They came last Saturday night to the open house at Dick Scobee Elementary to remember the days when it was North Auburn Elementary.

Squinting at name tags, they recognized under hairs grow inexplicably gray and heads bereft of hair, faces they knew when all was young.

They visited classrooms. then mingled in today’s school library, in their days the gymnasium and cafeteria, to study news clippings and point excitedly at grainy photos and faces peering out at them, often their own.

“Wow, it’s so small, it seemed so big then,” Connie Henke, Auburn High School graduating class of 1970, said of one classroom.

Good memories?

“Oh yeah, the best,” Henke said, “the best.”

Prompting this trip down memory lane was the school’s pending razing to make way for a new Dick Scobee Elementary at the same site. That school is tentatively scheduled to open in the fall of 2020.

Last Saturday, these alumni, most of whom who attended North Auburn in the 1960s and early ’70s, recalled what the school was like in their day.

Andy Ulrich, AHS graduating class of 1974, laughed about some kid “who donated a two-headed snake to Mr. Pickens’ class.”

Pam Hawley talked about the flooding of the Green River, which turned the playground into a giant pond nearly every year, over which kids sailed on makeshift rafts or floated on inner-tubes in autumns of glory before the construction of Howard Hanson dam.

“We lived right next to the field and got the worst of the flooding,” Hawley said.

On that same playground, Tracy Hagen and Mike Trimble, both of who went on to graduate from Auburn High in 1975, played baseball.

Some dusted off stories they once told about some of the wholly-imagined spectral goings on inside Old Lady Grant’s barn, long gone now, but then a baleful, moss-covered cedar barn west of North Auburn Elementary School, sinking under the weight of its nearly 100 years, under a canopy of blackberry bushes that spooked young minds late at night.

“We always called her ‘the witch’ because we never knew her name,” said Ulrich, summoning up a childhood remembrance of Grant, whose name, he concedes, he never actually knew, but who actually was that kind old woman who sold the district the land for the school when the neighborhood was new.

“I remember climbing the walls of the school to get my kite back, because we used to fly kites in a field near it,,” said Craig Corbaley, who grew up just south of the school.

Mostly, the alumni remembered people, the teachers who held them after the final bell rang to bang chalk erasers because, well, because of something naughty they did they have long since forgotten.

Remembered also the annual Christmas programs fifth-grade teacher extraordinaire Elaine Murphy organized every year.

“I didn’t make choir, I wasn’t quite good enough,” Carl Corbaley recalled with a laugh.

Colleen (McGilvray) Rayburn recalled how she had a voice “like a squashed duck,” and the kind counsel she got from Mrs. Murphy: “Just mouth the words, Colleen.”

They swapped stories of favorite teachers like Mr. Ray, Mrs. Beckham, Mr. Tossey, Mr. Fettig — old Chrome dome because of his retreating hairline — Mrs. Darra, Mrs. Yost and many others.

“Mr. Ray and Mrs. Murphy were my favorite teachers,” Henke said. “They were best friends, but they argued because Mrs. Murphy would pull me out of his class to come sing in her class, and he thought that was not appropriate .

Cindy Ludwig, AHS graduating class of 1970, remembered her fierce rivalry with a fellow student for the honor of being the best scholar in their class.

“John Branchflower was my arch-enemy, as far as competition for high grades. We had a spelling bee, and I missed spelling ‘extraordinary,’ and I have never forgotten that my entire life,” Ludwig said.

While the existing school tumbles and its successor prepares to take the field, students will move to Olympic Middle School as an interim facility.

Scobee is one of six Auburn schools that will be replaced, thanks to a voter-approved $456 million bond package. The money will build two new elementary schools, one on the south end, the other on the north end. both serving up to 650 students.

Also slated for replacement are Pioneer Elementary (built in 1959), Chinook Elementary (1963), Terminal Park (1945), and Lea Hill (1965).