Somerville High School - Radiator Yearbook (Somerville, MA)

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14 SOMERVILLE HIGH SCHOOL RADIATOR EDITORIALS With the arrival of the sharp, snappy, autumn atmosphere, we naturally turn our eyes toward football. The season before us promises to prove one of great success if reliable opinion can be formed from hearsay. The student body has not displayed such general interest, and so enthusi- astically supported an athletic team, for many years. The controversy at the outset over the question of whether or not athletics should be continued the coming year has now been for- gotten as far as the school as a whole is con- cerned, but the players cannot free their minds from the recollection. It is this thought alone that will spur them on to many a hard won victory, for in their opinion, the season cannot be successfully completed until they have proved their worth in the eyes of the school, of the faculty, of the School Committee, and of the public. It is the players alone who are making, and will make the team. Their efforts are pitched to the utmost, and under such conditions, defeat is hardly possible. The season has started with a rush; may it finish with a touchdown! Boys, we are behind you, we are supporting you, we are cheering you! Do your best, and the victory you so richly deserve will be yours! Great credit is to be given to the Freshmen in Room 113. All have become members of the Athletic Association, and the pupils were also the largest donators to the Library Fund in the school. The Somerville High School extends to you a hearty welcome, Freshmen, offering you many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and of de- veloping moral, mental and physical strength. Al- though you are much smaller in number this year there is no reason why we should not hear just as much if not more from you. For in these war times each one exerts himself as he never exerted himself before. In starting upon your high school course one thing is especially important and that is: Start well. The way one ends almost always depends upon the way one starts, whether it be success or failure. You have four years ahead of you in which to make either a success or a failure. If you wish the first you must go out after it and work for it. Those who gain honor in school activities get it only by conscientious, steady application and if you once attain this name it is not difficult to keep. School spirit is a thing which the Freshmen, as well as other classes, ought to manifest. So, class of 1921, everyone of you cultivate school spirit. If those cheer leaders at our mass meetings who always tell us how little noise we make would stop trying to stand on their heads and would ask us to rise, better results would no doubt be obtained. “School spirit,” says a teacher of one of the western schools, “is doing by the school what you know down in your heart is right.” How about it?

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SOMERVILLE HIGH SCHOOL RADIATOR 13 chocolate, I will speak of the Walter Baker plant. The plant is located at Milton Lower Mills, Mil- ton, Mass., and consists of six buildings covering- fourteen acres of floor space. Walter Baker’s lirst plant was a small granite building on a corner near the present site. All the buildings are named after pioneer chocolate makers, such as Forbes, Ware, Preston, the former of which is chiefly a storehouse; the latter a receiving station on the railroad. The buildings are equipped with Grinnell Fire Sprinklers, and are inspected monthly to see that no rubbish is allowed to collect. At the foot of every stairway directions are posted for turning off any sprinkler in the vicinity that might ac- cidentally spurt water. All exposed gears and belting are covered by fine, strong grating. The windows are large and are kept clean, thus ad- mitting plenty of light. There is a great feeling of unity among the employees of the factory, which is absolutely necessary to operate a large plant. River water is used for cooling devices and operating elevators. The beans are fed into a hopper and thence into a sorting machine on the floor below. This is a perforated cylinder, slowly revolving, at the highest end of which the holes are smallest, and larger at the lower end. All sticks, stones, and dirt fall out at the side, and beans at the end. Sometimes double beans, or two or three beans grown together come out and have to be cut apart by hand. The beans are then put in several large vats, heated by steam, which the vats slowly revolve. In this way the beans are cooked so that their shells can be removed easily. Up to this time the beans from different countries have been kept separate, but before crushing they are mixed to improve the quality of the finished chocolate. The beans are crushed to the size of a finger- nail, then sorted in a machine something like that previously described. Those crushed finest come out at the high end and so on. Some beans es- cape crushing, and these are scooped up and the crushing process repeated. As the beans are crushed they descend a slide whence they are met by a reverse current of air which blows all shells and stuff lighter than meat back in a room. Such a strong current is necessary that good meat is sometimes blown back also. This bean is then fed into mills composed of two stones; the upper revolving, the lower sta- tionary; which grinds the meat to liquor or thick liquid. The liquor is so thick that the process is repeated in a smaller mill. This liquor is then cooled and hardened until used. In the winter the outdoors is used, in the summer a refrigerat- ing plant. Since probably few of my readers understand the principle of this plant, I will describe it. The principle is this: When aqua ammonia, the same only stronger than that used in the home, under high pressure is forced through a valve into a tank of low pressure it loses a great deal of its heat. In fact, the temperature is about 25, 30 or 5() degrees below zero. This gaseous ammonia is run through pipes of brine which is, in turn, cooled and pumped to the cold rooms. After removing from hardening, all cocoa butter is pressed out, which is mostly used by barbers for massaging. Sugar is next added to sweeten the chocolate. Some chocolate before sweetening, however, is sent to confectioners for covering chocolates. There are two machines turning out 10,000 pounds every day from the crushed meat to sweetened liquor. This sweet- ened liquor is cooled and put in a huge tub. Two huges stones are set opposite each other on an axis suspended from the middle. This immense tub full of cooled chocolate revolves and the chocolate is ground even finer, by the passing over it. This paste is put on little trays the size of the five and ten cent cakes which we buy at the store, and put on machines that shake the chocolate down into the moulding tins. On entering this room the racket is so great, that it is difficult to think. The chocolate is then removed from the trays and wrapped. The ten cent sizes are wrapped by hand, but the others by machines, em- ploying about fifty women and thirty machines. The chocolate is packed in wooden boxes for ship- ment. A very ingenious machine is used to nail the boxes. By placing the cover on the box and pressing it against a horizontal bar, one side and one end are nailed with a single stroke. The nails are dumped into the machine anyway, and are righted on the way to the box. For the cocoa the beans are crushed to a pow- der and then canned. The cocoa is fed into round receptacles. As one-half a pound enters the receptacle, automatic scales close the valve from [Contnued on Page 17]

