Girls Latin School - Liber Annalis Yearbook (Boston, MA)

Page 51 text:

Class of 193 7 CLASS V Experience is a wonderful teacher. We know all about life. Thus ran the motto of the new Class Five. And they proceeded to assert themselves. They looked down their brief noses at Class Six, but would not admit that they had to stand tiptoe to do it. They scorned Class Six, the ignorant babes of the school. They demanded the respect of all the upper classes, and were, perhaps, humored. They were immediately dubbed the noisiest class the school had ever known, and to this very day they retain that championship title. It shows we have spirit and originality, they boasted, and continued to defy law naively. Teachers shook their heads. What was the world coming to? That unsquelchable Class Five had very successful Christmas parties, very successful Valentine parties, and, to show their originality, a very, very suc- cessful class picnic at Provincetown. Everyone acquired a Wind-burnt red face, and no one was seasick. Then came the operetta, Lantern Hand, for which certain privileged Fifth Classmen lent their coolie-coat cotton kimonos. Candy girls appeared in these clothes on the night of the Operetta. Uppermost in the minds of the Fifth Class were the Emperor and Empress of Japan, Nogotta and Iwanta Kimono. Clwanta was the woman, of course.j To this day, the girls remember I am so kind, so very, very kind, I cannot hurt a fly-a fly! But time marches on. They were growing old, these ladies who had once worn pigtails. They were solicitous of the future. Next year they would be freshmen in high school, and so they cut off their pigtails, and curled what was left on their stylish heads. CLASS IV Now that the baby sixth-classers had grown into actual high school fresh- men, they discovered that they were not to be the only graduates of the class of '37: their ranks were swelled by a group of girls known as 4B. The 4A girls were apt to look at their new sisters scornfully down the long noses of their ex- perience, because they felt that two years in Girls' Latin School had made them veterans. This condescension, however, soon passed, and both sections shared alike in the woes and joys of freshmen. In evidence that these young students had passed from the ranks of mere children was the compulsory attendance at all assemblies. No longer were there early afternoon hours to play in! No longer were there early morning study periods in which to finish that half-prepared home lesson! But in rec- ompense there were the many really amusing entertainments which they used to miss. Many were the oh's and ah's as the Caney Creek boys Cwho will ever forget their good looks?j sang their mountain music, or as their classmates pre- sented a beautiful pageant. Yet school was not all assemblies. Oh unfortunate freshmen! For not long had they been freshmen when an epidemic broke out and spread through the class, like wildfire--an epidemic of crushes 'There were a few cool, calm, and collected young misses who were in themselves sullicient and who regarded disdainfully their weaker sisters. Still, in all fairness, they were not wholly weak. Recall what great people had a hero or heroine whose judgment they trusted and whose manners they tried to copy. Here a word must be said for the class of '34, who must have had quite magnetic personalities to have inspired such a wave of herofinej Worship. January, that month of the two-headed god, was for these school girls cer- tainly two-headed. CPage Forty-sevenj

Page 50 text:

