US School Yearbooks

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

This is my experience also in both U.S. anda Canadian public schools (high school).

Your student car photo doulbed as your yearbook photo. All grades had inidivual photos for everyone. Group photos for sports teams and recognized extra curricular groups (drama club, school newspaper), and larger individual photos of the graduating class. The grad photos were in cap and gown, but it wasn’t your actual cap and gown, just one the photographer had and everyone threw over their shoulders.

I’m pretty sure I also paid $40. Advertisers included tuxedo rental shops, florists, sports equiment retailers, and generally people who stood to make money from high school proms and sports.

42

Trippy! I just looked at my dad’s yearbook from the 1950s. Advertisers included:

Roy Thomas Decorated Cakes
Park’s Dairy Store “sodas, lunches, sundaes!”
Pierre Furs (because high school students wear mink)
Gay Hairdressers (I shit you not)
And… uh… Odor Master “the original electric deoderizer” :dubious:

43

Our school yearbooks always were less than $10 and the photographers took everyone’s picture. They offered a package of pictures for sale to the parents. This is what kept the yearbook cost down. You didn’t have to buy the pictures or the yearbook if you didn’t want them

I have my grandma’s memory book. She didn’t have pictures, just writings by fellow students.

44

Oh, I forgot to say earlier that I have a photocopy of my college’s yearbook circa 1901. It’s FASCINATING. I’ll have to scan some in.

But as promised, since I am not embarassed about having been a gawky adolescent (and was I ever!), here are some scans from a very typical, IMHO, high school yearbook. Circa 1997.

Here is one of the senior pages. (I am the gawkiest one, with no “Glamour Don’t” bar.) The other classes had very similar pages, only the photos were black and white and they were a bit smaller. Also, the senior pictures were professional - we went to a studio with appointments. The other classes were regular “school pictures.” Teachers also had a section just like this. At the end of the book was the “senior directory”, whcih I should have scanned, where every senior had listed all their activities and accomplishments and a quote. Something like 80% of the senior quotes in my class came from Tupac.

Here is the ad my parents bought. (They loved me a whole quarter of a page.) It’s very typical of the ads bought by parents.

Here are some of the messages people wrote to me. They were much longer our senior year, because we’d never see most of those people ever again. Again, I think these are pretty typical - full of “remember when?” and “have fun for the rest of your life!” When you signed yearbooks to non-seniors you always said “Have a great summer!” In fact, there’s a Buffy episode about a girl who didn’t have any friends, and her yearbook was full of “Have a great summer!” - it’s the default.

45

Ours was the opposite - in junior high, we got the yearbooks during the last week of school, and usually by that time classes were just big signing parties.

In high school, we got them over the summer, so signing was moot. I have no idea why that was, as the jr. high and sr. high books were put together and purchased from the same company. Sr. high’s was bigger, but it still seems strange.

46

Cover of my Senior Yearbook

I’m towards the back.

47

I was an editor of the yearbook my senior year of high school. Yearbook was an extracurricular and a class, by which I mean you didn’t have to be in the class to participate, but you could take it for credit and it had a class period devoted to it. Journalism I was for yearbook staff, and Journalism II was for editors. In order to be an editor, you had to be a senior and worked on the yearbook the previous year.

We didn’t do individual quotes or profiles for seniors, because nobody wanted to. We did, however, have a theme for the senior picture pages (which were in color and had candids to fill up space), and selected appropriate quotes for the senior pages. The senior pictures there were taken by professional photographers and paid for by the students. If you couldn’t afford that, then someone on the journalism staff took your photo, which generally turned out well. The other classes had one page of candids with a blurb about the class (in color), and then had the mugshot-style school pictures on the following pages. The faculty had the same thing. There was at least a single page for each department and activity, though some had double-page spreads.

Cost to students for yearbooks was about $35, but journalism staff sold ads to local businesses and parents could place baby photos and a short message for about $15. If they wanted more than an 1/8 page, they had to purchase an ad, which cost more. Without those sales, yearbooks would have been about $65 to $80 per book.

We printed our yearbooks through Jostens, who I’ve since decided are affiliated with Satan. They also provided the packages for our school rings and for graduation (invitations, announcements, robes, caps, etc.). Overpriced crap, if you ask me. Our yearbook was nice, though, since we laid everything out and they had very little to do with that.

Here’s what I looked like in my senior yearbook, ca. fall 2002. (I graduated in 2003, but because of the deadlines for the yearbook, senior pictures were taken anywhere from a year to 9 months before graduation.) You can also see my class ring, which has a huge peridot in it. My yearbooks are around here somewhere, but my scanner is currently out of commission.