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SOMERVILLE HIGH SCHOOL RADIATOR 15 With an enrollment this year of more than a hundred less than last, the school is no longer handicapped with an excess of pupils. The de- crease is due largely to the Junior High schools, and therefore it is the Freshmen who are in the minority this term. The greatest effects of this diminished enrollment are that it tends to make many of the classes smaller, and to abandon the back rows of many of the recitation rooms as study seats. With the smaller classes recitation may become much less formal, and greater in- terest centered on the work. The lack of study pupils in recitation rooms will lengthen the time devoted to class work, and will lessen the amount of distraction. How often history repeats itself! This is a truth that is borne in on us the more carefully we study the narratives of past events, and the rela- tive facts concerning the nations and empires of the past and present. How much we of the twentieth century enjoy, that is believed to be comparatively new and novel but is really the survival of an ancient custom or idea in a modern disguise, we seldom realize. Perhaps the greatest illustration can be found in the present war. Every age seems to have been rolled into one along the battlefronts of Europe; past, present, and future seem to have been realized at one and the same time. Never- theless, all branches of the struggle have been executed more or less successfully in the past with the exceptions of the submarine and aerial warfare. The barbarous Vandals and Huns of old are recalled by the spiteful spirit of the Teutonic warfare, and the struggles in the passes and gaps of the towering Alps revive the days of Hannibal. Only a short time ago, a French soldier helped to “clean out” an enemy trench with a primitive mace-head which he had picked up in his own dugout, before going into action. Archaeologists who commented on the incident are of the opinion that the weapon dates back 20,000 years, and one of them mentioned that “under the feet of the belligerents, embedded in the gravels of the Somme valley, lie the oldest implements of com- bat known to humanity.” After the battle of the Marne, it was considered an innovation that the Germans began to “dig in,” but trench warfare was practiced by Ver- cingetorix against Caesar before Alesia in 51 13. C. The modern machine gun is but an en- croachment on the clumsy, multi-barreled held pieces of the Swiss of the sixteenth century. Cities are no longer defended by streams of burning pitch, but modern warriors do not hesitate to ply their enemy with liquid tire and poison gases. The modern “mass formation” was used with the in- stitution of the Greek phalanx, and the giant British “tanks” are scarcely less formidable today, than the “turtle formation” of Caesar’s day, or the Persian scythe-bearing chariots of Alex- ander. The grenadiers of the past few centuries which gave way to the more modern infantry have made their appearance in the present war as bomb throwers. [It is said that ball players make the best bomb-throwers. Ball players take notice!] The armor of our modern knights recalls the days of chivalry and the later warfare so vivedly depicted by Shakespeare. The shield is again doing good service, and likewise it is with the face-mask, the protecting eye lunettes, and other details of mediaeval armor in the days before gunpowder. Soft hats and caps which were once the soldier's headdress, no longer top the ranks of our lighting men. Once more the up-to-date warrior dons the long discarded metal helmet, all of which goes to prove the truth of another old adage, “there is nothing new under the sun!” Our predecessor on this paper, Phillips A. Noyes, has already won distinction. He received an “A” on his first English theme, the first one to be granted to a freshman first theme since 1910. Congratulations, Noyes. In consideration of the method in which the Athletic Association took the entire school un- awares on September 25, the general opinion is “They did us two bits” instead of “We did our two bits.”