where she interviewed people who have had near-death experiences, and discussed death, the funeral industry and other topics.
Romick has come full circle at Wheeling Park High. First a student with a love of both English and theater, he is now, in his 12th year of teaching at the school, the chair of its English department and an assistant coach for its theater program.
What he loves about the school now is 50 years later, it hasn't stopped evolving. He sees it every day he walks into the J.B. Chambers Performing Arts Center for play rehearsals, or just when he walks through the school's main entrance, renovated only a few years ago.
Romick has worked in two high schools in other states and said Wheeling Park compares very favorably to both. That devotion to always making the school better, he said, is a major part of that.
"There's only one county in 55 in West Virginia that has gained population," Romick said. "And while everyone else has lost population, our school continues to be state of the art in so many different ways.
"A lot of that is the community support," he continued, "and they really have supported Wheeling Park."