So Long Robert Crown

It's a sad day in my bones.

This morning I heard that the Robert Crown Center in Hinsdale is shuttering its doors after more than 40 years of educating scores of junior high students about the perils of drug use, the ins-and-outs of sex, and all the health-related body sciences that were shrouded so much in secrecy when were were young. From birthing to barbiturates, nothing was off limits.

Robert Crown Center staffers will continue to educate kids, of course. They're now opting to bring the education directly into classrooms versus bussing gaggles of giggly preteens on a one-day pilgrimage to learn all about the birds and the bees and the weed. Sure, I remember all of this when I was in junior high. Going to the Robert Crown Center was a venerable rite of passage for Chicago-area kids like me. I remember sitting on the beige-carpeted steps of an auditorium surrounded by models of faux organs interlocking like life-size jigsaw puzzles. Outside in the hallway, half of a giant brain mushroomed out of the wall. The annual trip always occurred in spring it seemed, and if we were lucky, it was the perfect time to debut whatever new warm-weather neon ensemble I may have recently picked out at Venture. Often PSA-type projections splayed across the screened walls as kids battled peer pressure (come on, Tommy—smoke the pot!) or dealt with the awkwardness of coming age. We were all coming of age too, whispering to one another in the back of busses and passing notes written in purple and pink and green ball point pens and always talking about what boy we liked or whose house we were going to go after school where we would drink instant iced tea made with too much mix and play until until dusk.

And back in those days we were still playing while something much darker shrouded the country. It was the late '80s and early '90s and the country was deep in the throws of the AIDS crisis. It was at Robert Crown where we learned you couldn't get the disease from sitting on a toilet, couldn't get it from kissing a boy or a girl, and that hundreds of miles in Washington, D.C. a public art project called the AIDS quilt laid across the White House lawn as visual representation of all lives stolen by the escalating epidemic. You got AIDS from sex and sex for us was a funny, strange thing to talk about—something that incited nervous laughter simply because we didn't know enough about it. There was no internet, no cell phones in our lockers—ideas about sex came purely from our imaginations or from the pages of romance novels we sometimes read aloud to each other at slumber parties. We learned what was taught to us in classrooms and at places like the Robert Crown Center. Getting information and education on such secretive things felt like we getting a peek into a vault of knowledge reserved for Adult Only audiences. We traveled on a bus ripe with the smell of preteen expectation to get let in on a big secret—and that, in itself, was exhilarating.

Maybe I am romancing my preteen existence, because no one in the history of the world has ever done that, of course. We are talking about a field trip to a place where a plastic mannequin with removable inner parts could be the leading star of the show on a given day. But I am merely one of 6 million students who experienced these trips and their poignancy stayed with me, maybe because I was 10 and 11 and 12 years old but also because it was simply a different time. Today, there's more access to information, kids learn about things much sooner. Robert Crown served its purpose in an age when it needed to, but it's time to say farewell and let it go the way of the The Smoking Lung.

I haven't been to the Robert Crown Center since the early '90s. I imagine that the carpeted auditoriums have changed, the courses augmented for tech-savvy times. The reel projectors are long gone and perhaps the plastic mannequins are too. What's not are my memories—and I feel good about that.