The big red schoolhouse is coming down.

Voters in Mansfield have agreed to tear down the last of its neighborhood schools.

Back in the early 1950s, my father looked at the balance sheets of the clothing store he and his brothers owned in Mansfield, Mass., and realized that the cash was rolling in. Really rolling in, in fact.

So he did what countless other sons of immigrants did during the postwar economic boom -- he strove for a better life for himself, his wife, and hopefully, a new generation that would eventually be coming along. He bought some land.

In the Mansfield of that era, many of the Italian families that came to America and then to our little town at the turn of the century were still clustered in what was called "the North End," very close to the huge Lowney Chocolate Factory on the railroad tracks that had offered employment and even housing to the newcomers so they would gladly do the jobs that none of the snooty white Anglo-Saxon Protestants on the other side of Chauncy and Pratt streets wanted to do. Those folks envisioned themselves as the rightful heirs to those that stepped off the Mayflower. My forefathers, on the other hand, were the spaghetti benders that stampeded en masse out of steerage.

My dad in front of the bakery in 1936.

But the Italians and Sicilians were resourceful and hard-working people. My grandfather opened a bakery to satisfy the taste buds of the town's ruling class, and his sons delivered the fresh rolls and loaves all over the region on bicycles. Then when they got older and longed for a better life, they seized the moment. My Uncle Santino crossed the imaginary dividing line between the ethnic groups, bought a decaying old stable at an important intersection, turned it into a clothing store that would be expanded and reborn several times over the next 60 years, and his brothers followed him into the business and started raking in the loot.

Step Two was assimilation. And the easiest way to achieve that was to buy land in parts of town where no Italians had gone before. Before long, all four Farinella brothers made it past that border and put down roots in what had been the strongholds of the Anglos that had settled the town. 

For my father, the plot of land he coveted was close to a swampy marsh on sparsely-built Dean Street. There was a large man-made pond to the east of it, dug out of those Rumford River-fed swamplands by a knifemaker and metals forger in the 1700s. My dad's parcel was almost fully dry and the rest easily reclaimable -- there was no such thing as "wetlands protection" in those days -- and by 1953, construction would begin on a five-room, one-bath, three-bedroom ranch to house him, his wife, and a player to be named later that was on the way.

Mom and little me in the unfinished garage.

By January 1954, construction on me was finished. In August, the house followed. We moved in, and my parents lived there for the rest of their lives. I spent most of the first 17 years of my life in that house, then the next 45 years or so wandering around the Hockomock League, and I returned to the house upon my mother's death in 2015 -- and here I remain.

I mentioned earlier that there weren't many houses on this street when my father bought the land. Most that were here were built between World War I and the 1930s on the higher-and-drier section at the northern terminus of the street (only a few tenths of a mile away). But one feature that stood out louder and prouder than all the other structures was a tall, red-brick schoolhouse that was probably the pride of a growing Mansfield when it opened in 1923.

In the background in 1955, the Roland Green School.

For all of my life, the Roland Green School has towered over Dean Street. I say "towered" loosely, as it is only a two-story building -- but in the architectural style of the day, it rose well above the houses surrounding it, each story was far taller than it needed to be, and the high-peaked roof made it look like an imposing skyscraper -- especially to the first- , second- and third-graders that attended it for most of its existence.

Mansfield was always big on neighborhood schools. There were schools in every part of town for every age group. Generations were born and raised with pride that they attended the Roland Green, or the Paine, the John Berry, the Spaulding or the Central schools and didn't interact with the other kids in town before coming together at Mansfield High School eventually. But one-by-one, almost all of those have been repurposed (the John Berry in West Mansfield became a satellite YMCA facility, and the Park Row, itself a former high school, became Town Hall), or met the wrecking ball. Mansfield consolidated today's schools in a complex that includes a high school, a former high school that's now a middle school, and two large elementary schools, and the need for satellite schools diminished.

Roland Green, however, clung to life. Elementary grades were phased out, but the building found new purpose as a pre-school facility for many years before it closed with no fanfare at all after the 2025 school year. The building is old, environmentally inefficient and in increasing disrepair. Upon moving the pre-school classes out to other school buildings where space was now available because of declining enrollment, town government immediately set to the task of planning the Roland Green's demise.

That was set in stone at a special town meeting Tuesday night. Before the bare minimum of a quorum and with hardly a peep of public discussion, the meeting voted to turn the building over from the school department to the control of the Select Board, which will immediately set to the task of demolishing it. The remaining property will then be carved into three lots for the building of three duplex houses.

This took me by surprise, and it really shouldn't have.

Quite matter-of-factly, it was explained at the town meeting that these plans had been discussed in public meetings for quite some time, and all that was now needed was the rubber stamp from voters to start the wrecking ball rolling and the cash rolling in from the resale of the property to developers. I had heard nothing of it, but the newspapers never cover municipal meetings anymore, and the first mention I saw of it was in a preview of the town meeting in the local daily that ran on the very day that the meeting was to take place.

Yes, I know that municipal meetings are shown on local cable. No, I don't watch them. I don't have any axes to grind with anyone else at the present time, and I'm convinced that the only people that watch municipal meetings on a regular basis are those with specific and obsessive grievances. Go ahead, try to convince me otherwise.

And no, I didn't attend the meeting. Call me a bad American if you will -- I know at least one guy in town that revels at that opportunity -- but I have all of four days left in which I can prepare for the next 10-12 weeks of announcing high school sports on the cable systems of three local communities. I'm busy. My car has left the garage only once since I got back from the Feehan-CM football game on Saturday night, and that was to pick up a pizza tonight.

