As America’s Semiquincentennial year continues, and with the start of the new school year, this is an ideal time to look back a century to the experiences of Pekin Community High School’s students and teachers in 1926, during the fabled “Roaring Twenties.” Though there have been many changes in how we live, dress, speak, write, or dance, high school life today still has much in common with high school life in the 1920s.
The Pekin Public Library’s Local History collection includes a copy of the 1926 Pekinian yearbook that bears the “ex libris” of Irene F. Lohnes — that is, Irene Florence (Lohnes) Moran (1910-2005), daughter of William Andrew and Minnie Florence (Hunter) Lohnes of Pekin. Irene was a member of PCHS Class of 1928, so her 1926 Pekinian was a memento of her sophomore year at Pekin high school. During her high school years she was in the Girls’ Glee Club her first three years, orchestra for her last three years, string quartet during her junior year, Latin Club all four years, was secretary-treasurer of the Latin Club in 1926, and was secretary-treasurer of her class during her senior year. Irene died at age 95 in Richardson, Texas, on 22 Nov. 2005.
The 1926 Pekinian’s editor-in-chief was Helen Cook and the business manager was Lester Beitel. Other members of the high school yearbook staff were Mayme Dwyer, assistant editor-in-chief, John Shepperd, assistant business manager, Eva King, literary editor, Florence Foster, assistant literary editor, Kathryn Glasford, society editor, Al Black, athletic editor, Burl Hecker, assistant athletic editor, Norma Isenburg and Alice Rowan, organization editors, Clara Tebben, calendar editor, Carol Howard, Eugene Fisher, and Herbert Roman, joke editors, Lotus Edwards, Lillian Burton, Leota Wells, and Zillah Kriegsman, stenographers, Ruth Pollard, Hortense Kraeger, and Florence Caldwell, snapshot editors, and assisting Kathryn Glasford and Eva King as art editors were Mary Elizabeth Kumpf and Verna Zeigler.
The theme that the high school yearbook staff chose for the 1926 Pekinian was to depict PCHS as a theater and to design and organize the yearbook to resemble a program for a theatrical stage production. The yearbook opens with a foreward that quotes William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Act II, Scene VII — the famous “All the world’s a stage” passage. The foreward says, “In this nineteenth volume of the Pekinian, Pekin Community High School is presented as a theatre. The students and teachers are actors and their organizations and events form part of a play. May the reader in future years be able to re-act in memory his part of the play and feel again all the joy, happiness and enthusiasm of high school life.” The yearbook was specially dedicated to a favorite PCHS teacher, Miss Grace Boyd, who taught English.
A notable feature of American high school years from the early decades of the 20th century is that usually only the senior class members had individual portrait photographs, while the lower classes had to be content with only a group photo and a caption that listed the names of the students in each photo. We see something like that in the 1926 Pekinian, only that year the group photos of the lower classes do not have captions identifying each student row by row. Even worse, the 1926 Pekinian doesn’t even list the names of the students in the junion, sophomore, and freshmen classes!
Similarly, the group photos for the various student events and extracurricular activities also lack captions. At least the names of the students and faculty advisers are included, but the names are not listed in a way that would make it easy to identify people in the group photos. For example, here is the group photo of the 1926 PCHS Student Council. Only by consulting the 1926 faculty portraits, and the senior portraits from the 1926 Pekinian and subsequent Pekinians, was I able to write the caption below that identifies each of the people in the photo.
Among the Student Council members in 1926, one of them, Henry George “Hank” Bruder Jr. (1907-1970) went on to become a champion offensive lineman with the Green Bay Packers after an All-American career with Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Two years after his death at age 62 in Mattoon, Illinois, he was inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame.
Perhaps with further painstaking work, it will be possible to identify the students and faculty shown in the other groups photographs in the 1926 Pekinian. Shown here below are the group photos of the Girls and Boys Glee Clubs, who staged the operetta “Pickles” that school year. Since Irene Lohnes, former owner of the Pekin Public Library’s copy of the 1926 Pekinian, was in Girls Glee Club in 1926, she should be one of the girls shown in the photo below.
Besides portraits and group photos, the 1926 Pekinian also features pages devoted to “student life.” Following the “All the world’s a stage” theme, the following yearbook page is fancifully depicted as showing the “PCHS music” from that school year’s “play.” Many of these photos were taken on James Field, the former athletic field for “West Campus,” which remains a dedicated park and green space even though the beloved 1916 high school building is lost.
