St Helena Extension School - Saint Yearbook (Norfolk, VA)

Page 107 text:

[ 103 ]

Page 106 text:

;4tM€tcCA r 102 ]

Page 108 text:

By Jack Horner Saint Helena was born into something old and something new. The something old was inherited from William and Mary. Name perhaps, perhaps prestige. The something new was in the students. Youth, vigor, the will and courage to be imaginative. It is, perhaps in the new that the romance of the school lies. Un- fettered by protocol, unbound by restricting tradition, a society was built, tailored to the taste, not of the dead past but of the enjoyable present. Built is a poor word to use with reference to the creation of the society of Saint Helena. Like Topsy, it “just growed.” It began to grow even before the first student walked through the gate in September of ’46, and it exhibited healthy life until the gate was finally locked in ’48. It was a progressive creation augmented each day by a lot of little things. It was working long and hard with no reward or recognition, complimenting the good, complaining of the bad, accepting the in- evitable and the unchangeable. It was bull-sessioning late at night in the study rooms, arguing in the classrooms, laughing in the canteen, eating in the dining hall. It was the footballs of autumn, snowballs of winter, and baseballs of spring. It was pinochle, poker and bridge. It was the noise of the gym, the quiet of the library. It was groping sleepily to eight o’clocks, it was cutting classes. It was a million things: library fines, dissected frogs, navy lockers, chow-mein, sunburned bodies, the smell of the fertilizer plant. And it was studying, cribbing, cramming, coaching for reading, writing, arithmetic and the rest, morning noon and night; wishing, wanting, praying to pass. But always it was studying. It was quizzes and exams. It was disappointment and satisfaction. It was college men with boyish hearts, and it was All-American. It was the little things, almost unnoticed. But it was the big things, too. It was dances, campaigns, club meetings. It was dates, dates to recall, to remember in the years to come: C 104 ]