Local history class students tour museum

REVERE – Paul Revere School fourth-grader Grace Rondon was surprised by her visit Wednesday to the Revere Historical Society Museum.”It wasn’t all what I expected it to be,” she said. “I thought it would be boring.”Rondon, along with 20 of her classmates and her teacher Susan Ross, toured the Beach Street museum as a wrap-up to a six-lesson course on Revere history.Mary Jane Terenzi, president of the historical society, said she and her cohort Toby Pearlstein visited the students bringing pieces of the museum with them.”It was mostly based on neighborhoods, Point of Pines, Oak Island, Shirley Avenue, this area where we are is Center Village and there’s West Revere,” Terenzi explained. “We also talked about schools and the type of people who lived here back then and who lives here now.”Students wandered through the three-story museum that Terenzi said was once a rectory for Immaculate Conception Parish. On the first floor they marveled at old class photos declaring that the boys of Garfield Junior High School’s Class of 1940, who were all dressed in suits, looked more like college guys.Terenzi said children were a little more serious in those days, when hard work was serious business and families didn’t have a lot to spare.In the political room across the hall they were intrigued by a large display of weights and measures donated by the city, permits that dated back to the 1800s and old campaign buttons.On the second floor Emmanuel Sosa gazed at a display that included an old musket, saddle and medals from the Civil War era.”Man, this stuff is old,” he breathed quietly. “That gun’s made of wood.”The students also viewed remnants of the city’s beachfront heyday when the boulevard was home to dance halls, movie theaters, restaurants, hotels and an amusement park replete with roller coaster, Bluebeard’s Palace and dodgem cars.Museum curator Rick Terenzi told students of the Ocean Pier dance hall that sat at the end of a pier out over the ocean and included a heated saltwater pool.”They would freeze it in the winter for ice skating,” he added.He also pointed out pictures of Barbra Streisand and Dorothy Lamour and said they were among dozens of famous people who played the nightclubs along the boulevard at places like Frolic.The kids giggled at the old fashioned wool bathing suits and wondered if the phantom horseman rumored to guard a buried pirate treasure in Point of Pines was real.At the end of the tour, Rondon marveled at how much of the history she already knew because of Mary Jane Terenzi and Pearlstein’s visits.”They’re like little sponges,” said Mary Jane Terenzi. “They just soak up everything.”Sosa said he enjoyed the visit.”I think it’s interesting to see the things they do in the past,” he said. “I really liked it.”The museum is open to the public every Saturday, except this Saturday, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.