Plus ça change...

If you've ever wondered how much times have changed in America, spend a few minutes with the 1925 yearbook from, in this case, Catonsville High School.

I have to admit this is the first time I've ever seen an ad for bloomers. (The "Man O' War Middy," sold with the boast "the sloped sides make it fit." Oh, it's "wholesome looking.") The portable steel garage was advertised with this provocative question: "Why own a car and walk halfway home?" Milk came from tuberculin tested cows. Grocery stores also sold animal feed, Hudson and Essex automobiles were available at excellent prices, and a private sanitarium was the place "for mental and nervous invalids (no alcoholics or drug addicts received)." Automobile insurance covered "you while operating, adjusting or cranking any automobile" (and if you were run over by an automobile as well). The premium? Five dollars a year. And who needed margarine when one could buy butterine?

The second best section of the book is split between the sections titled Noted Personages — students judged to be the Class Hercules, Class Romeo, Queen of the Ivories, Most Versatile (?) and other categories — and what are charmingly termed Class Statistics.

You might think statistics involves numbers. Well, not in 1925. The class statistics included: tallest boy, tallest girl, best boy athlete, best girl athlete, and shortest boy and girl.

Then come the categories that would never fly today: most thrilling Latin type (Herbert Rice, who hardly sounds Latin), most obliging girl (one can only imagine), biggest tease (ditto, though won by a boy that year), most backward in coming forward (different from quietest, most studious, most unobtrusive or meekest), and the list goes on. Elizabeth Rodgers had the most attractive dimples, though Cora Appler beat her out for prettiest eyes. Lula Cook was the class milliner — I'll wait while you look it up — and Albrecht Stude (great name for a band) was the most argumentative.

The best part, though, is the jokes and riddles. Even the names of the people speaking are great:

Miss K: Billy, give your oral composition.

Absent-minded Billy: I left it home.

Pedagogue: What would be the first thing you would do if you spilled acid on yourself?

Victim: Yell.

Some of the jokes require bits of knowledge that I never acquired in school — the composition of Glauber's Salts, for example, and the meaning of slang expressions such as "chewing the rag" (it means to ponder or meditate) — but one still has meaning today:

How to avoid falling hair: get out of the way.