A 1930s photo showing the old church adjacent to the school that is scheduled for demolition.
Photos courtesy of Betty Wannemacher
OTTAWA — Betty Wannemacher’s oldest sister attended the Fourth Street Sts. Peter and Paul School (SPPS) when it was first built in 1921, 101 years ago, and it has proudly stood as a centerpiece in the Ottawa community and Catholic parishioners for multiple generations. On Sunday, former students, teachers, and the public were invited to tour the building one last time before its scheduled demolition, with blackboards, filing cabinets, bookcases, and any other items inside available for the taking.
Betty Wannemacher, who was born during the Great Depression, began school at SPSS in the first grade, in 1941, which was the same year of the outbreak of WWII.
“Every day we prayed for our soldiers, and we worried about the war,” Wannemacher said. Later, in high school, she saw many of her male high school classmates drafted for the Korean War.
Wannemacher said she and her sister traveled across town to reach the school. But after after she graduated and then married, Betty and her husband moved into a home across the street and could see the school whenever she looked out her window, joking that the walk to school would have been much easier had she lived in this home earlier. She attended school in that building until her graduation, which was before the new high school was constructed in 1956.
“It’s going to be very weird not to see the school there,” Wannemacher said when asked about the impending demolition.
Linda and Ron Ellerbrock met at SPPS and have been married for 58 years. The Ellerbrock’s extended family has had 52 people attend school there over three generations.
In 1946, Ron, the oldest among 11 children, was the first in his family to attend SPPS, making his family and his direct descendants — 4 children and 12 grandchildren — one of the longest (if not the longest) direct family line to have attended the Fourth St. school building — a total of 73 years (1949 to 2019). Some of his relatives continued to have students there until the building stopped offering classes in the new school addition adjacent to the church which was completed in August in time for the beginning of the 2021 academic year.
“The flood of 2007 kind of destroyed the building, and, after two to three years of fundraising, it’s time to move forward,” said Linda Ellerbrock.
Susan Kuhlman’s parents attended SPPS and sent their eight children to the same school. After finishing college, Kuhlman returned to the Fourth St. SPPS school and spent the next 30 years working there as a teacher.
Kuhlman invited her siblings, who had since moved away, for a small family reunion. They came together to walk through the building one last time. Each left with a coat hook as a token to remember from their youth spent together before the school building is gone.
