Saturday, February 13, 2016

FOURS

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.

25 comments:

  1. I'm sure she was really proud that her table manners were unforgettable.

    Love high school yearbooks - they always reveal a good secret. My mother was remembered for never being without chewing gum. Yet she did not allow me to have chewing gum. Of course, I managed to get gum sometimes, but she was quick to tell me to spit it out. You would have thought chewing gum was the gateway to worse things like smoking.

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    1. We never knew about those bad table manners until one of her old May School classmates came to visit...she used a spoon to launch peas into her water glass! Quite the skill...

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  2. You are so lucky in the USA in having school year books, as they are a gold mine for family historians. Here we ha ve nothing like that - perhaps a class photo if we are lucky. I have no memorabilia of my mother's schooldays, and just a newspaper photograph of my father as a member of a football team.

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    1. I am lucky: I have both my father's and my mother's high school yearbooks; my mother's Smith yearbook and my father's Naval Flight School yearbook...they are wonderful peeks into the past!

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  3. Your mother sounds like lots of fun. I would have liked her too. I wonder why Latin made her laugh and whistle?

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    1. She told me once she HATED Latin -- so she probably laughed and whistled to get out of doing translations or verb conjugations!

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  4. Such a nice memory. I like the description of her.

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    1. Her classmates had her down cold! I remember her lighter moments with great fondness; mostly, though, she was a tough parent!

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  5. I really enjoyed this post. Your mother sounds like such a fun person. She must have been very popular. How wonderful to have the yearbook!

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    1. She had a delightful sense of humor, Sharon -- and kept it until her death at 93...a lesson to us all!

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  6. What a great idea and a wonderful way to find a side to your mother that you never knew.

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    1. As I get older, I find more of her within myself (if you know what I mean...) -- we share that sense of humor AND the dislike of Latin!

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  7. Good link you found, and your mother's classmates saw her sunny side definitely!

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    1. They did, indeed, Barbara! And she passed it on to both me and my brother...

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  8. Things I never knew about my aunt! Do we really change that much when we become adults, or is it somehing we don't reveal in front of the children, lest they get ideas in their little heads. Probably for fear that they, too, will act out, or use the knowledge as a reply to "Stop doing that!" being, "Well you used to do that; Grandma said so."

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    1. Well, Ma never hid her sense of humor (as you know); she did, though, hide her "bad" schoolgirl behavior from us. But so did Dad (remember the radio tower escapade when he was at Brown?)!

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  9. Super story. It's fun to get glimpses of personality from a distance of time. A bit like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. What do you supposed she whistled in Latin? A melody or just a loud screech?

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    1. She was a pretty good whistler, Mike; also played violin! But I remember being surprised that she was just an ordinary kid once -- just like me!

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  10. Colour combinations bring all sorts of things to mind.

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  11. I am sooooo glad that there is no corresponding description of me as I finished High School. I was too quiet for much to be said but I would still shrivel with embarrassment !

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    1. I find those descriptions endearing -- in that they are so true! That's who she was, and she, unlike me, loved to be the center of attention...so it was just perfect.

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  12. Well doggone it, now I want to know about these color combinations!

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    1. She always looked like somebody colorblind had picked her outfits; she wore patterned dresses that made her look like an exotic bird wearing a clashing cape...amazing! We got used to it...

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    2. She sounds like she had her own drummer. Good for her. A colorful aunt in many ways.

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