Published: April 20, 2008 11:19 pm            

THE OFF SEASON: Yearbooks offer captivating glimpse into past

TERRE HAUTE — With weekend yard work and house cleaning and reasonable household budgeting all considered, my wife and I don’t have nearly as much time and money as we’d like to wander the aisles of local antique stores and second-hand shops. We’re not serious collectors; we don’t consult guides and handbooks for the latest news on crockery and cut glass and anything else considered treasure. For the most part, we just like to look.

But, if by chance she spies just the right set of commemorative glasses or a little something for her printer’s box that hangs in our kitchen, she’ll pull out the checkbook. Me, I’m an absolute sucker for old high school yearbooks.

I know, while others are collecting jewelry or clocks or fine china — you know, things that actually appreciate in value — I’m more likely than not interested in collecting someone else’s collection of memories: antique annuals, in good shape or poor, with wrinkled paper covers or with sturdier hard backs.

They have names like “The Cutlass,” “The Pirate,” and “The Outlook,” and most often they’ve been left to the auctioneer or shopkeeper because the owner has passed and his cousins and nephews don’t see the point in keeping them around any longer.

Just a month or so ago, we wandered through an antique mall south of town, and despite salivating over a tiger oak library table and baseball cards of players I grew up admiring (Rico Petrocelli comes to mind), and more Beatles, Doors and Sinatra LPs than you can shake a stick at, she gravitated toward the shelves of mugs and glasses, and I agonized over a choice between a 1928 Brazil and a 1950 Glenn annual. I bought the latter of the two, but plan on going back again soon.

Last winter, I bought at auction a 1928 Montezuma yearbook, and as I write this, I have another annual on my writing desk beside me, a loaner from a friend whose mother-in-law graduated from Dugger and who had a 1922 “Hoosier,” the Bulldogs’ yearbook, even though it debuted a number of years before her time. I’d like to think that perhaps a favorite uncle was featured in it, perhaps a memorable teacher; her family will probably never know why she kept it.

Both books are the first of their kinds: the first volumes from the first years those tiny schools produced yearbooks, and I’ve enjoyed looking at every inch of them. One of the main reasons actually comes toward the back of the books. There I can find the advertising, and I can see in my mind’s eye high school girls, perhaps with bobbed hair and pleated skirts, and their male classmates, resplendent with brilliantined hair, parted in the middle, of course, and in cuffed pants, walking five or six blocks west to the likes of J.M. Pavey and Co. in downtown Montezuma to ask for their help in supporting the yearbook.

That store featured, as their plain, boxy advertisement read, “drygoods, notions, ladies’ ready-to-wear, men’s apparel, and shoes.” After that, the staffers perhaps headed to Barney Davey’s across the street. Not only did his name rhyme with his fellow businessman, he wanted everyone to know that he dealt in “all electric Zenith radios.” I have no doubt that the buildings where Pavey’s and Davey’s were located are empty lots now, the businesses falling to the wrecking ball years ago.

Now, I’ve been to Dugger a number of times, but “The Hoosier,” a much larger yearbook than “The Aztec,” has dozens of advertisements in it, suggesting that the small Sullivan County burg was once a hopping place. The Grand Hotel advertised in the annual; it featured steam heat and phones. The Cozy Theatre ran an ad, too, as did Sims and Co., “dealers in general merchandise.” They made sure in their ad that everyone knew they carried “groceries, school supplies, and miners’ supplies,” too. Their Bell telephone number was 170.

Two of my favorite ads came from obvious competitors: The Chero-Cola Bottling Co. in Linton, and the Lemo Cola Bottling Works in Sullivan. The latter touted their “Cherry Blossoms” soda, “a blooming good drink.” I have no doubt that it was just that, and not just because it was “made right and bottled right.”

Dugger had plenty of businesses, like Citizens’ Mercantile, the Orpheum Theater, Dugger Bread, Yung Bros.’ Barber Shop and Jones Bros.’ Ice and Feed. Berns’ Pharmacy, Bledsoe’s Garage and Spinks and Barrows’ Clothiers were there, too. And there were many more.

For the sake of space, I have to succinctly add that, to me, the yearbooks featured a generation of students who looked ambitious and hopeful and ready. They would have to be: the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler and an island hopping campaign, would occupy their next 25 years.

In 1928, the Montezuma Junior Class put on its annual play, “The Winning of Joy.” Its lead character, Uncle Reeves, was played by Gerald Garrard. I knew Gerald; he sat on our school board when I was first hired to teach nearly 30 years ago; I taught his grandkids in my history classes.

Just eight years before the annual was published, a new building was constructed; the town was proud of the gym that had been “used to capacity.” Years later, my wife and I both coached junior high basketball teams in that tiny place, and we all wondered how varsity games were ever played there. The children of those players have now moved through our classrooms.

Those old yearbooks show me one thing above all: it’s not that the kids I teach — students who are going to be featured in my school’s 2008 “Paw Print” — are so different than those rather serious-looking senior classmen who graduated 80 or 85 years ago, but that they’re quite a bit alike. They don’t know any better than their ancestors did as to what their futures hold.



Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail C/O the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

        

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