Durfee High School - Durfee Record Yearbook (Fall River, MA)

Page 7 text:

A Message................. From Our Principal For many years your churches, your homes, and your schools have been striving: to guide you carefully through your childhood and youth to the gates of womanhood and manhood. Today as you enter these gates, many of you will dis- continue formal schooling and your own initiative and endeavor will count more than ever before. The schools, through the administration officers, the guidance members and the teachers, have aimed to lead you to think seriously and to act wisely. They have brought you into contact with the vital problems of life in America and the World so that physically, mentally, and spiritually you will be better citizens. After two World Wars and now in this time when the peace of the world is far from settled, there is a tremendous challenge to the young people of America, who will be faced with the responsibilities of high places in the national and in- ternational councils of today and tomorrow. If every person in this class and in every high school and college graduating class of this year throughout the country were instilled with high ideals and strength of character to fight strongly for what he considers right and to oppose just as strongly what he thinks is wrong, this country would be a better place in which to live. My hopes are that every one of you will live a good, happy and useful life, that you will be successful in your chosen field, and that you will live in a world of enduring peace. CHARLES V. CARROLL

Page 6 text:

A Message.......... From Our Superintendent It must seem strange to you that you have reached the end of your public- schooling. For twelve years most of you have been growing up within a pattern of life seemingly fixed and secure. At the moment you are enjoying, quite properly, the sense of achievement which comes from reaching a goal long sought. During those twelve years you have developed from very young children into young men and women feeling the first responsibilities of adulthood. Now you must really face up to those responsibilities. In doing so you will find life to be an ever varying and exciting mixture of success and failure. Fortified with the optimism of youth and the education you have obtained, you have every right to be hopeful and confident. In that hope and in that confidence lies your best chance for personal success and in it, too, rests the future of the community in which most of you will remain. There will be those who, out of their own failures and timidities, will try to draw you away from the good life through easy cynicism and whining pessimism. But keep your ideals high, never content with the second rate; be always ambitious for the best spiritually and materially. For you are members of a democratic society; the one form of government with God-given ideals of the worth of individuals. Now while all of us in the com- munity offer you the congratulations you so richly deserve, be resolved to shorten the distance between the true realization of those ideals and the shortcomings of which the rest of us are guilty. Sincerely, WILLIAM S. LYNCH

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Ten Highest Ranking Seniors ELAINE DESAUTELS MARGARET CANTWELL PETER COLLI AS DEBORAH DUFFY WILLIAM FARRISSEY HEL.GA GERLICH CONSTANCE HAWKINS HELENE PODOLSKI MARJORIE SHARPLES ELIZ A P,ET H W11J J A MS Class Officers PETER COLLIAS, President MAE SHACKLETON, Vice-President NANCY SCOTT, Secretary President of the Home Room Directors ALAN HAMPSHIRE President of the Students Activities Association JAMES C. CHACE Editor of the Hilltop MILTON SOKOLL tin