Berkeley High School - Olla Podrida Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Activities at Berkeley High School have not always meant Key Club hauntedhouses, meeting Senators in Washing- ton, D. C. and concocting floats for Homecoming. The social clubs students have initiated and perpertuated over the years are so ingrained in our every day lives that, without stepping back, we have difficulty seeing these activities not only as a product of our creative minds, but also as a product of our time. Throughout Berkeley High’s one hundred years, the school’s activities have mirrored the students’ imaginations and society’s expectations. From the pages of the 1896 Olla Podrida, Berkeley High’s original year book, men in dark suits and hourglass women smile woodenly from their respective group club portraits. The sex segregation of the clubs (two debating teams and six sororities and fraternities) suggests a formality and gentility almost unimaginable in this century of social intimacy. Although the students were in coeducational classes, they met socially only as competetors (in debating matches) or as courters, not as peers. By the turn of the century (1913), the clubs had expanded and integrated. The many language clubs (Greek, German, and Spanish) reflected the Bay Area’s influx of immi- grants. This cultural expansion was paralleled in the school by an industrial awareness, as the Gas Engine Club indicates. With this abundance of activities, and more, the 1913 foundation of the Board of Control was quite appro- priate! The Twenties seemed to be the golden age for the speech and writing clubs. The debating clubs expanded and a poetry club was founded. Apparently faced with the same cleanliness problem that currently plagues our campus, the students formed a “Park Department’’ for the “better- ment of school surroundings.” By 1933, the clubs dwindled and lost their members to the many crowded athletic teams. Only a handful of students joined the debating or archeology clubs. Perhaps the stu- dents saw little practicality in studying and history, while in the midst of a Depression which called for a physical cure. The B.O.C.’s selling of War Stamps and Bonds to aid the war effort and the boom of clubs and activities paralleled the surging war time economy of the Forties. Honor Soci- ety, the student Council, the Jacket Staff and twenty clubs and activities were represented in the 1943 Yearbook. The Fifties, in its quiet way, carried on the clubs. In 1969, the yearbook dropped its traditional name, Olla Podrida, and since then a new name and theme have been chosen each year. With this change, Berkeley High seemed to have gained enthusiasm and some of the unconvention- ality that students were involved in. The Spirit Society or the Parapsychology Club; descriptions of the fun they had, rather than the results they attained, suggest that spirit (whether figurative or literal) was of essence. By the early Seventies, the school’s clubs featured activity (bicycle, swimming, dancing, and other sports clubs) and activism. The many ethnic clubs attested to the new cul- tural awareness which has since become one of Berkeley’s trademarks. The Activities of the Eighties promise to offer some of the most diverse and enriching opportunities in Berkeley High’s history. Willa Baker