after having taught for 50 years in the school. During this period, several other high schools opened in St. Louis to alleviate overcrowding at Central, including McKinley High School and Yeatman High School in 1904, followed by Soldan High School in 1909, Cleveland High School in 1915, Roosevelt High School in 1925 and Beaumont High School in 1926. On September 27, 1927, a tornado struck St. Louis, including Central High School, killing 76 people and leaving 1,500 others injured in total. The tornado killed five students—they are listed in the 1928 Central yearbook on a page with a touching poem--- and more than a dozen were injured when the school's tower collapsed. The damage to the building was so great that the school was permanently relocated to nearby Yeatman High School, which was renamed Central High School. The building, located on Garrison Avenue, had been designed by William B. Ittner as a three-story all-brick building with two towers at its entrance, and it would continue to house Central students through 2004. It has long been forgotten that the Central student body and faculty had just returned to the Grand Avenue building FROM Yeatman High School, where the school had been housed two years while the Grand Avenue building underwent an extensive renovation and updating. School had just gotten underway back at the Central building when the tornado struck. Everyone and everything had to be moved back to Yeatman. It's also been long forgotten that one wall of the school eventually built on the Central site, the factory-like and uniquely conceived Hadley Vocational High School, was a wall preserved from the Central building. Integration, magnet school status, and merger: 1927–1984 Central students continued their traditions at their new building on Garrison Avenue, including the use of the letter "H" to signify the school's status as the first high school west of the Mississippi. During the 1930s, enrollment in the St. Louis Public Schools increased and achieved a peak of 106,300 students; several high schools in the district reported overcrowding, and Central was no exception. In the 1931–1932 school year, enrollment at Central stood at slightly more than 1,500 students. Two years later, during the 1934–1935 school year, the enrollment at Central had grown to nearly 1,700 students. It was during the early 1950s at Central that the school's baseball team won three consecutive state championships, led by Vern Bradburn as head