Palo Alto High School - Madrono Yearbook (Palo Alto, CA)

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ADMINISTRATION

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PRINCIPALS MESSAGE TO THE MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF 1945: If I could talk to each graduate in person this is what I should try to say, in a sufficient variety of ways so that it would mean more to each of you than it can possibly mean as a general message. As a highschool graduate you need much less help from others than you imagine. It is yourself you have to lick. Most of us want to be too many things. Sometimes our ambitions cover too many fields, often contradictory ones. Having many interests is a worthy desire provided we have a few central interests on which we mean business to the exclusion of almost everything else. If we want to be a doctor instead of wanting to be interested in medicine; if we want to be an actor instead of wanting to learn to act; or if we want to be popular instead of wanting to be the kind of person who makes and holds worthwhile friends, then of course it is our- selves we have to lick. Modern life catches us all up in so many things that our desires are stimulated out of all proportion to our accomplishment and the result too often is drifting and aimlessness. Paly has been part of your life for three years, trying to help you to survey broad fields; and our best hope is that we have assisted you in a desire to cultivate the small ones in which you can find happiness and useful service, for surely you must have learned by now that the two are one and the same thing. No small part of what we call happiness resides m that peculiar sensation that we have when we are too busy to be miserable. In whatever direction you seek happiness in useful service when you leave Paly, may I add my personal best wishes to those of the faculty and the students of Paly High? Ivan H. Linder