The cover of The Grytte — yearbooks of Browning, a small K-12 New York City private school — traditionally had been white or brown. The year of the author's graduation, 1971, the cover was neon blue. PHOTO BY RALPH GARDNER JR
I suffer from a condition without a name. Fortunately, it’s not life threatening, though it’s been known to annoy my wife.
When this ailment overtakes me she utters sentiments such as, “Can’t you find anything else to do?” Or “Why do you have to do that right now?”
Were medical science or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the principal authority for psychiatric disorders, to attempt to name this syndrome it might sound something like organizitis. It’s not OCD, though it shares with it a preoccupation for order and exactness.
It may also come from inheriting a home that was formerly inhabited by generations of genteel hoarders. Also, the pandemic had something to do with it — as in the devil finds work for idle hands. However, that casts in a negative what I believe to be my admirable impulse to gather disparate things that ought to go together. I can’t think of anything that gives me more quiet satisfaction.
In other words, I can hear the reader say, you’re a collector? Not quite. Collecting connotes that you’re trying to acquire objects that you don’t currently own. I’m simply trying to establish order amid chaos.
If one wanted to be charitable about it you could say that I’m trying to locate life’s underlying structure. I’m sort of like Einstein if Einstein didn’t have a head for math and, instead of theoretical physics, he was obsessed with the stuff in his drawers and closets.
My latest source of satisfaction has been to assemble in one place every high school and college yearbook in the house. Why? My knee-jerk response to such an impertinent question is “Why Not?”
But I’ve also been asking myself the same thing. No such soul searching occurred when I gathered every hat and stickpin I could find — over 30 at last count — and arrayed them on a pincushion. I undertook that exercise out of curiosity to discover how many of them there were and also because, in silver and gold and decorated with precious and semiprecious stones, they can be quite attractive.
But I’ve been struggling to explain, if only to myself, what purpose ancient school yearbooks still serve? While I’m working on that question let me bore you with some statistics. We own 65 of them spanning almost 100 years. The earliest is a 1918 Stuyvesant High School Yearbook that I assume belonged to my grandfather though I can’t find his name or photograph listed anywhere in the volume. The most recent is my younger daughter’s 2012 high school graduation yearbook.
Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee (then Stanley Lieber) is among the notable graduates pictured in the 1939 Clintonian, the yearbook published by DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. The school is the alma mater of the columnist Ralph Gardner Jr.'s father. PHOTOs provided BY RALPH GARDNER JR.
There’s also the 1939 Clintonian, the yearbook published by DeWitt Clinton High School, my father’s alma mater in the Bronx. Notable graduates that year included Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee and playwright Paddy Chayefsky.
My spouse is of the opinion that it is only the yearbook from the year one graduated that matters. There may be some truth to that because seniors take up most of the oxygen and pages when they graduate, and also because Debbie and her boyfriend Bob — she was a cheerleader and he the captain of the football team — got voted cutest couple.
The most space, if not pride of place, on the bookshelf or shelves in our library goes to Browning, the small K-12 New York City private school that my three younger brothers and I attended, each of us for 13 long years. Between 1959 and 1979 we toted home 20 yearbooks.
Every volume holds up a mirror to the time they were published; perhaps more so than most forms of literature because high school editors possess the universal urge to differentiate themselves, make a splash, and comment on their times, through such devices as the yearbook’s cover and layout.
My yearbooks from 1959, the year I entered kindergarten, through approximately 1969, were relatively stogy affairs. They included photographs of the faculty, the various teams and clubs, and stiffly staged group photos of every grade, K-12, shot in the school gym. Each senior got his own page with a list of his achievements. And of course there were paid ads in the back of the book from friends, family, local businesses and school boosters.
But then the ‘60s happened, though it hit our hidebound institution later than most. Subversiveness became chic. The cover of every previous edition of The Grytte had been white or brown. But 1971, the year I graduated, was neon blue. And some of the clubs mentioned didn’t even exist.
A photo of the fictional Girl Haters Club includes Ralph Gardner Jr., far right. The author swears he actually likes girls. PHOTO BY RALPH GARDNER JR.
For example, the Girl Haters Club, its charter members including Sundance, Gopher, Fat Boy, Space Rat and Ralph. I don’t understand why I was the only club member called out by name. For the record, I don’t hate girls. My girlfriend at the time, with whom I remain friends to this day, is featured several pages later in the Girl Friend Club.
I also take issue with my wife’s contention that the only yearbook that really matters comes from your graduation year. Perhaps because girls — I may get in trouble for saying this, but as I stated above I like girls — have a tendency to solicit heartfelt inscriptions from friends, teachers and the school’s kitchen staff. Boys less so. Debbie’s mother’s 1938 Brevard College yearbook is filled with dozens of letter-length accolades from classmates and teachers.
Indeed, the only autograph in any of my yearbooks comes from Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, Democratic National Committee chair, and Browning School fifth grader. I brought along the 1959 yearbook when he was running for president of the United States in 2004 and I interviewed him for the New York Observer.
Perhaps I was trying to establish my bone fides. More than anything else I suspect I was hoping to use the book as a conversation starter and it worked. As he walked the streets of midtown Manhattan campaigning he reminisced about Miss Lamont, our saintly second grade teacher, and Charlie Cook, our feared headmaster.
