Yearbooks Redux: "The Kitten"

Abstract

Yearbooks Redux:"The Kitten" James Marten "There is a great deal to be learned about youth culture, both within and outside of the school, from the seemingly simple high school yearbook. … Yearbooks hold up a mirror to the students, their community, and their perceptions of the larger world. Few sources are written by and for young people in the same way as the high school yearbook."1 Last issue's object lesson by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg showed how the 1980s farm crisis rippled through the yearbook produced by the students of Harlan Community High School in Iowa. I want to follow up that fascinating object lesson with a very personal object lesson of my own. Last Christmas, while going through a box of family ephemera, my sister Jane and I came across a handmade yearbook from 1942, edited by our mother, Mary Lou Schlobohm, when she was an eighth grader in the one-room District 83 school near Aurora, South Dakota. As the lone eighth grader, she was naturally the editor of the yearbook, as well as the typist. Their township school was located about a mile north of the quarter-section farm where Mary Lou's father, William, farmed and her mother, Ruth, kept house (she was a former country school teacher). The students named their yearbook The Kitten, not for the cuddly pet, but for a game that for some reason became very important to them in 1941–1942. Kittenball resembles softball, but is played with a giant, rather squishy ball (the modern softball is twelve inches in circumference and has a hard surface, compared to the soft, sixteen-inch kittenball). Their season apparently consisted of a single game against another country school, which they lost, although as the yearbook went to press, there was hope that a rematch could be scheduled. There were only eight students in the school, but kittenball was a game that kids of any age could play. It helped that Mrs. Ishmael, the teacher (whom the students "like[d] very much"), covered first base. [End Page 307] Click for larger view View full resolution Materially, The Kitten bears little resemblance to most yearbooks being published by junior high and high schools in the 1940s. It is bound in lightly finished, quarter-inch plywood boards with rubber-covered rings. There's a photo of their school and "The Kitten" and "1942" fashioned out of black tape. The black and white photos are fastened to heavy construction paper with those black triangles that one sees in old photo albums. The text is typed directly onto the paper; blank pages were provided for students to inscribe with good wishes and signatures. Yet there are similarities between this crude yearbook and more polished publications. Each student is featured in a photograph of them standing against [End Page 308] the school's white siding; the pictures seem to have been taken on a typically windy spring day on the prairie. Each picture was accompanied with a brief list of favorite pastimes and special characteristics. My mother's listing, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the longest: she was the prettiest girl, best student, best girl student, best musician (she played piano by ear), most lady-like girl (there were no other girls older than ten), most silent student, most representative girl, and most popular student. Other kids were most athletic, wittiest, and most gentlemanly. A different page surveyed the students' favorite games and subjects. One of the two fourth graders, Bonnie Lou Kirby, "likes to swing, play ball, jump rope, New Orleans, Hop Scotch, and Pump Pump Pull Away," while the other, Kenneth Starman (he lived on the quarter section across the road from the school that would later be the farm on which my uncle, aunt, and cousins lived), had a similar set of interests, along with spelling and taking exams. Other kids liked the game "I Send," while the lone seventh grader, another Starman, also liked building birdhouses. Although I have no evidence to support this, "I Send" may have been an alternative name for "Red Rover," in which two lines of players with hands locked face each other, with individual kids racing to break through the opposing...