Malden High School - Maldonian Yearbook (Malden, MA)

Page 7 text:

M:h LEFT: A lot of furniture had not yet arrived when school opened. Gym and study students were pressed into service to move and assemble desks and chairs. Heating was erratic at best. Coats, scarves, and mittens were common classroom sights. theme 3

Page 6 text:

Just getting around the building was a constant hassle. Senior Neil Cherkas encountered a painting crew in a stairway that was supposed to have been closed. A few years ago when someone was coping, they were finding a solution to their problem; solv¬ ing it. You can still find that definition in most dictionaries it’s just that the defi¬ nition doesn’t work any more. The meaning of the word has changed. It has changed because we needed a new word to express a new process, one we had never experienced before. All of us are affected by the oil shortage of re¬ cent years but none of us can solve the problem. We all live with pollution that none of us can eliminate. We needed a word that captured this new exper¬ ience. Coping has come to mean not so much resolving problems as sort of co¬ existing with them. The problems don’t go away, we just learn the best way of living with them. The “now generation’’ of the sixties seemed intent on abolishing the sys¬ tem that created the problem. They reasoned that if you got rid of the insti¬ tutions that caused the problem you could get rid of the problems them¬ selves. It didn’t work. We got out of Vietnam but were left with the haunting realization of the limitation of our na¬ tional power that we had never quite seen before. Most hoped that Nixon’s resignation would put an end to Water¬ gate and by extension political corrup¬ tion but new scandals shook the gov¬ ernment and cynically were dubbed Koreagate. It began to be clear that there are no solutions. Faced with solu¬ tionless questions the Vietnam-Water- gate generation seemed to want to avoid the whole thing in a high water orgy of drugs. 2 theme

Page 8 text:

BOTTOM: Junior Lisa Fitzgerald clowns a bit with electrical equipment at the rear of Jenkins auditorium. Hallways were a maze of construction material agravating the usual problems of getting on time to the more remote areas of the school. It’s different for us. We see more clearly now what only a few saw then. For people who lived through both per¬ iods it seems strange to experience a whole generation of kids who have no difficulty living with the idea that many problems can’t be avoided and can’t be solved. New York went broke and the city that had often boasted, it could not be run, finally proved that the old joke was a reality. Worse, the fate of “Fun City’’ seemed like it might be¬ come the fate of all the nation’s big cities. Post Johnson government seemed to give up on beautifing Amer¬ ica, indeed we began to realize that pollution was here to stay. Oil and gas¬ oline were the first of the ages scarci¬ ties. Lines became part of our life. We became accustomed to being told that there wasn’t any of what we wanted. We had little choice but to learn to live as well as possible with situations that we had not created and could not con¬ trol. Perhaps things were calming down. Gone was the domestic turmoil of the 1960’s. The political upheaval of the early seventies had been stabilized. One president, Ford had returned us to normalcy, smoothing out the agonies left behind by his predecessor. Carter holds out the promise of our traditions, simple religion, stable family, trust in the common people. Things seemed more together. While life seemed to be proceeding in a more orderly manner there were still prob¬ lems and hassles to be worked out. However there was a new awareness, a sense of how to deal with them, we could cope. 4 theme