The first order of business our junior year was ordering our class rings. Jostens came to the school and showed us the styles we could choose from and the prices. Our class bought the same style as the class before us.
Our class rings were rectangular with raised sides and down in the valley was a colored stone. Sitting in the center of the stone was a large M in gold. On the inside of the left raised side was the numbers 19 and on the right side 66 for the year of graduation. On one side of the ring was a gold S and on the other side was a gold H; my initials. I bought a garnet colored stone with two white mother of pearl stripes that crossed the stone at an angle.
Mine was the same color as my boyfriends; I think he wore his just a couple of weeks before he gave it to me. Our class all bought the same style, but with different colored stones, but I think there were a lot of the garnet stones because that was one of the school colors.
My boyfriends ring cost him $35 when he got it in 1964 and mine was the same price when I bought it in 1965. His was twice the size of mine and they cost the same. I never did figure out why that was. I didn’t have mine very long either before he had it.
The second project we started to work on was the junior play. The play we chose to do was “All Because Of Agatha” it was about a witch who would not leave a home that she had haunted for a hundred years. I was chosen to play Agatha the witch.
During the first two acts of the play Agatha wore the usual black tattered dress and a long black wig. But in the last act of the play Agatha was dressed in a long red satin evening gown with gold heels (she had a date with another ghost) and her hair was put up in an evening hairdo.
About 6 weeks before the play I had an appendicitis attack and I ended up in the hospital and had surgery. I spent 10 days in the hospital. They kept you in the hospital a long time back then after surgery. But they didn’t use those little tiny incisions back then either.
It was another week before I could go back to school after I got home. The class was surprised when I joined play practice because I not only knew my lines but everyone else’s lines too. I became the onstage prompter. Since I had nothing to do in the hospital but learn my lines and do some homework I had learned the play book from front to back.
The next exciting event was chemistry class for me. I really enjoyed Mr. Keener who taught Chemistry and he made it fun. I loved the experiments we did in class. I thought it was fun to be given a substance and then try to figure out what it was with different experiments.
Just like all the classes before us and those who followed, we managed to fumigate the whole school at least once or twice when we made some gas that escaped the room and floated down the halls. Several times we were all hanging out the open windows of the classroom trying to get some fresh air.
Right after Christmas break the class chose the Junior/Senior prom theme. We decided on Evening in Paris and I always thought the room turned out very pretty. Well, all but the horse tank and wash tub fountain that the boys put together.
The Evening in Paris prom was the last chance for the two classes to be together before the senior class graduated. It was an evening of long dresses and corsages for the girls and white coats and boutonnières for the guys.
Our menu for the banquet was in a little book that was placed at every place setting. The menu was written in French. No one questioned if it actually said what we were having for supper. And no one at the school knew French for us to ask. The little book was also the program and there was space for autographs.
About 15 years ago I wrote the story about the junior/senior prom. I knew a young girl that was taking French in high school. I asked her to read it for me because I wanted to know what was on the menu for the meal.
Well to my surprise she said it made no sense to her. If it was French it wasn’t any French words that she recognized. I guess not knowing the truth at the time of the prom saved us from being angry with the company we got the books from.
A few weeks after the prom the senior class graduated and was no longer part of the school. We had gone through 11 years of school with those classmates ahead of us and it would seem strange not to have them with us the next year.
After graduation several of us in the junior class stood in front of the high school, at midnight, and watched the bus pull away from the school with our boyfriends or girlfriends on the bus.
The graduated senior class would be gone for two weeks on their trip. The only thing that made us feel better was knowing that the following May it would be us on the bus heading out for a two week trip together.
The junior year ended for us with high hopes for our senior year. My high hopes were left behind at Mullinville high school, when we moved to western Kansas in the fall of my senior year. Something I have not completely forgiven my dad for yet. To contact Sandy: [email protected]
