Shirley was up in our attic on Monday. She pulled down some of the detritus of my teaching career and asked if I could sort through it - perhaps throw some of it away. After all, fifteen years has now passed since I opted for early retirement. Why on earth have I hung on to so much of it for so long?
If I died tomorrow that stuff would not mean a thing to anybody else. Even my grown up children would not give it any more than a cursory glance before binning it. Amongst the memorabilia debris I found the two school magazines shown in this blogpost.
The first one was from the summer of 1964. I know who designed the front cover. It was a young art teacher called Barry McKenzie. He was still there when I arrived in January 1986, following a promotion from my previous school.
Barry also designed the following cover from the glorious summer of 1966:-
The two designs suggest a simpler, more innocent time when school magazines were printed in-house and costs needed to be limited. Within each magazine there were forty eight pages and they all needed to be stapled by hand in the middle before every pupil's family received a copy.
The magazines were meant to champion achievement and endorse a sense of community and well-being in the school which was built just a few years earlier on the northern edge of this northern city. To this day, it continues to serve an area with plenty of social and educational challenges.
Below you can see some of the text from the 1964 magazine. No word-processing back then. The typists would have used Gestetner stencil skins each placed in a rather basic printing machine before black ink was applied from a tube and the hand wheel was turned to churn out multiple pages. Later these had to be turned over and printed on the reverse. It would have been a very arduous task.
Anyway, I freed our house of these two magazines by posting them to the current headteacher of the school. I hope he finds a way to save and cherish them but that is now out of my control. At least he is someone with a History degree so there's a chance that history matters to him.
Or he cherishes "the bin" for detritus from former teachers.
ReplyDeleteVery possible.
DeleteA good place to deposit such items is in the local archives. I donated all my school yearbooks (27) to the local archives.
ReplyDeleteThe things we keep because .....
ReplyDeletePerhaps the school has a "History" or "Museum" cabinet where the magazines can be displayed along with other memorabilia.
ReplyDeleteYou don't come across the term "perusal" much anymore, do you. I love it!
ReplyDeleteThe typing was all done on mechanical typewriters, of course, and I can only find one error in the snippet you show us ("...congratulation to to the artists"). How much easier it is today to produce text without errors, and yet I stumble across wrong spelling and grammar all the time (and don't get me started on the apostrophe...!).
With an interest in the US Military community that used to live, work and go to school in Pattonville at the outskirts of my hometown, I have come across a website that has all the old American High School's year books ready for perusal (or download). They make for fascinating reading, offering a window into a time and way of life not so long gone. The school - like the rest of Pattonville as a place of housing for military family - closed in 1992. The very last yearbook is especially touching.
I had saved all my school records at home for some reason but my sister binned it all when Dad became ill. I suppose they would have ended up in the landfill anyway but I unaccountably felt sad when she told me.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been nice of her to ask you first, wouldn't it.
DeleteI tried doing that once with an in school magazine and no response from the school. I tried sending a photo taken in the 1940s I think, to the current of the house owners, again no response. I no longer bother with such efforts, but I'm glad you made the effort.
ReplyDeleteThere was something satisfying about the hands-on production of magazines and hand-outs: touch, smell, skill, labour, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's great that you at least passed them along. Hopefully the school has an archive where items like this can be preserved. (We have an archive in our library of our school's past publications, but I'm sure we don't have them all.)
ReplyDeleteI hope the current headmaster saves them. There must be a place in the library for school memorabilia like that to be displayed!
ReplyDeleteI have started that process too, mostly after realizing how much of the stuff I inherited from three grandparents and one parent in the last five years that I have tossed because it meant nothing to me and I didn't know why it had meant something to them.
ReplyDeleteWe have generations who have never handled a typewritten page. There is something tactile about the appearance.
ReplyDeleteThe things we hang on to...
ReplyDeleteI have lots of books that I hang onto. It's difficult to get rid of some things.
ReplyDeleteI have a bin of stuff from when I was growing up as my Mom saved it all and sometimes it is interesting to share with my kids and grandkids. I also have a bin for each of my 5 children filled with their stuff - from birth through college mostly. Whenever I move out my home, I will pass on their bins to each of them and they can decide what is worth saving... I get a kick out of looking through these as they bring back so many sweet memories.
ReplyDelete