Christopher Columbus High School - Anchor Yearbook (Bronx, NY)

Page 16 text:

THESE ARE THE TIMES.. It is now one and a half years since our alma mater opened its doors to us. Nineteen thirty-nine, nineteen-forty-what will we remember of these years in years to come? Will these be for us, as days of one's youth everlastingly are, just an elusive impression of good old days? Will anyone remember what it was like-the little manners and customs of the day? How did we dress? What were we reading? What enthusiasm did we cherish? What were the names that impressed us? What were our amusements, our turns of speech, our fads? What ideas occupied our minds? How did things look? In full aware- ness that what's to come is still unsure, we set down here a brief record of the present, with the hope that we may read it in the future with gentlest pleasure, and not with either super- cilious remoteness or violent nostalgia. About three months after Christopher Columbus was opened, the New York World's Fair began. The school's visit in a body to The World of Tomorrow was our first great outing. Flushing had once been a good three hours' trip from Pelham Parkway, but the Fair necessitated the opening of shortcuts from all over the city. For the first time, we could go from the Bronx to Queens in about twenty-five minutes, over the new Whitestone Bridge, or the new Triborough Bridge, or by the comparatively new Eighth Avenue subway. We passed the city's first airport, under construction, LaGuardia Airport, it was to be named. As for the appearance of the school's own

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Page 17 text:

neighborhood, surrounding the building, for a radius of several blocks, there were farms, and trees, and flowers, which afforded a fine view to the students looking from our windows. Women were wearing styles borrowed from the past and adapted to modern living-Victorian, Gibson girl, and World War fashions. Shirts were about seventeen inches from the floor. Hats were of all queer shapes and sizes, trimmed with fruit, flowers, and veiling. Shoes were heel-less, toe-less, side- less-mere holes with trimmings. Some were constructed on platforms three inches thick, these were revolutionary in the footwear field. The advent of the jitterbug craze, in keeping with the tempo of the day, brought in sharpie clothes, brightly colored and extreme, through which younger and more frivo- lous people expressed excess energy. High school girls donned fiat-heeled shoes, flounced blouses, swing skirts, and pork-pie hats. They wore their hair in variations of the page-boy style, long in back, short curls piled high in front. The boys wore peg- legged trousers, the waistbands of which were held almost under their chins by dazzling plaid suspenders. They wore bow ties, and green hats with tremendous brims. The troublous times were reflected in the entertainment world as well as in clothing, and since one part of the works of theatre, screen, radio, and literature depicted so vividly the conditions of the day, the other part perforce romanticized the past, and served as an escape. Theatre, screen, and radio went in for historical, biographical, and socially significant worhs.