Longfellow's first day a family affair

Students rarely want to see their parents' faces at school every day.

Call it independence.

Karie Cecil's kids don't have the option of escaping their mother's mug, though, nor their family's lengthy history at Longfellow Elementary School in Wheaton.

Karie's on a mural painted in the late 1970s. Her father and uncle are in the class photos from the late 1940s. And the patriarch of the MacKay family attended the school in the 1930s.

Longfellow truly is a generational family affair.

Ava MacKay started school for the very first time Wednesday, rolling up to kindergarten with her dad, Scott, another in the four-generation brood.

When looking for a home, Scott specifically targeted his old neighborhood - one still clearly liberally peppered with family.

"Most of the people I started with at Longfellow still are my friends," the early 1980s alumnus said. "That's the feeling I wanted (Ava) to have."

Three siblings in the second generation of the MacKay family - Ginny, Bill and Ken - attended Longfellow. Now Bill's daughter, Karie, has passed the attendance baton to her children Peyton, 9, Briggs, 8 and Hayden, 6 - all first-time students at the school. When Karie moved back to the area from Atlanta, she, too, gravitated to her old alma mater, even though the building she attended was torn down and rebuilt in 2001.

Scott is Ken's son, and he savored the multigenerational experience as he walked his pigtail-clad daughter - backpack in hand - for her first day of class.

And there to cheer on both branches of her family, eyes welling with tears, was aunt and great-aunt Ginny Christensen. She's the Longfellow product circa 1950s who made sure to claim the coat rack from her third-grade classroom when the old building was torn down.

"I'm just really blessed," she said, choking up, as the four youngsters got ready to walk through the doors and create a whole new wave of Longfellow memories.