Taking a look at old photos

They seemed so quaint.
Certainly they looked old fashioned.
And then some eagle-eyed classmate would take a close look and point out that the girl third from the left on the second row was your mother.
And how did that feel?
Years ago, long before the Pleistocene Era and Indiana Daylight Saving Time, it was a tradition in Hoosier high schools to hang from the walls large, framed assemblages of photographs that included head shots of every graduate.
Class by class, these groupings of black and white mug shots would line the halls.
Each year, a new class would go up. And there would be something like a link in a chain added, a sense of community continuity on display.
A student might graduate in 1956, but with a little searching in the halls it was possible to find Mom or Dad in 1936 or some other year.
In the old 1925 Portland High School building that was a junior high when I was a student there, the class photos were even more mysterious. The tradition had stopped somewhere around 1959, so the graduates who were pictured were caught in a moment of history. Before a certain point, no one was pictured; after a certain point, the same thing held true.
I remember spotting my mother and father in different class pictures while I was in junior high. I remember spotting my aunts — Jean and Janet — who were identical twins.
But I also remember our fascination with people we never knew, who seemed as fantastical as if they’d come from another planet.
There was Zep Yohe, for instance, a dweeby-looking kind of guy with an elaborate hair-do that was punctuated with a large, free-standing curl that must have extended three inches from his forehead.
That will get your attention when you’re in junior high.
Who was this guy? What was with the hair? Was that some sort of photographic trick? And what would he look like if he’d walked among us 30 years after his high school graduation?
And Zep wasn’t alone.
His class group photo hung outside a ninth-grade biology classroom, and in the same class was the amazingly-named Halloween Baggs.
Now, while Zep looked as if he had just arrived from the planet Neptune, Halloween looked as if he were 10 years older than anyone else in his class.
So, what do you do when you’re faced with funny-looking pictures and odd names when you’re in junior high school? You make fun of them, of course.
They become fodder for silly jokes.
Which might be funny until you go home.
My mother didn’t remember Zep Yohe much. But she called me up short when I started chuckling about Halloween Baggs.
He was a nice guy, she said.
He was, indeed, older than most of his classmates because he’d dropped out of school and had a short career as a prize fighter before coming back and graduating.
He was named Halloween because that’s when he was born.
And he was, she reminded me, a nice guy.
Suddenly, those mock-able, old fashioned pictures didn’t seem so funny.
And the people in them weren’t targets for junior high humor, but real people.
That’s another reason I’m glad that Zep and Halloween and all the rest are now hanging at the Jay County Historical Society’s museum. They’ll be appreciated there, though I still don’t think Zep’s hair-do is going to be the next rage.[[In-content Ad]]