Liberty Memorial Central Middle School sixth-grade students look at historical features of their school during a Traditions and Heritage Assembly Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2014. The assembly teaches students about the significance of the school and the story behind the building, a monument to WW I veterans.

There are perks to being the principal of Lawrence’s Liberty Memorial Central Middle School. Having business cards the size of a Trapper Keeper to accommodate your school’s name perhaps is not one of them.

But giving tours to other school district employees, now that is fun. They come in from other buildings spread throughout the district, and LMCMS (I’ll buy a vowel, please) Principal Jeff Harkin gladly shows them around. One place always gets featured on the tour: The balcony of the school’s auditorium.

From that perch, you really get the sense of this room. The tall, ballroom-like ceilings, the panes of stained-glass windows, the heavy red velvet curtains that look like they could house a phantom of the opera, ornately carved trim work, mammoth bronze plaques, and even a stanza of a Rudyard Kipling poem in large letters above the stage.

“They usually just stand here with their mouths open and ask “how did you guys get this?” Harkin says.

That’s the thing about Liberty Memorial Central Middle School: The one thing larger than its name may be its history.

“We have things that other schools don’t have,” Harkin says to the school’s sixth-grade class as he stands in the auditorium. “We would not see a school built like this today. They couldn’t afford it.”

It’s hard to imagine that we ever could. But then again, you have to imagine a different day. When Liberty Memorial High School was built at 14th and Massachusetts streets, the country was feeling pretty good about itself. We had just fought the War to End all Wars, and apparently we didn’t know much about false advertising yet.

We also hadn’t bought in much to the idea of statues of Gen. George Pershing and such. The town wanted to create a memorial for those who died in World War I, and it thought big.

One of two plaques on each side of the stage inside the Liberty Memorial Central Middle School auditorium lists the names of the 19 Liberty High School students who died serving in WW I. Sixth-grade students attend an annual Traditions and Heritage Assembly to learn the history of their school.

“The mayor said he didn’t want to just build a statue in a park or a field,” said Mary Gordon, a former student, teacher and now historian of the building. “He said, why not build something that will serve the living and teach the ideas of democracy and freedom for years to come.”

So, they did. And then, eventually, most of us forgot it.

The building opened in 1923, replacing a conglomeration of buildings near Ninth and Kentucky streets that served as the city’s high school. This year’s class will be the 90th to graduate from the school, although in 1954 it switched from being a high school to a junior high.

Gordon says it perhaps was in 1954 when the idea behind Liberty Memorial High School began to fade a bit. When Lawrence High School was built, the Liberty Memorial part of the school’s name faded away. The building simply became known as Lawrence Junior High because it was the only junior high in the city, Gordon says.

Fortunately, bronze does not fade, and it seems neither do the words of Rudyard Kipling. There is a bronze plaque on each side of the auditorium stage. There are 19 names on the plaques. One plaque reads “We are Keepers of their Faith.” The other reads “That these Dead shall not have Died in Vain.” Above the stage is the final stanza of Kipling’s poem The King’s Pilgrimage, which includes the uncomfortable words of “We they redeemed denied their blood and mocked the gains it won.”

The 19 names are those of Lawrence high school alumni who died in W.W. I. On Nov. 11, Veterans Day, the entire sixth-grade class at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School learned a bit more about them during a morning assembly.

Liberty Memorial Central Middle School eighth-graders read the names and short biographies of the 19 Liberty High School students who died serving in WW I. The 8th-graders gave the presentation during the Traditions and Heritage Assembly for 6th-graders Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2014. The assembly teaches students about the history of the school as a monument to WW I veterans.

Gordon tells the class about her uncle, Cpl. Everett Demeritt. She tells the students about his parents’ farm on the west side of what is now Clinton Lake.

“The Army men came in a horse and buggy to tell his parents that their son had been killed in WW I,” she explains.

She also explains there are more reminders of the men than just their names on the wall. She points to the panes of stained glass in the large windows that flank the auditorium. Each pane shows an insignia of a military unit. They were the units of the fallen men.

The students had noticed them before. When Gordon asks them to point to the insignia that looks a bit like a wooden wagon wheel, a good number of them know exactly where it is. The students may not know everything about this room’s history, but they’ve already figured out that it is special.

“The auditorium is the heart of this building,” Harkin says.

If you have never been in the auditorium, you ought to look for an excuse to see it. Lawrence has several fine memorials — Memorial Stadium, the Campanile, Oak Hill Cemetery, to name a few — but the auditorium of Liberty Memorial Central Middle School stacks up well with all of them. It may be the least known among them, even though it is designed to hold people. It has seating for about 1,400.

Certainly, the auditorium has housed a lot of people over the years. Graduations, plays, assemblies and such. But I wonder how many sat in that room and didn’t quite understand where they were. The building lost its Liberty Memorial name in the 1950s, and it picked up the name Central Junior High around 1960, when the school district built West Junior High.

It took awhile for the outrage to build, but eventually alumni of old Liberty Memorial realized the school lost something important when it lost its name. It was a little more than four years ago when a group of residents started talking to the school board about a name change. It happened a short time later, but not without some complaints. Some felt the name would be too much of a mouthful. Those who knew the history of the building felt we probably would find a way to survive it.

“I really got upset about it,” Gordon says. “You wouldn’t take the Lincoln Memorial and name it East.”

Several WW I military insignias in stained glass decorate the windows inside the Liberty Memorial Central Middle School auditorium. The school was built as a monument to WW I veterans and the 19 Liberty High School students who died serving in the war.

After the name was changed, a group led by Gordon, 1940 Liberty Memorial alumnus Alan Fisher and former Lawrence mayor and retired Marine Erv Hodges talked to the school district about having a special assembly each year to teach students about the history of the school.

“I really just want you to remember why this building was built, and to not ever take anything for granted,” Gordon tells the students. “It was peace that these people died for, and we never want to take that for granted.”

This is the second year for the program, and Harkin says he’s looking forward to many more. He says he’s confident the students are beginning to understand the significance of their school. It doesn’t happen all at once, but over time the students begin to understand how important this building once was in the city. World War I unleashed gas warfare on the world. Soldiers lived in terrible conditions in the mud, the blood and the muck of trench warfare. Worldwide, nearly 9 million people died in the war. And some of them were from Lawrence.

Days like this one at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School help remind us all that those names on the wall were real people.

“I hope someday,” Harkin tells the class, “you will tell people this is where I went to school, and it is a special place.”

Perhaps someday they even can provide the answer to that question that gets asked on all those school tours: How did you guys get this?

The answer: It wasn’t easy, and it certainly shouldn’t be forgotten.