But I did watch the meeting on my iPhone and witnessed the death sentence for the Roland Green being delivered. It wouldn't have helped if I had gone. I would have just sounded like a NIMBY objecting to six new housing units going up on a plot of land not much larger than my own, and I would have come across like a curmudgeonly codger shaking his fist at the moon. Unlike others I know, I actually can read a room. Anything I could have said would have fallen upon deaf ears.

I can't imagine Dean Street without the Roland Green School being a part of it. But to be totally honest, I don't really know if any remorse I feel is actually genuine.

You see, I never attended it.

The late, lamented Dominican Academy.

My parents sent me to a Catholic elementary school in Plainville in 1959, the long-since-closed Dominican Academy, which was sort of regarded as "Bishop Feehan Prep" in those days. But I was too much of a hell-raiser and free-thinker for the shellshocked Dominican sisters, and they basically threw me out of the place after I made it through six of eight grades. My parents grudgingly sent me to Mansfield schools (and by that time, the brand-new Robinson Elementary was open), and I survived and thrived and became the solid citizen I am today.

Mansfield was a different town in my elementary days, however. I remember how I would see lines of students my age being led by teachers past our house and up Dean Street as "field trips" to the river that flowed through both Fulton and Kingman ponds, and then maybe stroll to the library near the South Common. Kids were also let out on their own at the end of a school day, and they'd stroll past the house on their way home. Life was a lot safer then. Buses took you out to the sticks, but if you lived within a mile or so of the school, as most of the kids did, the walk was usually pleasant and safe.

But in the less-trusting 2020s, with pre-schoolers in the building, there were no field trips and no carefree walks home. All of the streets in the grid around Roland Green became parking lots for countless SUVs waiting in line to pick up their precious little cherubs around 2 p.m. You could tell inside the house that it was time for pickup, too, because of the incessant and ear-piercing screaming by the children with separation anxiety that would refuse to go gently into those giant Yukons, Tucsons and GLE 450s.

I remember quite well my first day of school in September 1959, when I was 5½ years old. My parents walked me the eighth of a mile from our house to the bus stop at the corner of West Street and Copeland Drive. The yellow Ford bus (No. 3, I recall) stopped, the doors swung open and my folks basically told me that I was on my own and not to be bashful. I sat down, looked out the window most of the way and then got off the bus in Plainville and asked the first white-robed woman with a long black cape that I saw, "Which way to the first grade?" Every day thereafter, I did it all myself.

True story. Pre-school? I didn't need no steenkin' pre-school.

Not only was there way too much traffic near Roland Green in recent times, the soccer moms in their suburban commando vehicles would floor the accelerator pedals once the kids were belted in, and they would try to get from 0-to-60 by the time they reached West Street -- and with no regard whatsoever to anyone else trying to make it to their driveways. And the teachers, with no parking spaces available in the playground behind the school, took to parking their cars in front of my house, often practically blocking that driveway entrance.

I complained to the former schools superintendent, who had graduated from MHS just a few years after me, but she said she couldn't do anything about it. But then once the school year was over, the pre-school closed and the problem was solved. And now, the "final solution" will be a permanent one.

Frankly, I don't think I've ever set foot inside the building. I wasn't a student, nor was I a parent of one, and otherwise there's no reason for an adult to be roaming about an ancient elementary school if sports aren't being played there.

My pitching dreams ended
during my Legion career.

The only use I had for the building, in fact, was when I was in my early teens and I had made the junior varsity baseball team at MHS. I harbored dreams about being a pitcher, but with no brothers or sisters and few children my age on the street, I didn't have anyone to throw the ball with -- especially at higher velocity. But the Roland Green's side walls were solid red brick with no windows, and a foundation of concrete that began right where the middle of the strike zone might be on an opposing batter. I'd mark off a spot roughly 60 feet away (no mound, so I wasn't really helping myself), put down a bucket of balls and strap on my cleats, and I'd start firing full-windup throws at a small rectangle-shaped vent hole in the foundation that I presumed would be a perfect strike.

I'd do that for hours on end, usually on weekends when the school was closed. My accuracy got better, but the velocity never got much past 60 mph from my estimates and occasional throws with a radar gun nearby. The thwack ... thwack ... thwack noise of the ball striking the wall must have been annoying to neighbors, but no one ever complained ... which is amazing, when you think of it.

And on those very rare occasions when I would put the ball right into that rectangular hole in the wall, it would jar loose a metal wire grating inside it and send both it and the ball bouncing to the basement floor of the school. I'd beat a hasty retreat hoping to avoid discovery and accountability, and a few days later I'd return to see that the grating had been replaced. It would be time to start the process anew.

In some ways, I hope that maybe I can take a stroll inside Roland Green School just once before it becomes a pile of rubble, just to see what's inside. I always wondered, because I never attended a school that wasn't of recent construction. It has been a noble backdrop to significant portions of my life, but it's hardly worth re-purposing. Starbucks would not be interested, I'm sure.

It's all part of the march of progress. Tradition and history walk when money talks. I get it. Besides, the Roland Green has had a long and useful life. I hope I can say the same thing when that march of progress overtakes me -- and to be honest, I suspect the Roland Green doesn't have that much of a head start.

Farewell, old friend.

MARK FARINELLA fully understands that nothing lasts forever ... although he's going to try his damnedest to prove otherwise. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.