Wakefield High School - Oracle Yearbook (Wakefield, MA)

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ly, at about two o ' clock, the plane again headed earthward and again came to rest in an ocean of muddy water. Thank- fully we staggered forth, waded across the field, and after passing through the customs, were driven to our hotel. Thus ended my first airplane flight. Eleanor Poster, ' 33. MODERN POETRY If a poem is worthy at all, it isn ' t tough — it is frail and exquisite, a mood, a moment of understanding, a cabinet which falls apart at a clumsy touch. Perhaps, this little quotation, containing so much truth of thought, explains why modem poetry is unpopular with many people. In a multiplicity of cases, one reads modem poetry not in a moment of understanding, but in a mood of foolish prejudice. Few could sit down by a cozy fire with an anthology of poems by Sara Teasdale, Lizette Wood- worth Reese, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Frost, and not delight in it. All of their works create a lasting im- pression, have personality in expression, and sincerity and beauty of thought. Sara Teasdale ' s lovely poem called The Coin leaves one in rich dreams. Into my heart ' s treasury I slipped a coin That time cannot take Nor thief purloin. Oh, better than the minting Of a gold-crowned king Is the safe-kept memory Of a lovely thing. Carl Sandburg, another of our twentieth century poets, writes more of the city, and the huge machines; therefore his thoughts are practical. His striking power of description is evident in Fog. The Fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. Surely excerpts fine as these — the best of Masefield, Noyes, Lizette Woodworth Reese, and Edna St. Vincent Mil- lay, Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell — to mention but a few — will stand the test of time. Margaret Rogers, ' 32. IS THIS BOSTON? Boston is composed of four or five different elements, business, foreign, residential, and well-to-do sections. I shall try to picture two of the outstanding. Quiet, clean, uncrowdcd, open to nature and sunshine, this is the rich man ' s domain. Sunday and Monday all the same; very few persons are on the street, while limousines, phantom like, silently glide by. The stillness is so oppressive that if one ' s thoughts were not centered upon something important, he would be soon counting every tap which heralded his approach upon the concrete walk. In the alley ways, strange sounds are issuing from behind closed windows. The farthest away is that of a piano, be- ing played by a pianist who is thrumming away at some mournful dirge which has struck his fancy; the foremost is a voice, that of a woman who is perfecting her vocal powers by running up and down the scale with ever increasing momentum, until she decides it is enough. The other sound is a violin in the hands of a master, who is playing some heart rending melody. And all these sounds do not seem to break the monotonous silence — only to increase it. Noisy, dirty, stinking, overcrowded, sunless — not a blade of green grass to be seen upon an empty lot — this is the environment of the poor man ' s son. Dark, dim, red buildings enclosing a cobblestoned street with the roaring elevated as a ceiling — this is the jail, wherein children play and make merry. Children everywhere, dark-haired, dark-eyed Italians, blue-eyed, light-haired Slavs, and meek, but wily Jews, all one underneath the shadow of the ele- vated. Vendors of all sorts sell their wares at the top of their voices; long, lean cats, with wild eyes, slink into alley ways submerged in ashes, garbages and wastepaper. Many mothers scold their children in many strange tongues and rarely do their progeny escape from a thump fit for a prize- fighter. What a remarkable difference there is between one ele- ment and the other. To visualize this one may learn only little by reading, but much in actual life. Alexander Lutkes, ' 31. THE MODERN GIRL AND STYLE I have on my desk an album of old-fashioned pictui ' es which belongs to my mother, and as I look over these people of long ago, there comes to my mind a conversation I listened to the other day. A man was saying, Well, we used to have ladylike girls, and then we had breezy, ath- letic girls, and now we have eager smart young things. I wonder what will be the style in girls next year? The style in girls, he said, not the style in girls ' clothes. We are accustomed to think that girls have remained the same during these hundreds of years, and that only the style of clothes has changed, as if the same girl had put on a tunic in Greece, brocaded velvets in the Middle Ages, bustles in the 1890 ' s, and short skirts today. But really it is the girls inside who have changed, and they have changed the style of their clothes during all these years to fit their own personalities. It was a prim girl who was responsible for prim styles; not prim styles that made the girl seem so. That is all very interesting to think about and ponder over, and it makes a starting point from which to wonder what sort of girl is going to choose clothes to fit herself to- morrow. It is exciting, too, to think that the ideas out in the world are shown in the sparkle in girls ' eyes, and the swing of their bodies. But there is another side to this question of style that I find very unpleasant, and that is the feeling I have every once in a while that gii ' ls now-a-days are all alike. They are all making themselves after one pattern, trying to fit in the same mold. I had that feeling very keenly the other day when I saw a group of girls walking down the hall. They looked like a strip of paper dolls who were training theii- growing bobs in exactly the same way, and whose voices had the same in- flections. Haven ' t you seen one girl in a crowd establish a line, and every other girl in the same crowd repeat it par- rot-like, whether it suited her abilities, or not? Now. why not be yourself? Ruth Assenza, ' 32.

