While rummaging through my junk recently (and by junk, I mean scraps of paper, etc., not, well, my junk) I came across something I didn’t know I had. A yearbook. From Central High School. In Charlotte, North Carolina. From 1939.
I know why I have it … it was my mother’s yearbook. Mom was a Southern belle, originally Rebecca Pearl Hankins, known as Pearl to quite a few of her friends, as the yearbook shows (as I recall, she hated the name Pearl, so she was Becky once she came to Canada). The yearbook, called Snips and Cuts, is a fascinating look back in time.
I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that, well, ‘times have changed’ (don’t they always?), but the high school my mom attended in 1939 in the American South bears no resemblance to any high school, anywhere today. Looking through the hefty tome is like watching Turner Classic Movies; were people ever like this?
Charlotte was a city of about 100,000 people back then (850,000 today). Segregation was in force, which is pretty clear by the sea of entirely white faces at Central. The individual headshots are very formal; every boy is wearing a suit and tie, every girl wearing what appears to be some sort of scarf. There appeared to be about three standard hairstyles for both boys and girls. The names are mostly relics of another era: Mary, Betty, Barbara, Mildred, James, Clyde, Doris, Hazel, Herman, Dorothy (nickname is always ‘Dot) and plenty of Roberts, James and Richards (nickname always ‘Dick’). The most unfortunate name I found was Zimmer Lester Rape, with Vesta Gibbons Slaughter a close second.
The ‘class historian’ offered up a detailed look at the school year, ending with “So, with the gaiety of the Junior-Senior Prom, with the sadness of Commencement just head, we say goodbye to the three happiest years of our lives …” Man, that is NOT the way I remember high school.
That is followed by a couple of pages that would never be duplicated today – ‘Senior Superlatives’.
Sam Palmer was the ‘most retiring boy’ (retiring from what… being a boy?), while Walter Stockton was ‘most bashful’. Joseph McLaughlin was voted ‘most dignified boy’, while George McCachern copped ‘best all-around, most sincere and most energetic boy’. That rascal Julian Black was ‘most mischievous boy’. One of the big winners was Ann Wiley, who was the ‘biggest heart-breaker, most likely to succeed, cutest and most popular’ (she was also the assistant editor of the yearbook). Norman Pease was the best executive, most popular, most attractive, and most influential boy (coincidentally, he was also assistant editor of the yearbook), but Bill Winter was the best looking boy (different from most attractive, I guess), and my favourite, the ‘biggest bull shooter’. The smartest boy was the sadly named Mitchell Sorrow.
Clubs were a very big deal at Central. I’m guessing that membership was not optional, judging from the number of clubs and the number of members. There was a club called junior marshals (I could find no reference to senior marshals), the national honor society, the dance committee, and huge school bands.
There were clubs with cryptic names Lace and Pig Iron, another just called O.D.S., and another called Sock and Buskin. The Traffic Club appeared to be the favourite, judging from the number of kids; what they did is unclear. There was the Central Hi-Y Club, the Girl Reserve Club (I assume they were in reserve if, what, the other girls left?), Good Sports Clubs, and a Girls’ A.A., which, if it stands for Alcoholics Anonymous, this school had a serious problem.
Sports, of course, was huge, taking up 16 pages of the book. The football team got most of the ink, with descriptions of every game, including a 0-0 thriller against Blue Ridge. The basketball team, the Silver Streaks, weren’t exactly a juggernaut, losing one game 19-18. There was a girls’ basketball team, and a girls’ soccer team (but no boys). They got a token photo, and no write up.
This is not to say the girls did not get much attention. The last part of the book is my favourite – full-page photos of “the most beautiful girls at Central – selected, not by a beauty expert from photographs, but by a host of beauty experts, the boys of Central.”
With all due respect to both the boys and girls of Central … let’s just say that beauty standards may have changed somewhat. But my future mother, “Miss Pearl Hankins” was among the select few, and she deserved it. She was a Miss America candidate in 1938, so how she wasn’t the prettiest girl at Central is a mystery. It’s all who you know, I guess.
In This Corner 
Yeah. Good stuff. So I read your older entries on your mother and father. Fascinating as well. Ten siblings plus you, holy cow! And unique parents to boot.
I think it’s good when you can look back on your parents with fondness, remembering their quirks as humans, too. I think mine were out of the ordinary for leaving their homeland and striking out anew in Canada. Took guts.They had four hungry boys and a small income in the England of the 1950s, and it wasn’t meant to be that way. Dad was born in Amritsar, India, the first of three kids to a couple whose patriarch had risen swiftly through the British colonial bureaucracy as an educator, eventually establishing and running a university in Lahore after a spell in Madras. Post graduate Engineering students at Nova Scotia Technical College from India and Pakistan in the late 1960s knew more about him than I did. He’d ended up being head of education for the entire Punjab region before Partition. They were always friendly because of it to my intense embarrassment. And the amazing handmade gifts he accumulated we descendants still have to this day. He was knighted for his service in ’44, and with the revelation of those later students in Canada, I knew he was no colonial despot. I’ve even found an online photo of him in a Pakistani educator site archive!
As was common for such parents, they bundled Dad off alone on a steamship to England at age eight (!) to attend Kings School Canterbury prep and later public school, perhaps fifth ranking after Eton and Harrow. Dad never saw India again after 1927. And was never that happy about the way his parents had “got rid of me” so he had no family life. But he ended up captain of the cricket and rugby team, and two years running, heavyweight public school boxing champion of Britain. Public schools being intensely private there, of course. So then it was off to Oxford to become a doctor and play varsity rugger.
