On June 16, 2004, at 12:08 p.m., Hester becomes history, joining Lincoln, the Express and the rest.

The 143-year-old school is one of three the San Jose Unified School District voted to close at the end of this school term in a cost-cutting move.

"Emotional" is the word Erin Green, principal of Hester, uses to describe the final weeks.

"I entered my principalship here at Hester last year and served as summer school principal before that. I've loved this school from the moment I stepped on the grounds, and I just love the staff and the community," Green says.

To help the 343 current students, teachers, staff, alumni and community members, Green is hosting a Farewell Assembly and Social on June 11.

"We want the kids to have some sort of closure and understand how special the school is. That they're part of its history and they matter," Green says.

The school's history starts with the formation of the Hester School District in 1861. The school took its name from Craven P. Hester, former district attorney for San Jose and then judge of the Third Judicial District. A prominent citizen and a resident of one of the mansions on The Alameda, his name lives on with Hester Street. Gone is the Hester Pharmacy, and the Hester Theater is now known as the Towne Theater.

C.B. Polhemus donated the land for the school, but, according to a 1913 story in the now-defunct San Jose Times-Star newspaper on the history of Hester, money was a problem when Hester opened.

"There was no money with which to pay a teacher, and an old-fashioned 'social' was given to raise the salary.

"The sum obtained by the social was given as a subsidy to the teacher, who received the remainder of her pay from the tuition charged the pupils."

One alumnus with vivid memories of Hester is Harry Farrell, book author and a journalist for 44 years at the San Jose Mercury News until his retirement in 1986.

Farrell and his parents were living on Atlas Avenue when he started kindergarten at Hester in 1929.

"They had a real good faculty; there was only one teacher I couldn't get along with," Farrell says. "They had music and art, all the three R's and a physical-ed period. They don't teach kids that stuff anymore."

Farrell remembers his stint as a crossing guard, although he says that, in those days, "we called ourselves traffic cops."

"The traffic squad was run by Mr. William Osterman, the janitor. They let us out 10 minutes before noon. I had Hanchett and The Alameda, and I had a sign I held up to help the younger kids.

"It was dangerous crossing those streets. There were no stoplights then. The bad intersection was at Race and Martin and The Alameda."

Streetcars also ran down the center of The Alameda, and his fascination with them resulted in Farrell's being called into the principal's office when he was in the fourth grade.

"They repaved the sidewalk down in front of the streetcar barn on Lenzen, and I was coming out of school and I wrote my name in cement. My best friend, Jack Hoover, told on me, and I got called into the principal's office."

Knowing the principal had a reputation for spanking with a belt, Farrell went in with his defense prepared.

"The principal was William J. Peters, and he was very stern, and we were all afraid of him," Farrell recalls.

"I had a book on Jackie Cooper and in there it told how he left his footprints in the cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I was like a lawyer. I prepared my case and I brought the book along to show him that it was perfectly OK. He bawled me out, but let me go back to my room.

"In the sixth grade, I got into his class for one hour a day. When he got to be a teacher, he was a big showoff. We could hardly wait to get there because it was so much fun."

Farrell also remembers his current-events class, in which, each week, students had to report on a current event.

One event discussed endlessly in 1933 was when Brooke Hart, son of the owners of Hart's Department Store, was kidnapped and murdered. Later, the kidnappers were taken by a mob from a San Jose jail and publicly lynched in St. James Park.

The Harts' mansion was just down the street from Hester, at Naglee and The Alameda, now the site of the YMCA. Farrell says one of Hart's cousins was a fellow student of his at the time.

"We were really attuned to the whole thing," says Farrell, who was then 9 years old and in the third grade.

After his retirement from the Mercury News, Farrell wrote a book about Hart, Swift Justice: Murder & Vengeance in a California Town. Published in 1992, it won him the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe award for the best true-crime book of the year and a glowing review from Walter Cronkite, who wrote, "Splendid reporting that will shake up our concepts of ourselves."

Other big events Farrell remembers fascinating his current-events class were the crashes of the Akron airship into the Atlantic Ocean in 1933, followed by the crash of the Macon airship in 1935 in the Pacific.

Nancy Campbell Schell, now a pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church on The Alameda across the street from Hester, was a classmate of Farrell.

She remembers "dancing around the Maypole out in front of the school. I was one of the princesses, not the May Queen."

Schell also recalls "Thursday mornings when we'd all troop into the auditorium and listen to the Standard Oil Symphony Hour on the radio. It was geared to children, and they'd explain the different instruments."

