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There Went The Neighborhood - State Theatre Interview: Yael Gannett

When: April 16, 2023

Yael Gannett was interviewed after a preliminary screening of the documentary film There Went The Neighborhood: The Closing of Jones School at the State Theatre on April 16, 2023. She remembers attending Jones School and Wines Elementary.

More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.

Transcript

  • [00:00:05] YAEL GANNETT: My name is Yael Gannett. As a child, my name was Sue Ellen Gardner. I attended Jones School as a kindergartner and a first grader there and when my mother first moved into a house right smack dab next to Burton Tower, she walked us one day to Jones, which would be our school and we always walked to and from school, me and my brother who was two years older than me. Those were really important years in my life. I had a very best friend, Arlene Woodbury and we enjoyed ourselves very much as students there. When we moved to Wines School, because my mother bought a house in the Wines district right across the field, I was in the second grade. I thought the name of the school was Wines School because I didn't know the difference between the spellings of whine or wine. As a second grader, I said, this is Whine School because all the kids are white, except for a few black kids. None of my friends from Jones were there. The white kids were whiners and couldn't tie their shoes. Anyway, Jones School played a very important part in my life because I didn't see the privilege I had. I was working from a base of zero. I cherished the years I spent there in the days walking from Burton Tower to Jones School and playing on the playground, even though I got bullied a little bit, but I just remember them as really important years.
  • [00:02:13] DONALD HARRISON: Is there anything that wasn't in the film, like a story or some piece of perspective that you want to add?
  • [00:02:20] YAEL GANNETT: I just remember how shiny the floors were there and how clean it was. Even though I was going to a new school in my second grade at Wines, it just didn't have the soul that Jones had. Mr. Pitts, Mr. Perry, I recognize their faces. I don't remember who but I just always felt welcome there. I think that's the soul of Jones.