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THIS BEIN ' A SHERIFF This dern depresshion is liurtin ' everybody. Why, we ain ' t strung a guy up in Badger Crick since the Civil War, and now you cain ' t even pull in a couple of dogs for des- turbin ' the peace. I guess that ' s the cause of this whole dern catychism. You see, ' Windy ' Blair, that tall, blonde, good-for-what deputy of mine got to readin ' some high class literature on Skiing in the Alps when he didn ' t have nothin ' to do but hook his spurs on my oak desk and smoke my La Politas. I didn ' t give a continental what Windy read, but I did like my cigars. But then, you ' ve got to give a deputy somethin ' to make him work while you ' re sleepin ' . Wal, everythin ' was goin ' like a sober Injun, when ' Bill ' White comes into town with the dirty news that a wldder is squattin ' on Colonel Cook ' s land. The Colonel is a big noise back East who owns half of Montana, and don ' t allow no one to squat on it. So I aims me and Windy will go out and take a look at the widder. But Windy, who is all blowed up on this skiing idea, says why don ' t we get some skis (there bein ' quite a bit of snow on the ground) and have a time. Wal, the pictures in his magazines don ' t look half bad, so we decides we ' ll take a fall out of it. Windy sends away for some of these skis. The skis finally come, and the next day we sets out with our packs, for its 30 miles to where the widder ' s set up housekeepin ' . I ain ' t quite got the knack of pushin ' those funnies along with those poles with little wheels on ' em, but I manage to keep up with Windy. Before long we come to the hills. Windy says, accordin ' to his book, you should go up sideways, but I ain ' t no crab, and so I starts up low first. It ain ' t long before I find Windy ' s right. He ' s up the hill and I ' m about a quarter way up for the sixth time. When I finally reach the top of that mountain. Windy points to a nice slope that ain ' t quite straight up and down and says, Here ' s where the fun begins. You go first, Mach. So I takes ofl, and in about three-fifths of a second I ' m doin ' 60 per, but I can ' t keep those Scandinavian slipping planks parallel, and before I knows it, my left leg is where my right ought to be and I do a tailspin. I come down making a perfect 16-point landing, scraping hide off all of em. If I looked anything like Windy looked, I must ' ve looked like a octopus wavin ' all his legs at once. And let me tell you, it ain ' t easy gettin ' out of four feet of snow when you ' ve got a colt stickin ' in your ribs on one side, a fry pan on the other, your legs up where your arms ought to be, and your arms, God knows where. Wal, by night we are all of five miles from town, and I know now we could have got along a lot faster on snow- shoes goin ' backwards. After about a week, we finds our- selves in front of the widder ' s shack. I bites me off a chew, puts on my officious look, and limps up the door. When I knocks, the meanest, biggest lookin ' squaw I ever surveyed poles her head out, and I begins: ' Madam, I ' m sheriff of Badger County and — . ' ' Well, what do I care who you are? Scat! ' she piped. ' But madam, you ' re trespassin ' — ' ' Git! she cries, and for emphasis, she shoves a double barreled cannon in my pan. I knows red when I sees it, and it would have took me just about two seconds to get out of gun range if it hadn ' t been for those Norwegian sleigh runners. As it was, I took three spills in the first fifty yards. So when I gets back to Windy I can ' t even cuss; I ' ve used ' em all up. I figgers the Colonel won ' t mind if just one widder is squattin ' on his land, but if he does, he can kick her off hisself. We spend the rest of the week hiking In the snow. We makes a sleigh out of our skis and puts our packs on it. When we gets back to my office, we sleep for another week. Windy still creaks when he moves, and I feel as though I ' d been through a threshin ' machine. I ' ve got blisters on my pedals as big as four-bit pieces, and what shows of me under the adhesive plaster is black and blue. But I ' ll tell you one thing: If Windy ever brings up another one of his dernfangled winter sports ideas, he can go some place where they don ' t have snow. ' Evan Fail-banks, ' 31. MY FIRST AIRPLANE RIDE One of my most vivid, but not altogether pleasant, mem- ories of last summer is my airplane flight across the English Channel. Our party of