That’s the thing about yearbooks. They’re basically time capsules stuffed between the leather, cloth or in the case of one Browning yearbook, Naugahyde binders of a book. To the rest of the world they’re utterly irrelevant. But to you and your long-ago peers they may just be priceless.
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This one is a keeper! Ralph, you and I graduated in 1971! I was born in August, 1953. I'm at the age that understands how you feel. Best sentence: “I’m sort of like Einstein if Einstein didn’t have a head for math and, instead of theoretical physics, he was obsessed with the stuff in his drawers and closets.” I understand your latest source of amusement/hobby and I too suffer the slings and arrows of my wife, since everything reminds me of everything, and I fancy myself as a raconteur of sorts and the poor thing has suffered through my blather. Digression will prove to be the end of me. However, you and I are very different: I went though 12 years of Catholic schools. My father only went through the 8th grade and then got a job and worked for the rest of his life. My mother was college material, extremely intelligent, however she too had no money and had to work. BOTH of them beat my brother and I over the head about going to college, and we fulfilled their hopes and dreams. We grew up poor to loving parents; being White and male was our lottery tickets, because I think I succeeded by just showing up. I too liked girls. My dream from the 1st grade was to have a girlfriend and it finally happened at the Cardinal Mooney/Campbell football game junior year. Our class was quite large and I sort of knew the girl in front of me in the bleachers that night, Carol Kovach, but she later said she only knew me as “that cute kid from the hallway.” We never had class together; she was in secretarial and I was college-prep. As luck would have it, Richard Eidam chose that moment to put his arm around her, which infuriated me (and her) since I thought, “Even gottdamned Eidam has a girlfriend!” But as Plutarch wrote, Carol’s eyes met mine and it was a “bolt of lightning” moment. Now I know she kept all her yearbooks. My mom must have kept mine, from high school and college; but I have no interest in them. I stayed in touch with most of the wheat and disposed of the chaff the day of graduation. I still recall all the rowdy/goofy, “teenage-sexy,” nights straight out of American Graffiti. I did as Paul Newman advised in the movie, Hud, “Get all the good you can out of seventeen 'cause it sure wears out in one hell of a hurry.” Heck if you go to the hallway in the Pharmacy Building at Ohio Northern University and look at the photo of the Class of 1976, there will be one name and one photo missing: mine. I was a firebrand and an iconoclast and I didn’t see the point. My mom regretted it but I didn’t. My advisor, Doctor Batacharya, told my mom, in an Indian/Pakistani accent, “He is the only one missing.” Hey, I made it; I was the 1st college graduate on either side of the family. As it turned out, I continued doing OK by just showing up. A director of pharmacy told me a few years back when he was trying to hire me, “You know, you’re kind of a legend around here.” There’s two sides to being a “legend.” As an iconoclast, I’m proud to occupy both.
Wait. So what happened between you and Carol Kovach?
This one is a keeper! Ralph, you and I graduated in 1971! I was born in August, 1953. I'm at the age that understands how you feel. Best sentence: “I’m sort of like Einstein if Einstein didn’t have a head for math and, instead of theoretical physics, he was obsessed with the stuff in his drawers and closets.” I understand your latest source of amusement/hobby and I too suffer the slings and arrows of my wife, since everything reminds me of everything, and I fancy myself as a raconteur of sorts and the poor thing has suffered through my blather. Digression will prove to be the end of me. However, you and I are very different: I went though 12 years of Catholic schools. My father only went through the 8th grade and then got a job and worked for the rest of his life. My mother was college material, extremely intelligent, however she too had no money and had to work. BOTH of them beat my brother and I over the head about going to college, and we fulfilled their hopes and dreams. We grew up poor to loving parents; being White and male was our lottery tickets, because I think I succeeded by just showing up. I too liked girls. My dream from the 1st grade was to have a girlfriend and it finally happened at the Cardinal Mooney/Campbell football game junior year. Our class was quite large and I sort of knew the girl in front of me in the bleachers that night, Carol Kovach, but she later said she only knew me as “that cute kid from the hallway.” We never had class together; she was in secretarial and I was college-prep. As luck would have it, Richard Eidam chose that moment to put his arm around her, which infuriated me (and her) since I thought, “Even gottdamned Eidam has a girlfriend!” But as Plutarch wrote, Carol’s eyes met mine and it was a “bolt of lightning” moment. Now I know she kept all her yearbooks. My mom must have kept mine, from high school and college; but I have no interest in them. I stayed in touch with most of the wheat and disposed of the chaff the day of graduation. I still recall all the rowdy/goofy, “teenage-sexy,” nights straight out of American Graffiti. I did as Paul Newman advised in the movie, Hud, “Get all the good you can out of seventeen 'cause it sure wears out in one hell of a hurry.” Heck if you go to the hallway in the Pharmacy Building at Ohio Northern University and look at the photo of the Class of 1976, there will be one name and one photo missing: mine. I was a firebrand and an iconoclast and I didn’t see the point. My mom regretted it but I didn’t. My advisor, Doctor Batacharya, told my mom, in an Indian/Pakistani accent, “He is the only one missing.” Hey, I made it; I was the 1st college graduate on either side of the family. As it turned out, I continued doing OK by just showing up. A director of pharmacy told me a few years back when he was trying to hire me, “You know, you’re kind of a legend around here.” There’s two sides to being a “legend.” As an iconoclast, I’m proud to occupy both.