Both Schell and Farrell have strong memories of lunchtime at Hester.

For Schell, it's the "once a week they had shredded carrot and raisin salad, which I didn't like."

Farrell's favorite lunch spot was at Hester Pharmacy.

"They had a special table at the drugstore at noon for kids. My folks would give me 21 cents—a dime for a sandwich and a dime for a milkshake, a big one, and a penny for sales tax."

Both Farrell and Schell also remember attending the matinees at Hester Theater.

"They had free matinees on Tuesday afternoons, and I remember raking leaves to earn money to go to the show on Saturday afternoons," Schell says.

Another classmate of Farrell and Schell's was Allyn Ferguson, who was apparently inspired by all those matinees. He moved to Hollywood, where he's composed the music scores for more than 60 films.

Bob Dalton is another person with many memories of Hester, but not as a student. Now living in Roseville, Dalton was principal of the school from 1968 until he retired in 1988.

"My fond memories are of the community," he says. "It was a real neat community to work in. Everyone was cooperative, and it produced good kids who worked hard and were well behaved. We had a great staff, an unbelievable staff who really cared about the kids and worked at developing their skills."

Dalton was there when Hester assimilated students from Sunol School in 1968 and Longfellow School in the early '70s.

During that time they were tearing down the old Hester School and building the one that stands there today. He remembers double sessions and working out of trailers.

"Westminster Presbyterian across the street gave us rooms in their basement at no cost, so we could continue to have a library. A parent ran the library," he says.

Dalton also remembers when Hester was considered the school to send deaf students to.

Then there were his battles to "clean up the community" by opposing the showing of X-rated films at the Towne Theater, helping to close an adult bookstore near the Towne and working to have a jail on Lenzen relocated.

The battle that made Dalton decide to retire was in 1986­86, when the SJUSD started busing children into Hester.

"I was at school some nights until 9 p.m., trying to locate little kids who got lost. It was turmoil for a while," he says. "I thought, I've been around as a teacher and a principal for 40 years, and it's time for me to bail out."

Staff members who came after Dalton also have strong memories and feelings about Hester, particularly about its closure.

LeAnne Cooley taught for 25 years, the last 20 at Hester, before her retirement in 2002.

Under her direction, a literacy team was established more than a decade ago, at a time when the concept was almost unknown.

"We were concerned about our student test scores, so we wrote our own grants to provide funding and did our own training," Cooley says. "There was a synergy and desire to see our students succeed. We were willing to go the extra mile; we didn't wait for the district. At Hester, we had a common vision and the determination to pursue it."

Elsie Sydnor, a teacher and librarian at Hester for 16 years, praises the literacy program and Cooley's efforts.

"We were a step ahead of everybody else," Sydnor says. "It started at Hester and then it caught on with everybody else."

Among Hester's staff and the parents of Hester students, there is still a great deal of anger focused on SJUSD for closing Hester.

"I was one of the ones who went to all the meetings and spoke against the closure," Schell says. "My sense was this was a done deal before any of the open meetings. I feel it's an injustice that the schools that were closed are in the northern part of the school district, while none in the southern district were closed.

"Hester has done a tremendous job and is being punished," Schell says.

Over the years, there have been a number of buildings carrying the Hester School name, from the original small, four-room building to today's version, which opened in 1971, replacing one built in 1914.

A key legacy of Hester that will remain after the school closes is the "Spirit Gate," now a local landmark.

Erected in 2000 and facing The Alameda, the "Spirit Gate" was a project of the San Jose Public Arts Program.

Artists Bill Gould and Glen Rogers worked with the local community, teachers and students at Hester. Fourth-graders chose "power words" such as wisdom, honor, vision, community, family and dream that were cut into the steel rings of the gate by Brian's Welding.

Other students did drawings reflecting local history that Fireclay Tiles transformed into mosaic tiles that spiral around the tusk-like columns on each side of the gate.

To help students deal with the closure, the staff is preparing a time capsule for burial on the school grounds.

Lynn Hyssop, upper-grade resource teacher at Hester, has been organizing the farewell assembly and social. She says students are being invited to write messages that will go into the capsule.

Looking ahead, Green says the present Hester staff will be scattering to 12 different sites throughout SJUSD next year. "I'll be the principal at Cory next year, and I'll see 20 to 30 of the students there," she says.

Looking toward June 16, Green says, "l can't imagine standing out with the kids for the last time on the last Friday. It's definitely rough."