Malden High School - Maldonian Yearbook (Malden, MA)

Page 9 text:

LEFT: Workman restore a door to the English Department office that had originally been walled up. The celebrated misaligned wall of the first phase of the addition. The columns were off by some nine inches causing a building committee vote to tear the whole thing down and resulting in several months of delay and arbitration. TOP: In December a newly installed oil tank began to leak. It too became the focus of charges and counter charges that dragged on for months. S ' theme 5

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

Page 10 text:

Struggle is common to athletics and the band, although the latter is often unrecognized. Junior Linda Masters braves the cold and damp of Thanksgiving morning. A 4A good synonym for cope is struggle. Sometimes it seems as though struggling is the only way to deal with a problem. Of course, struggling is rough and is not usually the first choice of recourse. If the problem can be solved, then it is done. The other alternative is quitting, but this is unacceptable in our society. Struggling, contending, and fighting against a problem is considered valiant. Perhaps the point has been over dramatized. After all, what kinds of problems are we, average people, bound to run into? Occasionally something genuinely bad will happen, something that will cause great pain and suffering. For the most part, however, we tend to exaggerate; we make crises out of trifles. Nevertheless, a problem of any magnitude is going to create some degree of hardship. If we were to observe our lives in macrocosm undoubtedly we would find problems big and small. The problem dictates that we reshape our lives to make it bearable. When the price of gas goes up, more people leave their cars at home and walk or ride bikes. Or, when the great blizzard came people united to shovel out their streets and help one another. To some people, problems of this nature are terrible: just ask anyone who was stuck in their car for a day on Route 128. For others, the storm appeared beautiful as they watched from their penthouse apartment. Likewise, if we narrow our field of vision to include just Malden High we would find problems and people struggling to cope with them. There were problems native to any high school in America and problems unique, M.H.S. originals. Students have been waging war against homework, tests and school lunches for years. The hassles related to the construction were something that had not been experienced here before: extremes of climate, disrupted classes, strange men milling about the halls, fire alarms, closed stairwells, and a lack of classroom furniture all contributed to the atmosphere of confusion. 6 struggle