Vandergrift High School - Spectator Yearbook (Vandergrift, PA)

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18 THE SPECTATOR faculty is a history of repeated horrors and tyrannical outrages. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid public: They have forbidden our taking strolls at various intervals over our beautiful and extensive campus. When a crime is committed we are sent to the judge’s office without witnesses and prosecuted without a trial by jury. They have cruelly taxed us with extremely heavy tests such as most of our fellow-students are unable to meet. They do not permit us to have any voice in the making of the laws. New instructors are being installed and every one is a sworn enemy to the students. They have refused to let us test that great saying “Great minds run in the same channel” by prohibiting our talking to our friends and seeing what is really running through their minds. They have taken the joy from the Hallowe’en Season, by levying atrocious bimonthly tests—due the week previous to Hallowe’en. They have persisted in overloading our careworn minds with lengthy and difficult lessons thereby necessitating our staying in nights, studying, when we might be having a most profitable and enjoyable time elsewhere. Moreover, we have given no cause for these outrages. Our princely behavior deserves no such reward; our magnanimity and conscientious performance of sacred duties is worthy of the finest treatment at the hands of the esteemed faculty. We therefore, the Representatives of the Senior Class of ’24, in general meeting assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of Education, do in the name and by the authority of our most worthy classmates, solemnly publish and declare that they are henceforth subject only to their own wills; and are absolutely free of any tyrannical sway on the part of the aforementioned Professor, Faculty, and School Board. And for support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, our honor. The foregoing Declaration was by order of Committee, engrossed and signed by the following officials— President, Delbert Secrist Vice President, Pauline Bolar Secretary, Winona Love Treasurer, Howard Hill

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THE SPECTATOR 17 JOHNNY—A HERO sn |OHN Wilson, Jr., was very angry. Just at the beginning of a game of “Hare and Hound”, his mother called him from his pals. Johnny went, scowling and grumbling to where his mother stood. “Johnny, dear”, began mother, “run down to the store and get me some vanilla and I will give you a nickel.” “Don’t want to go,” said Johnny sourly. For a while mother coaxed but when Johnny appeared obstinate, she lost her patience with him and said, “Now, young man, you march down to that store and get what I said and then you can stay in the house for the rest of the evening.” At bedtime Johnny stalked to his room and there made the terrible resolve to run away. Taking his little bank and slipping on his coat, he opened his window and stepped out on the balcony. He swiftly climbed over the railing and slid down the rainspout. What should he do? Johnny sat down on the steps to think. At last he decided to take a last visit to the state bank and look at his beloved statue of Lincoln. As he drew near the bank, he was surprised to see three men silently open the back door of the bank and dart in. Johnny thought this strange so he quietly tip-toed to the door and peeped through the crack. He drew back, astonished and dismayed, for he had seen the men open the largest vault and go in. At last he ventured to look again. He could not see the men but he could hear them move the papers around and whisper. Johnny stood for a time in thought and then crept away. As fast as his fat little legs could carry him, he ran until he arrived at the door of the police station and kicked the door with all his might. One of the night police opened the door. Johnny hurriedly told his story. The officers consulted together a few minutes and concluded that there might be some truth in the child’s story, but how did he happen to see the men? Johnny told the policemen that he had started to run away. Starting immediately for the bank, tne men and the boy reached it by the way of a dark alley. Going to the door, they looked in, to see several sachels full of money, bonds, and the like. Then the policemen waited in the shadows until finally the burglars came out of the bank. Suddenly the thieves found themselves surrounded by officers of the law, who demanded surrender. Two quickly put up their arms, but the third whipped out a revolver, shooting as it came out of his pocket. The bullet sailed unerringly into Johnny’s arm. The last thing Johnny remembered was being lifted carefully from the ground where he had fallen. The next morning, mother read the head lines of the daily paper to him: SMALL BOY MADE HERO BY SAVING THE STATE BANK “O, mother,” cried Johnny happily, as he put his uninjured arm about her neck, “Ain’t you glad I got mad at you?” —Virginia Young, ’28. A MODERN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE — -.1 HEN, in the course of High School life, it becomes necessary for the jjgOTj students to disso've the paternal bands which have connected them with the most exacting faculty, and to assume among the intellectual powers of the world an equal station, to which the laws of nature and intellect entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of learned critics requires they should declare the causes which compels them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident:— That all men are created equally brilliant: that they are endowed by the school board with certain unalienable rights: that among these are freedom of whispering, chewing gum, and day dreaming. We, the Seniors of V. H. S. feel that by right of the long train of abuses and indignities that we have endured from the faculty for the past three years, we may throw off their control over our daily lives, and institute a student government, which shall give those privileges which we feel are due us. The history of the reign of the present

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“DREAMS COME TRUE” ERHAPS many of our imaginative scholars have idly dreamed of V. H. S. with a wonderful auditorium, and a very modern gymnasium, but have they let their dreams go so far as to imagine a swimming pool ? Somehow, in the past, we have gotten along without these modern equipments of every school, but can we say our school was up to the standard? In some things, “Yes”; in others, “No”. How can any school keep its athletics up to the standard without a place for practice ? Our basket ball activity has been of the average but this year the boys have entered upon the season with a vim and determination to win, which, although it should not be unusual, may be given credit to our new gymnasium and its effect upon them. As yet the girls have not practiced for basket ball, but they have organized and expect to start practicing in the near future. More than likely they will be urged on by the same spirit as the boys. So far no plan for daily practice in the gym has been made, but this will probably come, after the biuldings are entirely completed. Without our auditorium we students of V. H. S. have missed some of the most interesting and beneficial times of our school days. W'e have missed the early fellowship of a daily chapel exercise which almost every other school enjoys. Previously in Vandergrift, we have lacked what might be termed a center of all things, which our auditorium will now supply. All kinds of entertainment can be held here and meetings of all sorts, religious or educational. Lecture courses can be given which heretofore, we have not had because we did not have a convenient place for the holding of such things. Now this will be changed and I’m sure not only the students, but the citizens of Vandergrift will receive the benefit of the auditorium. The auditorium has a very large stage and a seating capacity of about seventeen hundred. The swimming pool seems to incite more interest among the students than any of the other attractions probably because it is new, for not every school can boast of a swimming pool. The people of the town will get the benefit of this addition as well as the others.