PROPHECY SAYS IT ALL

The one-word title of my 1971 high school yearbook — "Prophecy" — says it all. Discovering things about yourself and your loved ones from high school yearbooks can be refreshing and, dare I say, maybe educational.

More than 50 years after graduating from Battin High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, am I the person others prophesied? Rereading each entry in my high school yearbook had me spellbound.

For example, the “hot” art teacher, Mr. Angelo, wrote: “There are students and there are students, and you are one of the fine young ladies of Battin. I’d like to offer you my best wishes for a very happy life.” Did he say that to everyone?

Sometimes you wonder what an innuendo in a signed statement from a close friend means. Do you remember an “unforgettable” event that supposedly happened over half a century ago in your biology class? Does the person who made the entry recall the happening?

“The Pork-chop!” ?? Hmmm Lucia next to Rosemarie may be the “Lucy” who put the entry next to my picture in the yearbook

So happy I brought happiness.

Is she still the “fearless lion?” How many of these “girls” are still living? How many are living their dream?

She couldn’t have taken gym without me in her class?!

There I am, Sharon Mark, and, as in Arnee’s yearbook, someone mistakenly signed by my picture…not as bad as Arnee’s when the person wrote all over Arnee’s picture. I don’t know who Lucy was but I like what she wrote about me. Below me is Pat, and as she says, I have never forgotten who introduced me to Arnee. We met at a party at Pat’s house the summer after 10th grade when Arnee had just graduated high school.

Looking through the old yearbooks was so inciteful that I continued back to my junior high school yearbook. One teacher I had for three years filled the back cover with his comments. A friend was visiting and saw the yearbook out so she glanced through, stopping at the entry from 1968 inside the back cover, and commented, “he was in love with you.”

Other family yearbooks in our collection have their own stories. My mother-in-law is recorded in her 1935 Linden, New Jersey High School yearbook as “Vivacious, colorful, eager.” My father-in-law stated “Knowledge is power,” in his 1928 yearbook from my alma mater. That was when the school was co-ed.

When I attended Battin, it was an all-girls high school. My husband graduated from Jefferson, the all-boys high school in Elizabeth. The two schools have since become the co-ed Elizabeth High School.

Aunt Fannie cut out her picture from her 1935 Newark, New Jersey East Side High School yearbook, a picture she insisted she never liked. My husband’s classmate signed over my husband’s 1969 Jefferson High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey yearbook picture, instead of his own.

It’s a wonder what I wrote in the yearbooks of my classmates. Was it something meaningful and prophetic?

Most importantly, in this age of minimalism, I hope that someday these yearbooks in my possession, too precious to part with now, will end up in libraries rather than landfills. They tell a story about a person at a particular time. The mystery is how many yearbook prophecies were realized.