Four, fourfold, 4-H,
four-footed, four-hand, Four Horsemen (of the you-know-what), four-in-hand,
four-letter word, four-star, four-wheeler…
…the list goes on and on.
But this formidable foursome
is a special grouping: behold four members of the 1937 varsity basketball team
at the May School, 270 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts (now the Brimmer
and May School of Chestnut Hill).
Top two: Peggy Breed and Edith Fisher;
bottom two: M. Harcourt and my mother, Martha Howell.
There were twenty-seven
members of the Class of 1937; these four were the powerhouses of their
basketball team, although the term “powerhouse” probably meant something entirely
different back in those days—no powerhouses would wear collars like that!
My mother’s May
School yearbook is one of my favorite possessions: a slim, beautifully bound
yearbook that gave me a new vision of my mother…
...in the Class Vote (senior
superlatives), she was chosen Most Animated, Funniest and Noisiest (none of
which is news to me).
I’m surprised she’s not grinning in this basketball photo; her senior picture,
too, is an amazingly demure image of her, recognizing, I am sure, the
seriousness of graduation back then.
But the write-up beneath her picture tells a truer story:
Hats off to Haffy! What would we
do without her laughing and whistling in Latin class? If she weren’t around, we
should have no one to tell our new jokes or riddles to, since she will always
laugh for us, while the rest of our blasé class merely stares at our efforts.
Haffy has been with us four years; and although timid at first, she certainly
has snapped out of it. Her table manners at school, however, have not passed
the kindergarten stage. Water and a spoon are a constant temptation that cannot
be resisted. For all her hilarity, she comes out with swell marks and is one of
the most conscientious members...
Her major weakness,
according to her classmates, was her terrible
color combinations.
Again, no surprise there—she favored terrible color combinations well
into her nineties!
But here she is in
1937, part of a sports foursome: a senior in high school, eighteen years old
and on her way to Smith College…
I might have liked
her back then; we might have been friends.
