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West Texas High School was located in the Education Building at West Texas A&M University, then called West Texas State Teachers College.

In 1949, the Class A State Champions in boys basketball hailed from Canyon, but they did not attend Canyon High School.

Months after West Texas State Normal College was established in 1910, a demonstration school was opened to give education students an opportunity to practice their teaching in real classrooms.

“It was a wonderful school,” said Billie Erwin, a 1946 graduate of West Texas High School. “They wanted the school to help train teachers that were getting an education degree from WT. The classes were formed to be the exact size of about 25 students per class and the rest of the children went to the other school, Canyon High School.”

Classes were held in the Education Building at West Texas State.

“At one time it had beautiful statues of Greek gods and goddesses,” Erwin said. “It was a beautiful school. When the college took over, they started cleaning that building out and they took all the statues out and it made me sick.”

Erwin said West Texas High School was small, with a maximum of 35 students per graduating class.

“They kept it small because that was the facilities they had, and we were on all three floors of the education building,” Erwin said. “Kids nowadays can’t imagine small schools with just that many students. But we had an orchestra, music and theater. We did all those things.”

The students participated in many sports, including football, volleyball, swimming and basketball.

“I was football queen there in 1945 when we finally got a football team,” Erwin said. “There wasn’t any gas because everything was rationed during WWII, so many sports and things were cancelled and they just played intramural stuff.”

Canyon High School and West Texas High School were athletic rivals.

“I knew a lot of people in Canyon because I was raised there, but you kind of hung out with your group and they hung out with theirs,” Erwin said. “We had the Buffalo Drug at the college where we hung out and they had the old pharmacy where they hung out.”

Erwin graduated as World War II was ending.

“It was something else, because the Air Force brought their students down from training them to be pilots to West Texas’ campus,” Erwin said. “They lived and trained there on campus, and every morning we could sit in our class and hear them marching by, always singing a song or something. Of course, we all just thought they were wonderful. They were all young bucks and were as cute as they could be.”

Erwin’s mother fed Air Force students who lived on campus.

“It really made the war more real to all of us,” Erwin said. “I got to know a lot of them because they would bring them up to my mother’s home and she would always feed them. They loved coming to Mom’s. She treated them just like they were one of her kids. We were sort of like a home away from home.”

The end of the war had a direct impact on college enrollment. Enrollment had dipped as low as 505 students during one point in the 1943-1944 school year. The 1946 freshman class at West Texas State Teachers College, Erwin’s class, was the biggest in history with a total of around 1000 students. (The name of WTSTC was changed to West Texas State College in 1949.)

“That was because the war was over and the boys had been given a GI bill to go to school,” Erwin said. “Many kids could not have gotten an education if it hadn’t been for that bill that Roosevelt passed so that the boys who served would all have the opportunity to go to school.”

Erwin graduated from West Texas State College in 1950 with a degree in education.

“I could’ve been a teacher, but my husband had farmland close to Amarillo,” Erwin said. “He wanted to do that, so when we both graduated he went into farming, and I never took the opportunity to teach. In those days, you stayed home and did what you were supposed to.”

The school closed in 1950 when too few students attended the demonstration school.

“They finally decided that Canyon High School would take all the students,” Erwin said. “That was fine.”

The staff thanks Canyon High School teacher Wes Kirton, who discovered WTHS yearbooks and shared them with the newspaper staff.