Graduated in ’46, educated during the war, and not allowed to join up, because “we need docs”. So joined the RAF then because he felt guilty after his younger brother had been killed in action in Italy, and even participated in the Berlin airlift. Paid well as a Squadron Leader and 2IC medical staff in British-Occupied Germany. I can remember the Hamburg of those days in 1950 and much more. By the time he hit civvy street in ’53 with three kids, the new National Health Service paid a doctor less than a car assembly line worker, and only half of his RAF salary. A few years of that, his father already dead from malarial complications in ’49 back in Blighty, time to emigrate — he’d already trained as a headshrinker in the RAF and practised as such as a civilian, and landed in Nova Scotia with a provincial government job. Paid about three times less than a regular GP billed, but four times his UK salary. Most of the eleven salaried shrinks across NS were ex-Brits. Mum had her hands full raising four boys, never showed her true stripes in England. She came from Oxford, a pharmacist’s daughter that Dad glommed onto at a dance in early ’39 with his broken leg from rugger in a cast and sporting crutches. Couldn’t dance a step before or after! Doctors were very well off pre-war, had servants, so Mum was impressed by the prospect and he was a blond handsome devil.
So, my parents came from England in ’59 where there was no school yearbook tradition, yet a 1938 8×10 studio photo of my 18 y.o. mother I have (kept following her death seven years ago) would knock yer socks off even today. Freaks me out. Another brother has the official photo of my parents 1942 marriage in the middle of the war — the surroundings are drab. Mum ain’t! Even in her prescribed downmarket wartime-fabric-rationing short unstylish dress. No flowing gowns in the war years, nor much food. Dad was a goner over her. Both look skinny. My maternal grandfather told me when I went back to Blighty in ’69 for grad school of how proud he was to parade with Mum on the seaside front at Southsea England pre-war while on summer holidays (vacation). He’d just shake his head at the remembrance. The high school girls in my little Valley town in NS were knocked out with her style in the early 1960s. Never able to afford decent clothes in England, a trip back to Blighty had led to acquisition of some above-knee skirts of a style unobtainable in our rural world. I was always being asked to find out from her by girls where they could get clothes like that. Not out of the Simpsons catalogue, that’s for sure, or even Halifax. Mum blossomed in Canada, had a job by ’63 to Dad’s conservative chagrin and uneasy acquiescence. She was always an overtly friendly chatterbox with a brain, a bad cook, not in the least sentimental, made a friend in two minutes flat out of anybody, so everyone quickly knew her and she essentially eased us kids’ way into Canadian society from an English background. Head of the local PTA after just two years in the country, steamrollered into it by other women; she didn’t go looking for it. In conservative rural society wary of strangers, no less. She was also one of the best drivers I’ve ever met, deft and fast. She only learned to drive after we came to Canada, and cars have been a hobby of mine all my life, so I exaggerate not a bit at her skill. There arose local legend about her speedy ways. The Anglican vicar for some strange reason would always seem to want to chat to her endlessly after the Sunday morning church services which Dad refused to attend. Hmm. We kids used to listlessly hang around wanting to drive the 12 miles home for lunch while Mum had one of her seemingly interminable gabs. Why did the married vicar drive to our house many times to personally tutor me in Confirmation rituals? No funny business occurred, but at 14 or so I was beginning to realize she was a knockout to others, while to me she was just Mum and she talked too much. Personally, I was interested in the much younger Sweater Queen, ahem, featured in our HS yearbook one year, among a dozen other young ladies. VERY unPC to feature such a sexist object like a Sweater Queen in a yearbook or anywhere else these days, but the girl was unreservedly damn proud of it then.
My yearbook grad pix are boys with ties, and girls with ’60s hairstyles. None of them much reflect the people behind the facade. Nor did the university ones up to 1969 which were entirely similar. In fact your description of clubs and sports teams from Charlotte ’38 are pretty similar to my high school and college yearbook experience except with regard to women’s fashion. Lots of gossip and candid photos and montages and solemn tomes about entering adult society. When it all changed I have no clue. And yes, I did enjoy those teen years immensely. I have rescued the yearbooks from storage these past few years and have them at the ready. Old classmates are dying off, you see. My younger brother’s wife’s older brother from my exact homeroom class just two months ago of ALS being just one example. She’s a-winding down, this life.
Nice trip down memory lane.
Great personal story there, Bill. Man, your parents have a terrifically broad and fascinating background. Your background and mine could hardly be more different. (And as for ‘Sweater Girls’ … the less said, the better.) Thanks as always for reading.
Rebecca was Miss Charlotte is the 1938 Miss America Pageant. Do you know what she did in the talent competition, sing, dance, musical instrument, monologue, and what the name of the music/song ??? (I am researching the talent history of Miss America pageant) Thank you for any help.
I wish I knew, Tim. I should have asked mom more about the pageant, but that’s one of those things you regret not doing when it’s too late (mom died 35 years ago). I do know that she got to do a screen test, which I think was a standard thing they did for everyone, but it didn’t go anywhere. Maybe that’s why she ended up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and having 11 children! Sorry I can’t help, but thanks for reading and writing.
Thank you for answering so quickly. and yes, all the Miss America contestants got screen tests back in those days. Thanks again