Rock Island High School - Watchtower Yearbook (Rock Island, IL)

Page 24 text:

We love it...We hate it... We loved school and we hated it at the same time. All the exhausting require¬ ments of the school system were bal¬ anced out by the recuperative extra-cur¬ ricular activities. No matter how we tried to make our lives carefree, though, there were always some things we couldn ' t live with or without. The ever beloved PE period was a state regulation multitudes of students at¬ tempted to escape. Nevertheless, unless you were in a sport, every student who wanted to graduate had to tolerate four years of this malodorous period. Rising at unruly hours of the morning to take a four hour exam was never a popular diversion for Rocky students, but the ACT had to be taken by most, if not all, college bound students. Likewise, every 16 year old craved a driver’s license, but the agony of the test and the hideous If anyone wants to know what a high school student looks like when forced to arise at 5:00 am just take a quick glimpse at their drivers license. Stefan Wahe isn ' t too happy to let anyone have a peek at his. result of a picture made us marvel if it was all worth it. There were other experiences we knew were worth the trouble, but just the same we hated going through with them. First dates were a prime example. Intense anxiety upsetting our stomachs and hope¬ less lust clouding our brains, we would not soon forget the blundering yet emphatic happenings of the night. After four years of high school we soon understood that it was inevitable to avoid it. We couldn’t have everything our hearts desired without a little sacrifice. For every best friend there were a dozen fights, for every poli ceman that helped us out there were two pulling us over, for every pleasure in life there was always something we could definately live with¬ out. After the smoke has cleared from another fight, Lesley Chelar, Shanon Maddox and Lori Frederick see they really can ' t live without eachothers ' friendship. Scared as these girls are of getting in that deep water, they will get the guts to do so in order to pass that required for graduation swim test. 20

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Uniquely individual Hundreds of faces and figures blurred by us each day at school unno¬ ticed. Even people we had gone to grade school with had us fooled. Little did we know beneath all those outer layers of personality were hundreds of unusually individual people. People with hobbies and talents we had no idea they pos¬ sessed. Music and theater are the arts most often recognized, but the arts consist of innumerable categories such as speaking or cooking, ceramics or me¬ chanics-all praisable. Unfamiliar to the applause of an audience, handfuls of Rl students had mastered many diverse abilities such as these and aimed to make them into a career. In the year 2000, tanning beds might be as common in the home as the microwave (a relevent comparison), but in 1989 it was still a bit unusual. Maybe even more unusual than a regular Barnum and Bailey trampoline implanted into a back¬ yard deck. In any case, both could be found in the homes of Rocky students. Sometimes the most unusal things about people were simply those little quirks or things they collected. Whatever it may have been each of us had something that made us different from the rest-something unusual. What a way for Paul and Greg Hansen to make fools of themselves and have fun doing it on their own trampoline in their backyard. Whenever there are a lack of laughs. Erin Greathouse keeps her friends rolling by doing her imitation of a Weeble . Why wait for summer when Tiffany Styre can go into her basement and get a piece of the sun from her own tanning booth.

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