Ionia High School - Ionian Yearbook (Ionia, MI)

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PR I ENDS: Salutatory The privilege of extending the greetings of my classmates, our faculty, and the administration to you has been accorded to me. We wish you to understand that you are welcome to attend and participate in all scholastic functions, but we want you to feel especially welcome today. This day is numbered among the few that remain to be spent with all our classmates and our school. From thence onward, we as individuals, will be determining the final success or failure of our lives. To make a truly worthwhile beginning in this business of life, we must consider ad- visable initial steps. One cannot travel very far on life’s road without entering upon partnerships of business, politics, or friendships. In business or political partner- ships. our choice does not always determine our partners, but the choice of friends rests with us alone. As a result, our characters are inevitably revealed by the friends we make. In the audience today there are a few strangers perhaps, casual acquaintances, friends, and parents who are intensely hopeful and expectant of our success. As friends, we will try not to disappoint you and to be worthy of your friendship. When we consider the responsibilities we carry in fulfilling our duties to you as well as to ourselves, we are allowing ourselves to be heavily taxed. Perhaps we may try to shirk our duties to you, and in doing so, subject you to disappointment and re- gret. But in a partnership of friendship, each member voluntarily assumes certain obligations which must be duly recognized when one friend doubts the stability and fidelity of another. After all, a friend is only human, and frailties are common to everyone, and although the disappointment in a friend is one of life’s greatest tragedies, it is only a shallow partnership that can be dissolved by such a cause. This occasion is of importance to us because it means that we welcome you to be our friends, in our future careers as you have been in our scholastic careers; it means that we need friends to realize ideals, hopes, and the most distant aspirations. The acceptance of this friendship will not be without cost to you, for the making of a friend is the result of a great day’s work. Our most anxious desire is that the pleasure and joy derived from such contact will overbalance the cost. We believe that your presence here this morning is the expression of your in- terest and good will, and for this expression we are grateful to you and extend to you a most sincere welcome. Pauline Scheid

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IONIAN 1931 Valedictory FRIENDS: This morning, we, the class of 1931, have met here to bid our school-days fare- well. We have reached the goal toward which we have been steadily and earnestly working through the past four years. Now that we have attained this height we realize, with a tinge of sadness, that, as a class, we are assembled together for the last time. As we meet here our thoughts are turned to what these four years have really meant to us. It is, indeed, only human that our minds should first turn to the friends we have found here. With them comes the thought of the friendships we have enjoyed and the many pleasant hours of companionship we have had. But although friends and friendships are a necessary part of human life, we need something more tang- ible in this busy world of competition. How has our school provided for this? Shall we be mere toilers and live ever by drudgery or shall we be master workmen and give to the world the best we have that the best may come back to us? Let us reso- lutely set forth, in this new phase of our life, with an earnest endeavor to be master workmen. Future years will show how well our foundations have been laid. Let us now consider the two influences of our school life, which were most important in fitting us to be master workmen — our school and our teachers. Founded on the principles of efficiency, honesty, loyalty, and good sportsman- ship, our school associations have helped us to form the character of the master workman. School alone could not do all this. Only by the kindness, patience, and en- couragement of our teachers, who by their untiring efforts have inspired us to do our best, would we have accomplished our ideals. Nor can we forget the influence back of this — our parents. For it has been through their efforts and perhaps sacri- fices that these four pleasant years have been given us. As we go out from school life and into our new life away from the influences of school, teachers, and parents, that have guided us through these four years, let us ever keep before us the new goal for which we have been fitting ourselves. And in our new work let us build our foundation upon the principles of service, effi- ciency, loyalty and honesty, and thus advance more and more surely toward our ideal, a master workman. Alary Piper. [20}

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IONIAN 1931 Class Prophecy The day had faded in the west and dusk was swiftly gathering into darkness as I approached the tent of El Herrik. He sat cross-legged and motionless, outlined faintly white against the grey of canvas. We were twenty miles from Kufra. The day had been hot, the sun pitiless, and sand still warm as I sank to the desert floor across a small fire that burned in front of him. I was lonely. Wandering had taken me far and to many lands. All experience seemed to gather and swell in a peculiar oppressiveness within me. El Herrik merely nodded. I am lonely,” I said slowly, I wish for old friends and old faces. If only 1 could know where they are tonight, what they are doing----.” I stopped at loss for words, unable to define the emotion that grew within me. I bowed in silence. El Herrik moved; from the white folds of his robe he drew a translucent crystal. Placing it between his knees, he bent and smoothed the sand in front of him. The wind eddied the sand into ripples and forms. El Herrik gazed from eyes deep set and piercing, intently at its movements. Allah is kind. The night is favorable. The sands are right,” he muttered at last. You may see those friends of yesterday. O Master, come closer.” He held the crystal out. I edged forward and peered into the depths of the sphere. A light gleamed there, grew and suffused the darkness. Figures and forms took shape and I was lost in a nuance of dreams. The mistiness cleared and I beheld a blazing neon sign. Schramm Drugs” it told the world. Inside, the proprietor was busily engaged in a heated argument with Arthur Rivett as to whether or not a malted milk is a necessity or a luxury. Clark Welker stood behind a marble counter nonchalantly juggling a milk shake for Lee Yates who was intently interested in this pointless argument. The quietude of the place was disturbed by white-aproned Mary Stewart, who desired to know if Detroit or Philadelphia cheese was ordered from the Wag- ner, Hall Beck Cheese Works. The vision grew dim, but this short glimpse revived many memories of the past. My sight was blurred but slowly cleared again. I saw a comfortable room. A fire burning at the hearth, soft easy chairs, an atmosphere of contentment prevailed. Deep in one chair was a figure of considerable proportions; close by, one of much less pretentiousness. Devotion flashed to my mind simultaneously with Richard Hodgkins, and Esther Post, now Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins both buried in a newspaper, (an Osborn, Moon publication, by the way). And by some strange intuition I felt that he was reading a Social Column by Ruth Butler who was extoling the philan- thropies of Helena Coe, who, after a most disappointing romance, had lost all in- terest in pharmaceutical endeavors and had turned her attention to more enlighten- ing enterprises. Esther sat in front of the radio complacently listening to George Vance’s sonorous voice announcing the guest artist of the evening, Florence Leach, accompanied by Ami” Quaglio and his Flute Flaggers. I again could see no more. The trance continued. Light glowed from the shimmering sphere. I saw a smooth glazed surface littered with papers and sur- rounded by faces in the center of a handsomely furnished room. It was the board of directors’ meeting of the Kowatch Arnold Publishing Co. They were discus- sing the best way of marketing the latest book of Clarence Kress; namely, An Ap- preciation of Literature.” Stockholder Baker upheld a plan to turn the entire matter over to the Heim and Carbaugh Sales Service. Stockholder Boettcher insisted that the company’s own super-sales force of Clara Bixby, Pauline Ellison, Laura Gates, Lucille Goodwin, Edith Ransom, and Grace Wyman, canvass the United States from door-to-door. Stockholder Hacker wondered when they were going to declare divi- dends again, and stockholder Catt was too busy filing her finger nails to give the [22}