Mesa, AZ - Oldies but Goodies

Check out these cool yearbooks - from 1962, 1963, 1964 - my years in High School. Well, they were Gary’s years too but he’s scanned his yearbooks long ago. All we have now is mine left to scan. My choice: put them back into storage intact or scan them. Let’s see, the last time I looked at these was - who knows? Long ago. But I’ve spent a bit of time recently looking them over and - we’ll scan them.

Funny, after we scanned mine, I happened to look up where I keep my cookbooks and found - Gary’s Senior yearbook. I guess I thought that this one should be kept for some reason and I put it up there where Gary would never look. Oh, well, we’ve tossed all of them now and just have all the pictures we wanted scanned into our computer. (Sorry, Sherron.)

We were in the same class and took many of the same subjects in high school so we wrote in each others yearbook. Here's my first stab: ‘May your joys be as deep as the ocean and your sorrows as light as its foam.’ Oh, my, I thought that was so deep. I’d never heard this meaningful adage before and I was so impressed with the seriousness behind the words. Oh, my, spare me. I should have stuck with: ‘It was great having you in Latin class’ and ‘See you next year.’ We are both in this picture: Gary is top left, hand side, I am in the second row, 2nd from the left. Note how full my cheeks are. I weighted 153 lbs in my sophomore year in high school. But, when I realized that my father weighed 155, I began my diet and lost 40 lbs in my junior year.



Who wrote ‘Hugs and Kisses. Forrest’ on the picture of the School Board Chairman in my yearbook?

and ‘Love you’ in Gary’s yearbook? Same handwriting, same person. Who was this mysterious person?

A guy that I had a HUGE crush on wrote ’Good Luck, Sherron, (this name was crossed out and ‘Nancy’ put in) didn’t we have fun in Ms. Gorsuch’s class?’ Who was he having fun with? Certainly not me. Actually, he’s referring to a good friend of mine, but, when you write in ink, it’s there forever. In my Junior yearbook, he wrote: ‘I owe you some reading, I owe you some laughs, gas, but from Algebra and English I owe you’ and he had to draw some arrows to make this make sense. Cross out someone else’s name in sophomore year, draw arrows in junior year - why, oh, why, did I waste so much time on this guy? He obviously wasn’t concentrating on me.

Gary wrote this in my sophomore book: ‘Nancy, Had lots of fun in English and Latin this year. Just watch your SPQR’s. Hope to see you next year.’ (Did he realize that he would still be seeing me in every year between from 1970 on?) BTW, he’s the cutie in the top row on the right.



In our Junior year, he wrote: ‘It sure has been a ball in English, Algebra and Latin. You’ve got a great personality and you’ll go far.’ Did he know that he’d be going ‘far’ with me in our RV?

Finally, in our Sr year he wrote this:

Another friend wrote on the picture of a history teacher named Mr. Johnson, whom we called Big J: ’Hope you hadn’t planned to have Big J sign here. Now I’m sure you remember those important lessons he taught us like Andrew Jackson was impeached.’ You’ve got to be kidding. Did our American History teacher really say this? Even we high school kids knew this was wrong. Maybe that’s why I became a history teacher - to atone for Big J’s mis-statements.

I took debate in my Sophomore year. Here’s a picture of our debate class - we look like a bunch of prisoners on our way to jail. Not a smile to be had. We much have had our ‘debate’ faces on.



And, in gym class, we got to wear some really ‘cute’ uniforms. Everyone had to have one and we had lockers to keep them in. Now - I don’t know of many who took them home after every gym class. We all just stuffed them into our lockers. Some were happy just to get them home on weekends to wash. Others … Oooh, imagine the ‘aroma’ wafting into the halls from that room.

But, it was not the uniforms that were the bane of every girl, it was the showers after every class. We had to strip down to our birthday suits, pile into a mass shower while jockeying not to touch anyone else and trying not to get too wet (and certainly keeping our hair dry) but just wet enough so that we’d pass ‘inspection.’ Yep, Ms. Nordstrom was there at the towel window passing out towels - she checked us out to see if we had really taken a shower, if we were wet. Then she’d give us a towel. Don’t pass inspection, back to the shower and the end of the line. Then we moved into the drying room. No snapping of towels or you’d get detention.

Did we have any team sports? Nope, this was before Title 9. We got to have some school teams and we’d have some matches but nothing big. We had volleyball, soccer and basketball. Coaching? practice to get better? Matches with other schools? Nope, nope, and nope. It always frosted me that only boys could be ‘Patrol Boys’. Of course, now they have females and they are called ‘crossing guards.’

Well, that’s yearbooks for now. I’ve got some more cool pictures of Gary and me but some other time.