East High School - Orient Yearbook (Rochester, NY)

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Class History I?VEN a drenching, drizzling autumn rain couldn’t dampen the ardor or squelch the pride of a crowd of very fresh freshmen who found themselves close-packed in a little four-room brick building on the corner of Chestnut and James streets one day in September, 1904. 1 hose freshmen were the Class of 1908, and that building was the dear, dirty old Hast Annex where they made their first acquaintance with Latin verbs and the dissection of ancient pussy cats from the pound. There were no supe- rior sophomores to make fun of us. We reigned supreme for one short happy year. We worked a little and played a good deal (for freshmen are but children, and there were just beautiful bannisters to slide down at the Annex.) Even “midyears” couldn't subdue our spirits. Imagine coming into an examination room to find the the ceiling bristling with pens and the culprits, balancing on wabbly desks, trying to knock them down with rulers and pointers. Who could fear an examination begun in a shower of falling pens and a gale of laughter ? And when spring, that teachers’ harvest time for marbles and jack-stones arrived, it brought, in the girls’ study rooms at least, a fresh crop of rubber balls and a new and interesting but short lived diversion. We discovered that every time a ball hit the ceiling it left a beautiful, round, clean polkadot upon it. It would be a great improvement if wc could make a pretty dot design all over the dirty old ceiling. So we gaily set to work. Hut wrath in the form of an unsympathetic study room teacher soon descended upon us, and after that rebuff we gave up any attempt to beautify our surroundings and turned our energies in other directions. All too soon that merry year was ended and we found ourselves, we and our new 08 brothers and sisters from the West Annex, sophomores. Hut oh ! what young and innocent sophomores ! I can close my eyes now and see two little girls kneeling by their locker door and anxiously running their fingers round and round the knob trying to find the “smooth place. Sophmores! Joyously we hurled ourselves into the High School whirl where wc lost ourselves completely, until we at last emerged to find ourselves Juniors. And then '08 burst forth in all her glory. The fame of her athletes spread far and wide. The fledgling orators, who had fought out weighty questions with perhaps more vigor than logic in the old Annex, now began to “speak in public on the stage” and win honors for East High (incident- ally they won the inter-class championship). Not to be outdone by the “brains” of the class our athletes set to work and walked off with the championship in all the different athletic departments. There they hang in the hall now, those banners, witnesses of ’08’s prowess in war. Then we joined with the January class to have our “ Prom.” the social event of the year. Last fall wc entered East High as Seniors, and as Seniors we have been proudly reproducing last year’s record on field and platform, for this our last year must not fall behind. And in after years we may come back to East High, and, walking through the halls, point out this banner and that and say, “ It was my class. June ’08, that won all those championships. And now the graduation stunts have begun. Already “our” Senior Play is a thing of the past. Soon will come the Dance, Class Day, Gradu- ation and the Class of ’08 will go, leaving only a few old landmarks behind. Soon dear old East High will know ’08 no more and another class will take its place. £or four short years 08 has laughed and sighed, worked and played, and now '08 is gone, soon to be forgotten. “ ‘Tis hut a tent where takes his one night’s rest, A sultan to the realm of death addressed ; A sultan rises, the dark Karrash sounds, And prepares it for another guest.” M. A. CASTLE.

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DONALD CURTIS President MARGARET BURLING Vice-President CLASS OFFICERS OSCAR KAISER Secretary HESTER HOPKINS T reasurer

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SENIOR CLASS