Valparaiso High School - Valenian Yearbook (Valparaiso, IN)

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Un flfeemortam In memory of Bessie Parks, who entered the Valparaiso High School September 5, 1904, and died March 7, 1906. Her name was found on the honor roll for scholarship each month. Her work was not only accurate and complete but original beyond her years. She was kind to her classmates, thoughtful of her teachers, helpful to all with whom her lot was cast. She had no enemies and was most tenderly loved by her friends. While fond of a frolic, she never intentionally or thoughtlessly harmed any one with her fun. Life was to her full of joy and promise and we mourn her absence from our midst every day but rejoice that God has given her a better por- tion, even immortal life.

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HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL. 15 million men, gathers supplies, directs his army over twelve hundred miles a week from the banks of the peaceful Potomac to the rugged mountains of Tennessee, equals at Gettysburg the deeds of Alexander and Caesar. Then, after striking by a single bold and mighty stroke, the shackles from three millions of oppressed humanity, he dies, a martyr in the moment of victory, the clay with which he molded the magnificent liberty of our country scarcely dry. He dies leaving us a memory which stands colossal before all others, — the memory of an ideal American. Lincoln was the American of Americans, the best and noblest type of an indigenous democracy such as several generations of independence and self- government had produced in the lowly life. He stands a notable exemplar of the American of the nineteenth century, the natural development of the self- reliant English stock upon this continent. In him were the traits of the Kentucky knight, the ingenious fertility for contrivance of the New England Yankee, with all the breezy, unconventional boldness of the Westerner. In short, his blood was drawn from the veins of every section of the Union ; of the Bast, North, and South, together with the pioneer growth of the great North- west, his nature equally partook. Reared in the forests amidst ignorance, poverty and darkness, Lincoln had developed a character beautiful, symmetrical, mighty. It was the strong vitality, active intelligence, indefinable psychological law of moral growth which assimilates the true and rejects the false that Nature gave this obscure child which impelled him to the service of mankind and the admiration of the ages with the same certainty with which the acorn grows to be the oak. An ordinary man would have found in the wild West a commonplace life varying only with the changing ideas and customs of the times and locality. But for a man with extraordinary power of body and mind, for a man gifted by Nature with a genius such as Abraham Lincoln possessed, the pioneer education with its severe training and self-denial, patience and industry was favorable to the growth of a rare personality that qualified him for the duties of leadership and government and crowned him with the love of the people. Grant was great ; Lee was noble; Washington was sublime; but Lincoln, who came from the lowly heart of the people comes back nearer to that heart than any other man of the centuries. At the nation’s crisis there came from Illinois an untried man. The crisis passed; he returned too great for a state alone, a mighty conqueror, a nation’s hero, a world’s example! “ In the midst of this great continent his dust doth lie, a sacred treasure to myriads who pilgrim to that shrine to kindle anew their patriotism.” The incessant winds, that move over the mighty places of the west, chant the solemn requiem of this martyr, whose blood like so many articulate words, pleads evermore for fidelity, for law, for liberty. JANE DALRYMPLE.

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HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL. IT E6c High School Annual Edited by the Class of 1906 Editor, Neil Arvin Bertha Tofte Jane Dalrymple Clara Crosby Cordon Du Hand ASSISTANT EDITORS High School Notes .Social Department Alumni Department - Athletics Department Business Manager, Ray Marine Assistant Business Manager, DeForest Evans Editorial Department. WHAT THE CLASS OF 06 STOOD FOR. VERY Class which enters and leaves the High School must stand for something whether it he much or little. But it need not adopt a set of resolutions or a motto which shall represent the standard of the class, for the real standard can only be found in what the class has accomplished during its history. The Class of ' 06 never held a mass meeting at which they adopted with great solemnity a list of resolutions in which they sought out the longest words of Webster’s vocabulary, nor did they patch together some Latin or Greek phrases as their motto. They made their motto in actions so clearly that every- one reading their history must see and understand it. r l he Class of 06 stood for one thing — Progressiveness — throughout their life as a High School class. Progress marks everything they have attempted, from the time they entered High School as Freshmen in 1902 to the 25th of May, ’06, when they graduated with the highest honors that have ever fallen to any class in the school. As Freshmen in the crowded room so graciously allotted them by the school authorities they soon forced themselves upon the attention of the school and the faculty as Mr. Geary’s “ Star Class.” During the period of the school’s exile, over the Post Office during their Sophomore and Junior years they were the most attractive class in school. As Sophomores they organized a literary society known as the Current Event Club, and for a long time enjoyed the benefits of that society. It was in this Club that the germ of debating and oratory was nursed, which later brought the class to its zenith of glory. It was