When I first started this blog, I was based in Nassau, the Bahamas, and the content that I had with me, was a disk full of scanned negatives from my high school daze. All of my stuff was in storage, including yearbooks. Just lately I started going through my stuff, and came across the 1971 yearbook that appears in the frontispiece photo of this blog.
I had just joined the photo club in 1971, and Paul Gimpelj was the president. He had taken a lot of the photos in the 1971 yearbook. However many were taken by John Marinzel, and strangely enough, I have pics gleaned from negatives which were 126 format. That is the format for an Instamatic film cartridge - a cheapie camera. Gimpelj et al had Asahi Pentax Spotmatics, which I consider to be one of the nicest 35 mm SLR cameras designed. It fit in to your hand. It had a smaller footprint than most, and the precision came through everywhere.
The 1971 yearbook had a trailer of sorts -- song lyrics with photographs. The song was "A Place In The Sun" -- a hit first made famous by Stevie Wonder in 1963. The lyrics are:
Like a long, lonely stream,
I keep runnin' towards a dream.
Movin' on, movin' on.
Like a branch on a tree,
I keep reachin' to be free.
Movin' on, movin' on.
There's a place in the sun,
Where there's hope for everyone,
Where my poor, restless heart's got to run.
There's a place in the sun,
And before my life is done,
Gotta find me a place in the sun.
Like an old dusty road,
I get weary from the load.
Movin' on, movin' on.
Like this tired, troubled Earth,
I been rollin' since my birth.
Movin' on, movin' on.
There's a place in the sun,
Where there's hope for everyone,
Where my poor, restless heart's gotta run.
There's a place in the sun,
And before my life is done,
Gotta find me a place in the sun.
Gotta find me a place in the sun.
The trailer in the 1971 yearbook was just the chorus -- " There's a place in the sun, " and the very first picture was of Cindy Germanis -- pictured above. She is dressed up for the Sadie Hawkins Day dance. Sadie Hawkins Day is a cultural icon that has passed into oblivion. If you don't know what Sadie Hawkins Day means, here is a Wikipedia explainer:
The Sadie Hawkins dance is named after the very popular Li'l Abner comic strip character Sadie Hawkins, created by cartoonist Al Capp. In the strip, Sadie Hawkins Day fell on a given day in November (Capp never specified an exact date). The unmarried women of Dogpatch got to chase the bachelors and "marry up" with the ones that they caught. The event was introduced in a daily strip which ran on November 15, 1937. This is unlike traditional dances, where the men chase the women, this empowers women to chase after what they want and not just wait for it to walk their way.
In the U.S. and Canada, this concept was popularized by establishing dance events to which the woman invited a man of her choosing, instead of demurely waiting for a man to ask her. The first known such event was held on November 9, 1938. Within a year, hundreds of similar events followed suit. By 1952, the event was reportedly celebrated at 40,000 known venues. It became a woman-empowering rite at high school and college campuses, and the tradition continues in some regional cultures.
Wow - never thought that I would need a cultural explainer for a simple photograph. If you click on the Sadie Hawkins tag below this entry, you will get pictures of Marrying Sam, another character from the cartoon strip -- who was played by Leo Barrett. This faux wedding ceremony at the dance, was to complete the Sadie Hawkins tradition of a woman catching a man for marriage.
Over the coming weeks, I will try and digitize the 1971 yearbook. At last, more content for this blog.
Before his death, Joe Pender used to chide me for not including news about Dwyer in general. I reminded him that this blog was named My OCHS, or the high school of my era, and not what it became after I left. So the concentration is of content of the time that I walked those halls.
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