Pekin High School - Pekinian Yearbook (Pekin, IL)

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 PEKIN COMMUNITY IIICII SCHOOL

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”J'is education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined. Pope.

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J2oUj anb GTfjen Time may come and time may go but memories remain forever. Some may remember and others can now learn that fifty years ago the first class was graduated from Pekin High School. This is the golden anniversary of the graduating class of eighteen seventy-three. The date may bring thoughts of lavender and old lace to us, but apple blossoms and violets meant the same to the graduates then as they do now. Youth will forever be the same! There was some difference perhaps because the six who graduated in eighteen seventy-three may have been a little prouder and a little happier than we because they were the very first to receive more than the “readin’ and writin’ and ’rithmetic” education. We know little about'their school life because the school and all the records burned in eighteen ninety. But the age reminds us of courtesy and modesty and so in our own minds we must picture things as we think they were. And let us extend our best wishes and greetings to the five “first graduates” who are still alive and thinking with smiling faces of things as they were then. Though time makes memories dearer, it can but change facts. Every year since eighteen seventy-three classes have been graduated, except in seventy-four, and each year they have grown larger. The number of courses offered has greatly increased and teachers have become more efficient in order to meet the needs of the time. Even the schools have changed. In eighteen ninety-one a new school was built on Washington Street to replace the one that had burned. But this became too small and in nineteen fifteen our large new school was erected on Broadway Street. The school is now a Community High School and so benefits more than it could before. At present the enrollment is four hundred ninety-three and there are sixty-one graduates this year. They are proud because this is the largest class which has ever graduated here. And so we come to the end of our reminiscences and think of the future. May things “every day, in every way, grow better and better.” EIGHT