52 Ancestors Week 21: Yearbook

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 21

Get ready for fun (or cringe-y) hairstyles, old-time slang, and cryptic autographs -- it's "Yearbook" week!

"The Real Student Handbook"- Salem High School Class of 1997

    I've always found yearbooks to be great to look at because they are quite literally a time capsule. Take my high school yearbook for example. I graduated in June of 1997 and inside those pages I definitely see the hairstyles, the slang, the references to '90s pop culture and more. We even had a video version made and thanks to some ingenuity someone put the whole thing on YouTube. Our theme song was even R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as we Know It" for some odd reason.  All that was missing was some Rob Liefeld art and we'd definitely have a book that encapsulated a decade. Then again, if you know me you'd know that I do not want Liefeld anywhere near my yearbook! The '90s were weird when it came to comics and pop culture in general. At least it was a fun ride. We did see the rise of the Internet, the console wars and three back-to-back Star Trek series on television after all. What do you say we skip all of that and go further back in time to 1939?

    The year proved to be an important one when it comes to popular culture as films such as "The Wizard of Oz" graced the silver screen and a company called "Timely" launched its first comic called "Marvel Comics #1". Hmm...I think they'll turn out just fine. Just give that Stan Lee kid a chance. He's going places! War was on the horizon and my grandmother, Olympia Carrabs, was a student at Haverhill High.

    I've always liked my grandmother's yearbook because it really gave me a sense of what life was like in the 1930s. When I was little, she would bring the book out every once in a while and we'd talk about the contents. The first thing I did was start with her page because that version of grandma Ollie I never got to see. By the time I was born, her black hair had grayed and so she dyed it blond. It was so cool to see pics of her with her natural hair color and rare, too!  I'm not sure when she started going gray. Maybe it was after my father was born. ;) Make of that what you will, Internet!

    What was really cool about her entry was how she was described as:

"A joking, jolly, pleasant girl, Whose hair is in a natural curl . There's always in our heart a place For her laughing eyes and smiling face".

    Let me be the first to say that whoever wrote that passage did not exaggerate at all. My grandmother did have her funny side. She was always kind and had a great sense of humor as I've described many times in the blog. According to the book, she was in the Glee Club and a Philomathean. Not bad, right?

    Thanks to someone donating the yearbook to Ancestry, I can flip through the scanned pages of "The Thinker" online without having to drag out my grandmother's copy. That's pretty handy. Let's see what's inside! (And yes her copy is in a safe place. We treat it like gold! It's with my grandmother Natalie's yearbook. She graduated from the same school.)

New music to avert sleepiness, huh? Hmm....

    One of the cooler things I've found is this class will. A lot of things in it have actually come to pass in the decades since this was printed.

I especially like Article II and how they left yeast cakes to the underclassmen so they would rise earlier. That's funny because my class left...umm....Jolt cola. Hey. It was the '90s. We didn't have time to make yeast cakes. At least we didn't mix "Coke" and "Pop Rocks".

    Article VII is fun. Wait until they hit the Rock and Roll years. I guess those kids aren't ready for it. But, their kids and grandkids are gonna love it.

    The will itself is pretty standard. Lots of funny bits and you know I'd probably would have liked "A Thousand Ways to Dodge Homework". 

    It's nice how in the end they left "an inexhaustible amount of chalk and paper". Way to think ahead! (Wow. See what I did there?)

I really can spot my grandma
in a crowd. Neat.

    Other interesting parts of the yearbook include messages from the staff and other notable people at the school. I bet if I was looking at my grandmother's copy, I'd see messages from her classmates. There was a section in the book where various people were given various titles. There was:

"Mr. Smart" (Every class has their "royal smart person".)

"Miss Attractive". (Oof. I don't think that would fly now. Well, then again....)

"Mr. Singer." (Sadly this was NOT a young Frank Sinatra.)

Oh and before I forget, there IS a "Mr.. Attractive." I guess that balances it out. There were other titles for various students and I couldn't find Ollie in the list. For someone who was carefree and funny she was somehow absent from these. Huh....The mind boggles.

    Many clubs have also had their picture taken and sadly the Glee Club was nowhere to be found. All isn't lost! The Philomathians are here to save the day with their love of learning. Good thing I was able to find my grandmother relatively easily. The group was big.

Really big....

     That's definitely quite the group! 

  

    As a writer, I really enjoyed this bit about the history of the class. The chapters outlined what it was like coming into the school in 1935 with their hopes and dreams and how they stuck together for their four years. That was pretty cool and it reminds me of the Class of 1997 in a way.

    The only difference was that in Salem there are five elementary schools and our class came together as one class in the 6th grade before going to Junior High. We were basically together since 1990 with new classmates coming in or moving away.  I wonder if it was the same in Haverhill. It might be! You never know!

    The class president's address after everyone's photographs is definitely interesting in hindsight. In it, he discusses "The World of Tomorrow". No doubt it's a reference to the then recent World's Fair. He mentioned that America always believed in progress and that while the rest of the world was in turmoil,  America was focused on living differently and better in the future. Wow. Right in the feels. It makes me wonder how he felt about these words in the following decades. He then talked about being forward-thinking people in a forward-thinking country and ended his address saying  "Let us hope that someday we may be privileged to say that we have done our part in building a better world." Very optimistic, right? Yeah, I definitely wonder how he felt about those words as the years came and went. It was actually very progressive for 1939!

Haverhill High circa 1939

   In many ways Haverhill High in 1939 mirrored Salem High in 1997. Both classes were cheerfully optimistic about what the future might bring and both generations of teenagers wanted to help make the world a better place. Did the world change in between those dates? Of course it did. You'd be crazy not to notice.

    With change there comes adversity and while my generation can never compare with the threat of war on the horizon, we certainly had our own tragedies. I think what Doc Brown said in Back to the Future III still holds water. "The future is whatever you make of it. So make it a good one." Just make sure history never repeats itself.

    This copy of "The Thinker" is one of three yearbooks from Haverhill High that I have in my collection. The other copies belonged to my grandmother Natalie (Class of 1945) and my father (Class of 1965). It's not a bad collection by any means because you really get a sense of what life was like in the 1940s and 1960s when reading through the book. It's actually kind of jarring reading the cheerful optimism in 1939 and then reading the Class of 1965's book immediately afterward! Imagine how jarring it'd be going from 1939 to 1997 or even today! Times do change and unfortunately the more things change, the more they stay the same. It's fun to look at the stories of the past and it reminds us that we still have time to make the world a better place. Youthful optimism is a good thing no matter how rocky the tides of time become.

See ya next time! And here's to the 25th Anniversary of the  Salem High Blue Devils Class of 1997.