Girls' Latin School CHere he bowed eloquentlyj Magno cum gaudio I present Miss Clio, Musa Historiae I Mercury now speedily departed to his other Saturday morning duties CMorpheus againj. Clio, he knew, was a dependable divinity, very energetic because she did not Wish to lose her figure. Clio stepped forward gracefully and unrolled her gilded scroll. She com- menced to read: CLASS VI Six long years ago in September of the year '31, troops of girls of all sizes filed into the Girls' Latin School. Least noticeable among these were the hero- ines of my saga. In desperation, they clutched their cumbrous, but comforting. pencil boxes, and entered the portentous gates. A malignant, two-legged blackboard immediately faced them. Class Six report in Collins Hall. Oh, mourned the bewildered braidbearers, but what shall we do? We are Class One! Finally a daring child asked a senior in a blue knitted suit where Class One should go. The senior gazed in astonishment at her would-be contemporary. Oh, she cried suddenly, and condescendingly she explained the great puzzle. Thus it was that the pigtails found themselves in Collins Hall, found themselves scrutinized by swarms of teachers and regarded as just so many letters to be distributed in a place called the annex. The distributions brought fruitful discoveries. There were dressing rooms! A carefully compiled list shows the uses to which these dressing rooms were converted during the course of the year: hide-outs for secret societies: pun- ishment rooms for pupils over-sociable in class: sophisticated dancing-class ball rooms: gymnasiums fthe bars encouraged monkey stuntsj 3 gossip rooms Csub- jects: the Empress Eugenie hat and Miss So-and-so's new dressj : rehearsal and costuming rooms Cprevious to Christmas entertainments made possible by trag- ic histrionic attemptsj. The dressing-room was unanimously voted the in- dispensable foundation of annex social life. Sports included jump-rope, class-room ball playing, sans teacher, of course. climbing hundreds and hundreds of steps, and catching two o'clock trolley cars. CThe girls are now willing to wait until two-thirty.j There was an amazing amount of school spirit. Everyone invested in Jabs, Jab pins, A. C., and hymn and hand books, never opened since. And then-marks! The first report card-the first D-the maiden's first scholarly tears. Ah, the shock of it, the roseate color of it, the roseate color of father's face at sight of it! So this was life! But the pigtails soon recovered, for they were a happy-go-lucky little race. The really great events of the year were the gym meet, of which the fifth and sixth class stunts were the sole interesting features Caccording to their per- sonal opinionj, the class picnics to Nantasket, and the play, A'The Royal Fam- ily of Broadway. Promotion! fPage Forty-sixl

Page 52 text:

,E ...... M, ...... E., Girls, Latin School ,E ...... M, ,lf ...... H, Troubles-Midyears-Beastly monsters that spoiled a week. Smiles--Play-A'Smiling Through QBeautiful production that glad- dened their heartsj. Yet once January was gone, things began to hum. S-U-P-E-R-C-E-D-E spelled one young aspirant and was rewarded with a frown, Sorry, the word is 'supersede' with an Oh dear, how could a freshman really be expected to know such a big word anyway? Evi- dently there was a way, because bigger words were given and spelled correctly by the participants in the Boston-Herald-Traveler Spelling Bee, which was a revival of the old fashioned bees of long ago. How ardently the freshmen tried, only to find that their efforts on the whole were in vain, for the only con- testant from Girls' Latin School in the final spell down was-worst of all-a sophomore. The months that followed were so busy that this defeat by the sophomores was all forgotten. 1-2-3-4, l-2 .... came from the gym, where harassed teachers were trying to get lanky arms and skinny legs to coordinate in some semblance of time and rhythm. What for? The gym meet, of course. Now the monkeys and acrobats of former years had turned into real marchers, drill- ers, and dancers, but that was not all: they were even allowed to compete in the after school regular sports of hockey, basketball, and baseball. Their first attempts, however, to rival their elders in serious competition were sadly de- feated, but the young gymnasts came up smiling, with threats for the coming year. Their threats and promises did not apply only to gym meets: for, at the end of the year as they looked over their records, they all promised their fam- ilies and threatened themselves that they would do better the next year, when they should be just wise-fools. CLASS III The sophomores began to live up to their name by pretending to be quite wise. The tom-boys of the previous year now appeared neatly combed and curled: cheeks suddenly became rosy, and pale lips began to bloom. Somehow, this undue rosiness caused lectures about the improper use of cosmetics to descend upon the innocent as well as on the guilty. Had the lecturer foreseen the effect her little sermon was to have, perhaps she would not have wasted her efforts, for the next day the very stately and dignified statue of Diana in the lower corridor displayed Cmirabile dictuj unmistakably red lips. Soon the novelty of being grown up gave way before the mysteries of ancient history and geometry, Geometry! Oh, they lamented, Why did Euclid ever bother to find out that a central angle was measured by its inter- cepted arc, or Pythagoras that the sum of the squares on the legs of a right tri- angle equaled . . . ? Euclid and his associates, however, contributed to the arts as well as to the sciences, for music, in its very development, is based on the fundamentals of mathematics. How much more this branch of math was ap- preciated by the sophomores who raised their voices to swell the chorus of the year's musical production, The Bells of Beaujolais! Who are you going to vote for? Unhuhl Oh, don't vote for her: she's in an 'A' section. Don't you know we've got to elect a 'B' girl? What did conversations like these lead to? Upon further examination it seemed that all the old rivalry between the A and B sections, which had been ly- fPage Forty-eightj