Our new Digital Long Island website gives us better keyword-searching capability, and as part of this we have uploaded all the East Hampton High School yearbooks in the Long Island Collection’s holdings, beginning with The ’51, which is featured here.
Unlike many of the more recent yearbooks, in 1951 only members of the senior class had individual pictures. Underclassmen, including seventh and eighth graders, were relegated to class, club, or team photographs. The seniors were surveyed about nicknames, ambitions, student activities, birthdays, local jobs, and where they previously attended school. From an archivist’s perspective, this captures a great deal of valuable biographical information of the kind that is rarely included in today’s yearbooks.
The seniors dedicated the yearbook to Leon Q. Brooks, one of their teachers, “in grateful appreciation for his unfailing co-operation and constant help guiding us on our way.” The yearbook also devoted an entire page to a photograph of the school’s eight custodians, one of whom was female.
The “class will” from the seniors to the juniors is intended to be humorous and seems to have many inside jokes. Other “gifts” on the page appear to be revealing about each junior’s reputation, with the bequests ranging from “a stage” to an “even temperament” to more tangible items like “a box of tissues” or “a straight razor, a pair of scissors, and the first month’s rent.” This section, along with the Junior Prophecy, has a few entries that clearly border on hazing, behavior a school publication would not find acceptable today.
If you have any yearbook we’re missing and would be willing to let us borrow and scan it, please let us know. We could use 1950 and earlier, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1957, 1958, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2015, 2020, and 2021.
Andrea Meyer is the head of the Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library.
