Ah yes, the one top center that’s silver with a green stone looks very similar in design to my own, except mine was gold.
Mine is unique. It has a blue stone to represent my school colors–because I’m an October birthday and find “pink zircon” to be undesirable for a class ring (and opal would not have been a reasonable choice).
That’s not why mine is unique. Mine is unique because I moved between ring ordering day–which may have been sophomore year(otherwise freshman)-- and graduation. So I got the ring from my old school, and wore it for a year or so after moving. Then I called Josten’s, and they agreed (free of charge) to either alter my ring or make me a new one. If I recall correctly, it has the name of my new high school engraved around the stone, and the mascot symbol from the old high school on the side.
I wore it until sometime midway through college when I decided I didn’t want to wear it anymore.
Yes they are, but when you’re eighteen and everybody is buying one… I was actually relieved when mine was stolen in Navy boot camp.
I’m certain I’ve either read or heard that it was the custom to give the class ring to a girlfriend and if you broke up it was tradition that she gave it back
Am I right?
As an aside I have to confess that I find all aspects of American school culture/tradition etc quite enthralling.
Are there any books that I can get that will give me all the info I want and does anyone have a class ring they don’t want 
I’ll do swappsies for whatever
Yes, as immortalized in song, such as “I’ve Got You, Babe” by Sonny and Cher. A girl would wear your class ring, either on a chain around her neck (per the Elvis song), or all wrapped with tape to make it fit on her finger. This meant you were “going steady” with someone. Rings were returned upon breakup (see the movie “American Grafitti”).
Do you know I never realised that that was what Elvis was singing about :smack:
What if she didn’t give the ring back, what then?
High school class rings are indeed pretty tacky. I have mine around somewhere but would be happy if I never found it again.
Many colleges, on the other hand, have very distinctive rings - my alma mater, Agnes Scott, has a rectangular onyx thing going on that they’ve been using for a century, and it’s very important to alums. (There’s a Sophomore Ring Ceremony where you get them.) I don’t know anybody in the world who wears their high school ring after a few years out of high school, but some of those college rings are very widely worn. My dad wears his from Georgia Tech, for example, and he’s 76.
So you just thought his girlfriend was a pinheaded pencil-neck?
Yeah right :eek:
You misunderstand me.
I was a mere stripling of a callow youth at the time the record came out, I didn’t even know about US class rings
I was just wondering what image might have been in your mind when hearing “won’t you wear my ring, around your neck?”
“Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!”
Sorry.
That name Josten’s seems familiar to me as well. I think we may have had the chance to get class rings in grade 13, but I don’t remember whether anyone did. My impression is that such things were more important to the jocks and boosters and others who tended to define themselves by the social life of the school. Outsiders like me just moved on.
FFS it was many moons ago, I don’t have the foggiest idea, a cock ring maybe given that at the time my head was ruled by my knob 
I was on Yearbook staff in high school. Only seniors could be on it, and it was a class. My high school was pretty big - 2500 students or so - so the yearbook was a big project. Only like 15 or so of us and our advisor worked on it. Everyone’s class photo was included, school clubs and organizations, sports, theater, events, random little interviews and spotlights on kids, and the senior section had tons of stuff (and was one of 2 full color sections, I worked on the other one ‘student life’ which was a bunch of random stuff). We didn’t get them until August because we were still working on it after school let out, to finish all the end-of year stuff and we also didn’t receive the full-color senior portraits until later in the year, which took forever, and I assume the printing and binding on those huge ass books took awhile. So no signing. Think they were like $25 or so. Most people got one.
Class rings were less of a big deal at my school. Well they were a big deal when we got the order forms sophomore year, and for a while after we received them, but other than that no one cared. They were ugly. One side had the school logo, other you could personalize with a tacky design out of the booklet. You could pick your birthstone. Could get real gold, white gold, or some fake ass variants of either. I used to wear my mom’s 1978 class ring (same high school) instead because it was much prettier, better quality, etc. I think some schools, often private schools, make a bigger deal out of class rings, like they are worn with more pride for a longer period of time. But that is anecdotal.
One of the most famous is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “Brass Rat” (the animal depicted is actually a beaver, the engineer among the non-human fauna). There’s a lot of symbolism and legend associated with this bit of jewelry, which even merits its own Wikipedia page.
I can’t believe no one’s linked to this yet!
A classic!
If they handed yearbooks out while school was still in session, then (how) did they include pictures of graduation (or anything else that happen in latter 1/2 of of the year)? 
At my school yearbooks didn’t come out until the end of summer. The few underclassmen that bought them picked them up the first week of school while seniors either picked them up themselves, had their parents do it, or had the school mail them (the school did that for free). Nobody signed an actuall yearbook. A large white posterboard was set up at graduation practice and anyone who wanted to sign it could. That was scanned and miniturized and appeared in every yearbook.
My baby sister’s senior yearbook has one really amusing photo amongst the student portraits. The President of the Student Council went down to the county jail and got them to take a mug shot of him, which he then submitted as his official “senior picture” 
My own yearbooks are full of signatures that include messages along the lines of “You’re weird but I like you anyway. Good Luck!”
They didn’t. I already get pictures from prom and graduation anyway. They did have pictures from end of the year events on a disc that we could buy if we wanted to.