South Side High School - Optimist Yearbook (Newark, NJ)

Page 7 text:

FCRE ORD Many were the happy years I spent at South Side is a sentence echoed and re- echoed far and wide by South Side alumni. They have been heard to utter yearnings to return. We who have been here for four years for morej can appreciate and share that longing. Oh! for the good old days of carefree evenings spent with our noses buried in some volume of ancient history or Latin prose. We long to walk again through the halls and meet some patrolman with the audacity to ask us where we are going. We dream of the pleasant hours spent in classes, listening with mouths agape and eyes wide, to the stirring lectures of our teachers. Oh! for those good old days of South Side! Although some of us do not know it, we all love this school. It has been the very essence of our joys, sorrows, laughter, and tears' for nigh onto four years now. We have shared our setbacks and victories together, laughed, joked, and made general nuisances of our- selves, and yet our teachers have put up with us. We owe them plenty! They are the stalwarts who just keep rolling along. They are perpetual, untiring, understanding, and all-around swell. fellows. There is something about this school that creates an atmosphere of friendship and togetherness, an atmosphere which you have to get away from to miss. When you are here, you don't recognize it, but even we who have one foot still on the inside, begin to get that feeling. It's an inexplicable something that remains imbedded in the marrows of our bones. The best definition I can think of is Alma Mater, for, in truth, South Side has been a foster mother to us during these years. She has educated us in the ways of life, has given us something to stand on in our battles against the elements of the outside world. We are now walking out onto the springboard of life. It's a great vague, black, unfriendly shape that looms before us- as we prepare to jump. We are ignorant of what lies ahead. We are blindfolded as to our future. It is not for us to judge whether we are prepared for it or not, for we cannot yet tell. This we do know: we are not the first to experience graduation nor are we the first to step out into a world at war. We have had, too, sufficient self-training to be able to be self-reliant, to be the masters of our fates. No matter what lies ahead, we must feel confident that we will meet our obliga- tions: and fulfill our duties. If we want to take it as a sporting challenge, we may. We have the reserves and stamina to play for high stakes and come through on top. We have run up a large bill at South Side, and we doubt if we will ever be able to pay it. J.P.

Page 9 text:

eglcaleg lo . MR. CHARLES J. LYONS WE, the Senior Class of January, 1943, dedicate our yearbook to Mr. Charles J. Lyons in appreciation of his loyal friend- ship and Wise counsel that has guided us through these four years of our high school life, and for the preparation he has given us for the World We are about to enter. Lil1.T i 1 -J