My five year reunion is this summer, and I’m looking forward to it, because the last five years have been hard on all those popular girls, and I look way better than I did in HS. Mwah ha.

48

Why are all the guys wearing tuxedos in the link Zsofia posted?

Is it a requirement or what.

Miss P Mc You are certainly are, or was, a hottie

49

Ha! Thanks, chowder.

The reason the boys in Zsofia’s link are wearing tuxes is that some schools require the senior portraits to be formal portraits, which means the guys have to wear tuxes, and the girls all have to wear these weird shoulder capes/wraps that look like they’re wearing off-the-shoulder dresses. I have a friend whose school required that, and so all the girls in her class are wearing gold lamé shoulder drapes in their senior photos. Too weird.

50

Jebus! I never saw an uglier person in my life :stuck_out_tongue:

51

For our senior photos, all the guys had to show up in a white shirt. They gave us a clip-on tie and then the faux grad gown and sash that we had to drape over our shoulders to look like we were in our full grad outfit. The girls had to wear a white blouse under their “gown and sash”, and were handed a bouquet of fake flowers for their picutres.

One of the janitors, a hilarious woman with a frizzy mullet, had a white shirt that day. She got her picture taken, and filled out the yearbook form, so there is a hilarious picture in our yearbook, of a 40-year-old high school grad named “The Big Sweep”.

52

Swallowed :

See this is another thing which as a Brit I find a tad odd.

When I left school along with another mob of screaming refugees there was no dressing up caper…gowns.sashes and all that twaddle.

Not a bit of it, just an end of year sports day and then we all just fucked off into the yonder to seek fame and fortune or not.

You Merkins just have to make a big song and dance out of it doncha

53

They now make a big song and dance about it in kindergarten too.

54

Yet we play a very British tune at graduation. Pomp and Circumstance.

55

Not to mention that our caps and gowns and such are all from the European university tradition. It’s all very medieval, actually. Latin honors and such - no cum laudes and all for high school, but valedictorians and saludatorians and that sort of thing

ETA - there is very little ritual left in modern life. You got your weddings, your funerals, graduations, some people have bar mitzvehs, etc. There used to be a lot more ritual. I think it’s important for people to keep the rituals we do have - I think it’s sad if you finish a huge part of your life like the part of your education they make you have, with people you’ve been with for more than a decade and that you’ll probably never see again, and you don’t even mark it with something besides a kegger.

56

Ms Purl, that’s precisely what we had to do - you couldn’t get your picture in otherwise, and it did require traveling on your own time to a photography studio. All the poor kids in the dumb classes are in it, though, so I guess it wasn’t a huge burden. The other classes just have pictures of whatever they wore to picture day, which is held in the school. (Probably the cafeteria or the gym or the auditorium.)

The senior pictures were actually very nice - they took the “required” senior picture, and then some others with different drapes and props - the ones of the girls with roses were really all very lovely pictures. There was no sitting fee, because of course they made it up by selling pictures. My parents have a huge one in the living room of my “rose” picture, which is actually not too cringingly embarassing. Of course, the older I get the less cringingly embarassing the whole thing is - I’m sure everybody else in those pictures dies a little inside too.

It would be easier to get over if I still wasn’t really obviously recognizable - I once got spotted from behind standing on a subway platform in Paris. Paris, France. I know I look a hell of a lot better as an adult, though, and I don’t particularly give a shit at this point anyway. I was an awkward teenager and, hell, an awkward adult. So what?

Still not revealing the middle school yearbooks, though.

57

Right, so you’ve given me all the gubbins on yearbooks.

Let’s move on to Class Rings shall we?

What are they in aid of, who designs them, what does the design look like, how much are they and so on and so forth.

Go on…hit me with all the lurid info, I find this absolutely fascinating

58

Miss Purl mentioned a firm called Josten’s; they were our source for class rings, even backin the Dark Ages (1977). We had a choice of 14 stones: the 12 traditional birthstones, or a simple blue or red stone (our school colors).
I still have mine (Topaz if you care) but I rarely wear it.

59

Our class ring had a jade stone. On one side of the setting was the year of graduation, on the other the school mascot (an eagle). There is a whole industry dedicated to this.

A minor rant: the whole notion of kindergarten, grade school and junior high school graduation ceremonies is just abhorrent (stoopid) to me. It’s the height of kitsch and tackiness, and makes anything that follows just that much more meaningless. Celebrating every minor event in someone’s life as though it were the Nobel Prize is beyond lame.

60

Chefguy: I’m sorry to have to say this but those rings to me are the height of tackiness