three left London one misty, moisty morning and drove out to Craydon, the airport. There we, and our baggage, were carefully weighed and checked in a large, airy building on the edge of the field. Then we were escorted to where a large trimotored biplane waited with engines roaring. We climbed aboard, stowed our bags, and seated ourselves comfortably in deep wicker chairs. Twelve other passengers arrived and settled them- selves, and promptly at nine o ' clock the great plane took off. Slowly we bumped across the field, gradually gathering speed, and suddenly the bumping ceased ; we were off ! After circling once around the airport we sped away into the clouds. Then was the time when, according to all the folders, we should have been soaring smoothly through the blue sky, a white-coated steward in attendance, gazing at the white-capped waters of the Channel, or reading the latest magazines. How different was our fate! For some reason there was no steward aboard that trip, the man probably knew what was coming; also, owing to the thick, impenetra- ble banks of clouds, the Channel, white-capped or not, was invisible. The fine mist in which we had started immedi- ately turned to pouring rain, which dashed against the win- dows with terrific force, and a strong wind howled through the fusilage. The roaring of the motor made conversation impossible, and the altitude made the cabin exceedingly cold. The fierce winds tossed the craft, which had seemed so large on the ground, about like a leaf; and the resulting motions were more alarming than those of any ship. At last at about quarter of twelve, the plane nosed down and hopefully we viewed an open field through a break in the clouds. The plane landed in a veritable sea of mud and came to halt in three inches of waters. Nevertheless, we thankfully prepared to alight when, alas! an official appeared and declared that we were in Belgium, where five lucky souls were to get out, not Ger- many, our destination. Disgusted, we sank back and waited, tired and shivering, for an hour, while the pilot waited for a more favorable weather report. At last, at quarter to one, we again took off and headed for Cologne, Germany. By this time the rain had practically stopped and the wind had gone down a little so those who were not too sick could catch glimpses of the country beneath, broad fields, winding canals, and tall trees swaying wildly in the wings. Final-

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JELECTROPOLIS By Otfrid Von Hanstein Otfrid Von Hanstein is now recognized as one of the foremost of the scientific writers of Germany, perhaps of the world. He has written many excellent scientific stories of interplanetary travel. In a story, a Mr. Schmidt, a German, inherits the form- ulas and the inventions of the hero of a previous work. He has also bought an enormous tract of land from the Austra- lian government. On this land are located subterranean rivers which provide him with power, and enormous depos- its of gold and radium which provide him with wealth. He has a great desire to set up an independent empire and his ambitions are almost successful when the Aus- tralian government declares war. His plans are nipped in the bud, but something more ghastly and disastrous oc- curs and makes a definite change in affairs. The book is convincingly wi-itten; the illustrations are pleasing; and the lover of good scientific fiction will find a veritable horde of proved and possible inventions, which will stimulate his (or her) imagination and provide entertain- ment of a truly educational nature. Herbert A. Buttrick, ' 33 THE CLUB-FOOTED PANTHER Hungry, hungry, always hungry, why should she, a club- footed panther, be handicapped with a litter of panther kittens in the lair on the steep sides of old Bald-faced Mountain? She had been born a club-foot — always only the scraps of food had been left to her, while her great mother made several attempts to kill her; but she had survived, and now full grown she suffered more than before. Several attempts at coveys of grouse; a long tedious stalking of rabbits, then to miss, embittered her greatly. So, as the sim began to disperse the mist, she loped de- jectedly homeward to her fuzzy kittens. What was that delicious odor the wind brought to her nostrils? A herd of deer with a stately buck as leader were slowly making their way up the mountain. The path they were taking would cause them to pass under a huge rock