Waukesha High School - Megaphone Yearbook (Waukesha, WI)

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If Mrs. Jones' greatest joys in life are the perfectly appointed dinners she delights in being known to give. and riding in her Rolls'Royce. then let her have them if she can afford them. But if your greatest joys are simple hospitality and the good talk around the board. and if you care far more for books than the sort of car that affords you transportation. then in the name of Art give simple dinners. line your shelves with books, and drive a Eord. If you love Elizabethan 3 dv - Schmoller. Maragos, Boccaccio. Bottom RowfPease. Greene. drama nd ttest the Current Peters. Mielke. Rosenmerkel. Zenkevech. JUNIOR HIGH BASEBALL Top Row, left to right-Mr. Corrigan, Dunn, Johnson. fiction. read your drama: and when someone asks you if you have read The Mauve Petticoat, tell him candid- ly that you have not and that you do not intend to. If you are intelligent enough to be bored stiff with the absurd social life of ninety-nine clubs in a hundred, refuse to join the things and amuse yourself in your own way. Americans pride themselves on their courage and individuality and brag of the frontier virtues, but the fact is we are the most cowardly race in the world socially. Read Emerson's essay on Self Reliance and ask yourself honestly how much you dare to be yourself. I-Ie has been called the most essentially American of our authors. but would he be so today? The old phrases have a familiar ring. 'ATrust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformistf' My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. XVhat I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. Life only avails, not the having lived. Insist on yourself: never imitate. Every schoolboy knows them, but how many mature Americans dare to practise them? Take the matter of clothes as a simple touch- stone of individuality. Every American woman who goes to London is either shocked. interested or amused by the variety of womens dress there. Most of it, except sports clothes. is. I admit, extremely bad, but the point is that a woman dresses just as she pleases. Little girls may have long black stockings or legs bare to their full length: older women may have skirts that display the knee or drag the ground: hats of the latest mode from Paris, or from Regent Street when Victoria was a girl. Vvfatching the passing crowd on the Board Walk is like turning the pages of Punch for half a century. A man may wear any headgear from a golf cap to a pearl satin topper Compare this, for example, with New York and the mass antics of the Stock Exchange where if a man wears a straw hat Page One Hundred Twenry-four

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JUNIOR HIGH FOOTBALL Top Row, left to right-Mr. Corrigan, Hockett, Miller, Helker, Enders, Boccaccio. Bottom Row--Moen, Edwards, Reid, Mittlesteadt, Russell, Maragos, Engstrom. If we are to have an art of life, must we HOF exercise equal care in trying to dis- criminate between the influences and values of all the tools that we use in making the infinitely more complex work, an individual human life of significance and happiness and worth? We have got to think what all these tools-things, situa- tions, surroundings, relationships-may mean for our own individual selves, for our own private lives, regardless of the standards of the majority, before we can begin to live as human beings and develop an art of life. Otherwise we are mere telephone switchboards, like animals, receiving stimuli and sending our reactions. Until we have given thought to this, we can use all our tools and material only at random and with no idea of the result we are producing. If we can decide what we want to make of ourselves and what tools will best assist the result, then we can vastly simplify our lives by a wholesale rejection of all those things which may be well enough for our neighbors but do not conduce to the one desired end for ourselves. We would then no longer wear ourselves out in the mere living of standardized lives and keeping up with the Joneses. We would not only simplify our lives, but we would introduce Variety into the deadly monotony of the national life. No two artists would have exactly the same con- ception of a subject or treat it in exactly the same way. If it is true that our lives are increasingly frustrate and commonplace and standardized because we do not take time and trouble to think out what is the worthwhile life and achieve a scale of values, is it not because we lack the courage to be different from the Joneses and to give to our lives that precise quality of uniqueness which is characteristic of the products of art? The three qualities, therefore, which would seem to be essential to any artistic ordering of our lives are courage, thought, and will. We have got to acquire that rarest form of courage in America, the courage to be considered different from our neighbors and the rest of our set. Page One Hundred Twenty-three

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beyond the day appointed by i his fellows they smash it down over his eyes, and where he is not safe from similar moronic hoodlumism even in the streets. I mention clothes not as a Sartor Resartus but merely as a simple instance of that mass-minded- ness which permeates all Ameri- can life. One has to fight to be one's self in America as in no other country I know. Not only are most Americans anx- ious to conform to the stand- ards of the majority, but that JUNIOR HIGH BASKETBALL . I 1 Top Row. left to right-Fridie, Luther, Mason, Mr. Corrigan. IT13-lOf1tY, 3IlCl the advertisers, insist that they shall. I recall some years ago when living in a small village and when I was spending many hundreds of dollars more than I could well alford on books and also putting money into travel, that more than one of the village people actually suggested to me that it was rather disgraceful for a man in my position not to drive a better car than a Ford. My answer, of course, was that I did not give a rap about a car except as a means to get about, and I did care about books and travel. Another man, one from the city. speaking of the same sore point, said that I could afford to use a Ford because everyone knew who my grandfather was, but he had to have something better to meet his guests with. In another community, a moderately wealthy friend of mine who had a large house, also a country place, and did a good deal of traveling, was taken to task by a yet wealthier neighbor on the score that, again. a man in his position owed it to his wife to give her a better car than a Dodge sedan to make calls in, though both my friend and the wife preferred to spend their money in other ways than in running a Packard or a Cadillac. Spending one's money in one's own way in America-that is, trying to use the tools of life with sanity and discrimination-is a good deal like running the old Indian gauntlet. The self-appointed monitors of society to tell other people how they should live, ran. in the cases above, all the way from village store-keepersto a successful New York business man worth many millions, but they are merely typical of that pressure. express or implied, that is brought to bear on any individual who attempts to think out and live his own life. But if our lives are to be based on any art of living, if our souls are not to be suppressed and submerged under a vast heap of standardized plumbing, motor cars, crack schools for the children, suburban social standards and customs, fear of group opinion, and all the rest of our mores and taboos, then the first and most essential factor is simple courage to do what you really want to do with your own life. Bottom Row-Plotz, Covcrstone. Staffcldt, Lansinger. Page One Hundred Twenty-five