James Monroe High School - Echo Yearbook (Fredericksburg, VA)

Page 7 text:

States on August 9, 1974. Here he delivers his first State of the Union address. Vice President Rockefeller is seated behind. the sex appeal of Robert Reddford, or play tennis like Billie Jean King with one arm and and box like Muhammad Ali with the other. How many thousands of girls’ hearts will be shredded when Donny Os¬ mond grows up and marries? Can the Spring Dance possibly be any fun unless Kool The Gang are engaged to play? Obviously, if we measure success in these terms most of us are truly Born Losers. But is it any more realistic to believe you are a failure if you get a ‘B’? For at least one young woman, this belief was very real.

Page 6 text:

IN AN INTRICA . .— I. ■■■ M l— . . ...I ■ ., I . I « People have always sought immortality. From the mind- boggling construction of the pyramids of Egypt to graffiti scrawled on subway and restroom walls around the nation, all of us to varying degrees want and need recognition. However, in the fast-moving, competitive, and often in¬ different world we live in to¬ day, many people are overwhelmed by their ap¬ parent insignificance. Every day the media bombard us with images of women and men with perfect body proportions and straight teeth who never fail at anything they do; if we can¬ not meet these standards Rebate, rebate — anyone want to buy a car? During the winter car dealers ex¬ perienced twice as many non-sales as last winter. To get more cars off the lots, the dealers offered up to $600.00 on rebate for buying a new car. we are left to wonder if we are normal and to doubt our value as human beings. We are surrounded by scientific achievements which straddle the boundary between human and super¬ human; we have seen a man walk on the surface of the moon. Yet during the se¬ cond manned lunar expedi¬ tion in November of 1969, many people were openly bored with the television coverage of the “moonwalks”—the novelty had worn off. How are we to make an im¬ pression on a world that is so over-exposed to the quickest, biggest, best, and most of everything that plac¬ ing a man on the moon can barely provoke a comment from the average person? How do we cope with a society which demands perfection in every under¬ taking? In January of 1975, a fifteen year-old high schoof student from Milwaukee left her parents this note before taking her life: “. . . if I fail in what I do, I fail in what I am.” The “failure” she was referr¬ ing to was a ‘B’ on her report card—she had never receiv¬ ed a grade lower than an ‘A’. It is not realistic for everyone to expect to be the best in his respective field; we can¬ not all be the first person to walk on the moon, or have Nationwide unemployment approached WW II highs during the winter of 1974-75. Workless people line up in Chicago. Nixon resigned as an aftermath of Watergate. Gerald R. Ford became the first non-elected President of the United 2 Opening

Page 8 text:

Historic Fredericksburg, Virginia, nestled on the Rappahannock fall line. In Fredericksburg the ad¬ vancement of technology and the accelerated pace of living that it brings is slowly but surely seeping in through our small-town seclusion. As major cities on the East Coast from New York to Washington swell and expand, spilling over into suburbs until the boun¬ daries between one city and the next blur, Fred¬ ericksburg has sat, for the most part undisturbed, on the southern fringe of this growing megalopolis. Nevertheless, situated fifty miles either way between the capitals of our state and our country, we can hardly avoid the impact of the growth and progress around us. Fredericksburg is begin¬ ning to suffer from growing pains, and one of the places where it can be seen is in the halls of James Monroe. Whenever a bell rings, the halls are filled with a mass of bodies pushing and shov¬ ing, dodging and weaving to get from one class to the next. Students sometimes have to double up on lockers, and teachers have to shift classrooms from period to period, using another teacher’s class dur- ing his free period. Freshman homerooms have had to take turns missing assemblies because the auditorium will not seat the entire student body. If many students did not leave school on their lunch shifts, the cafeteria would not be able to serve everyone on two lunch shifts. Basketball games sell out because of the gym’s small seating capacity. All of these reasons and more are given for building a new high school for the city, but one very good reason is given against it — money. Words like “recession” and “inflation” are tossed freely around us every day. A dollar at McDonald’s will get you “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun” — and not much else. A dollar’s worth of gas will barely get you through the “cruise cir¬ cuit” from Pizza Hut, through the college, down Princess Anne Street, around JM, and back to Piz- IN AN EVOLV IN 4 Opening