overhanging the trail. The panther with fresh hopes, cautiously circled the herd and made a tedious ascent of the huge piece of granite. There she crouched, her thin sides heaving, while she slowly flexed and unfiexed her cruel curving claws. The herd drew closer, closer, till they were within easy springing distance. The great cat was motionless, her nervous agitation only expressing itself in the lashing of her tail. Suddenly, with an ear-piercing shriek which paralyzed the herd with fear, she sprang; her curving forepaws slashed a young doe ' s jugular, while her one good hindpaw ripped and tore its flank. The doe dropped, wallowing in her own blood. By this time the rest of the herd had disappeared, and with a few growls of feline joy and contentment, the panther pro- ceeded to gorge herself. When her hunger had been satisfied, she slung the re- mains over her tawny shoulder and set off for her den, where five rapacious kittens awaited her homecoming. Thomas Gleason, ' 33. A BOMBING ATTACK Nestled in a secluded wood a few kilometers north of the picturesque French town of Bar-le-Duc in the Verdun sector, lay the aerodrome of the 45th Aerial Pursuit and Bombardment Escadrille. Long, shiny fingers of Septem- ber sunlight penetrating the few openings in the heavily clouded sky have bathed the country-side in a semi-darkness light. While a group of jovial French and American air men partake of a hasty breakfast, their helpful mechanics groom their winged charges to prepare them for a long flight. This early morning activity came as a result of a brief dispatch received from Headquarters the previous night. The dispatch stated that in order to meet with success in an allied infantry drive that was to be launched the following day, a fleet of bombers and pursuit planes from this aerodrome were to annihilate the German ' s source 01 munitions — the enormous munition arsenal situated in Magdeburg, Germany. This assignment was to be no easy task, as Magdeburg was an air distance of approximately two hundred kilometers behind the enemy lines. In order for the bomber ' s target to be discernible, the attack must take place in broad daylight. To assure the heavy, slow, and awkward bombers as much safety as possible, three patrols of the best fighting machines at the front were to act as a bodyguard for them. Ten minutes before the hour of departure, the restless aviators clambered into the cockpits of their war planes to await the signal from their leader. Mechanics carefully loaded six one-hundred pound explosives on the bomb racks of each one of the huge Candron Bombers. Exactly on the appointed hour the leader of the expedi- tion gave the departure signal by waving a small, white flag. Simultaneously, the nine Nieuport scouts roared down the dirt runway, bounded into the air, and were soon gain- ing altitude over the aerodrome. As soon as the last pur- suit plane left the ground, the five heavily laden bombers slowly lumbered down the field to a take-off. They gath- ered into a flying V formation at an altitude of eleven hundred feet as three battle planes took a position above them, and the other two patrols flew on either side. Just before crossing the French front lines the aerial armada climbed up through a hole in the low lying clouds. At six thousand feet elevation they again resumed a hori- zontal flight toward the Rhine River valley. Below them as far as the eye could see stretched an almost solid layer of fluffy clouds like an Arctic ice field. After flying by compass for almost two hours, they received a fleeting glimpse of the winding Rhine. Within fifteen minutes after leaving this river, the formidable air fieet was cruising over its objective, and as yet. it had met with no interference. Breaking formation, the air men dove their machines down, down through the damp clouds. While the Nieuports hovered above, the Candrons swooped until their altimeters registered five hundred feet. The German ground defense now became active, and anti- aircraft shells exploded on all sides of the invaders. Peer- ing through telescopic bomb sights, the pilots in the Can- drons let their missiles of destruction descend. Inside of ten minutes the three thousand pounds of explosives from the five bombers had reduced the once proud arsenal to a blazing heap of debris. Workmen that appeared as if they were insects scampered in all directions from the inferno of fire and death. Their task successfully completed, the