52 Ancestors Week 15: School Days

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 15

The theme for Week 15 is "School Days." Any teachers, principals, or school staff in your family tree? What about favorite stories of attending school or fun things you've found in school records or yearbooks?

And then for no reason at all the "Saved by the Bell" theme
popped in my head. I blame the font.

    I think we're about due for another deep dive into one of the many yearbooks I have in my collection. If you recall, I dove into my grandmother Ollie's high school yearbook from 1939 and my grandmother Natalie's high school yearbook from 1945. Both Haverhill yearbooks had different takes about life and the future at the time. The most interesting thing I found in those books was how they viewed the world before and after the Second World War.

    Now let's travel twenty years into the future. The year is 1965. A young Gene Roddenberry was trying to pitch his "Star Trek" series to studio executives after filming an unaired pilot which later became the basis for  the "Star Trek: Discovery" spinoff, "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds". Don't worry, Gene. Your franchise will definitely live long and prosper. Following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in the previous year, the United States became entrenched in a conflict that would definitely be on the minds of high school students all across America in 1965. That conflict would go onto define a generation growing up in the shadows of the "Greatest Generation". That conflict was the Vietnam War. 

  

The third and last "Thinker" in
my collection!

    I've said it before and I'll say it again. Yearbooks are definitely a time capsule capturing what life was like for people at the time it was printed. Thanks to Ancestry, my father's yearbook is now forever in their archives. God help them if they ever get their hands on the Salem High Class of 1997 yearbook!!

    My father's yearbook has a lot of interesting things going on in its pages. The foreward by the superintendant mentioned how the book came out on the 325th anniversary of Haverhill's founding. Despite the rumblings of war on the horizen, he declared that the future seemed bright. There's that Haverhill optimism again! Well, you don't want to be negative in these books. Can you imagine? I think it's best to be positive. No need to bum anyone out.

   

    I do like how the book has a passage about the assistant school Superintendant and how she handled school finances and proved that women and business definitely mixed. Oh, Haverhill. That's just a taste of what's to come. 

    

    

    Like in previous years, the yearbook discusses the endless possibilities of the future. The language department remarked that the world was getting smaller and so the importance in learning different language was increasing. Well, that's true. It's only gonna get smaller. *taps monitor*. I like how the teachers stress the importance of picking up a language because it would help young people understand the greater world around them. It's an important skill to have. And hey it helps that their grandparents were likely immigrants from Italy, Quebec, Greece and any number of places since the people who immigrated to America were likely still very much alive.

    Much of the faculty's other passages had the same positive outlook about the future. Apparently we were standing on a new frontier in 1965. I wonder if they were taking Kennedy's speeches to heart. I really do.And then we get to my father's page.

Lookin' dapper, Dad!

    Things seem pretty normal on the page at first. You see my father James looking dapper with that sport coat and tie. I'm guessing that was the style at the time because he's got this Rod Sterling thing going on. Makes sense considering he was a huge Sci-Fi fan back then. He still is.

    One of the most interesting things about the page is that just above him is a photo of my mother's cousin Nancy Felker. Now, I always knew Nancy was the daughter of my great-uncle Austin and his wife Isabelle. That was never a big secret. 

    What surprised me the most was that Nancy was in the same homeroom as my father and he knew her a few years before he met my mother. She never introduced the two to each other because they actually met in college. 

    I was a kid when I first saw the picture and asked my mom "Is that cousin Nancy?" She said yes and that my father and her were in the same class together in high school.

    Talk about a small world! My father could have met my mother a good few years before they actually met in Boston. Alas, that never happened. To be honest, I'm not sure what Nancy ever thought of my father. They didn't really stay in touch since she moved to Florida shortly after graduation. Still, it's a cool bit of trivia, isn't it? A relative of my mom's knew my dad well before he met her. Perhaps the stars were aligned or something. I don't know.

Nancy Felker '65

   Aside from going to school with my mom's cousin, my Dad also went to school with a future mayor of Haverhill! Former Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini is also on the same page as Nancy and my father. That's pretty cool, huh?  You never know what the future will bring. Some people become dentists like my father. Some people become the Mayor of their hometown. Somehow I don't think they ever expected that to happen.

    To make it even more interesting, my father's high school eventually became City Hall. So, in essence Mayor Fiorentini was going back to school while he was the Mayor. I don't know why but that's just funny to me. Time plays tricks on all of us, I guess.

    My father has kept in touch with the Mayor over the years as he attended many reunion meetings the class put on and the like. You never know where life is going to take you as the yearbook says. The future is bright and the sky really is the limit.

    All in all I love the upbeat nature of my father's yearbook. Thankfully, politics were left out of the equation. Oddly enough, the Social Studies department didn't have anything to say about the crisis in Southeast Asia. Curious, indeed. I guess they wanted to give students and future generations who were going to read the book a positive view of the world in 1965. Times were a changin' and the 1960s would only get more turbulent.

    I really like how several people went on to do amazing things and it makes me wonder what my graduating class has been up to these days. Thankfully, the Salem High Class of '97 remains in relative contact with each other due to Facebook! Once again the Thinker provides an insightful look into what life was like in Haverhill in 1965. The class, like all others, were optimistic about the future and once again they encouraged adapting to a changing world. Little did they know that the world was about to change in ways no one could have ever foreseen. 

See ya next time! That's three yearbooks down and one to go.