Yearbook Inscription Tells a Tale of Love’s Labor Lost

The last literary prose many teen-agers write may be the inscriptions they note in the yearbooks of their classmates.

Usually they are brief and banal. In my day the most popular greeting was “Good luck to a swell guy.” But sometimes they are heartfelt, poetic and poignant, and expressive of emotions barely realized, of hidden aches.

Donald Tuzin, professor of anthropology at UC San Diego, sends me an inscription found in the yearbook of Sparta Township High School, in southern Illinois, 1953.

It was written in a graceful hand to Tuzin’s uncle (R.S.). It is unsigned, but Tuzin says it is attributed to one J.H.

“Dearest Darling:

“In another month and a half we’ll be 16 and both be juniors. We were talking yesterday about your birthday and what we would do that Sunday night. I hope that every time you read this you will remember our Sophomore year and the things we did.

“Remember the star you wished on, the Friday night we discussed things and I cried, the time Mr. Warren bawled us out, the time Mr. Adams saw you kiss me, the guy you hit for flirting with me (I told you to do it) . . . Tuesday nights after choir practice . . . the spanking you gave me before English, the poison ivy I had.

“Jim’s birthday party, the only lie you ever told me, the Christmas program and the first time you kissed Jeannine while I held the mistletoe, our anniversary, that little lock of hair you gave me, the things we did in Biology and English, our talks with Mrs. Ziegler.

“As I started to say at the beginning--remember the day you found out I had a surprise for you and you had a surprise for me on May 31 (R.S.’s birthday)? Remember when I cried and you told me what the surprise was? I’ll never forgive myself for that. I didn’t want to know. But you told me and ruined everything. You wanted to surprise me, but I spoiled everything. . . .”

Tuzin’s only footnote tells us that R.S. and J.H. did not marry. It was Jeannine, whom he kissed under the mistletoe, that became his wife.

In reading these few lines we feel the pain and joy of teen-age love. We must deplore the author’s complicity in inciting R.S. to strike her other suitor, and his spanking her before English seems both childish and brutal; but we feel her anguish in holding the mistletoe for her boyfriend’s first kiss with the temptress Jeannine. (Even as she wrote in the yearbook, J.H. evidently did not foresee the consequences of that fateful kiss.)

We cannot imagine what surprise J.H. spoiled with her tears. Nor do we know what surprise she had for him. In any case, it couldn’t have mattered. The surprise was already in Jeannine’s heart.

Granted, such confessions are not common in yearbooks. Usually the inscriptions are vows of friendship and wishes for a good life. In my own high school yearbook I find no such emotional passages. That is probably because I never inspired any girl to passion. The only girl I pursued rejected me for the school’s pole vaulter.

The only inscription that seems to reflect anything more than routine class friendship is this one:

“Dear Jacky Wacky: Don’t forget me. As if you could. Florencia de Bock. alias Florence Bock.”

I remember her well. She made me laugh. We called each other those silly names out of an innocent affection. But I never kissed her. I never asked her out. I did not know then that good humor in a woman is as rare as beauty.

By the way, Florence signed her real name under a line in one of the book’s ads: “With Sincere Appreciation of Your Patronage.”

The blond goddess I worshiped from afar, but never dared to approach, signed my book simply: “Good luck to a swell fellow. Hope I see you again.” I can’t remember that I ever saw her again.

A few of the inscriptions reflect some light on my character, as my classmates saw it. “Laziness and brilliance, but the brilliance predominates,” wrote Dorothy Cole, one of the class scholars. I once took her to a prom.

“It’s hard to say anything to you,” wrote Gladys Pearlson, a colleague on the Belmont Sentinel. “You’re too nice for me to be nasty and you’ve out-argued me too often for anything nice. If that sloop thing ever goes through, come back and tell me all about it some evening. Dinner will be hamburgers and pickled seaweed.”

Evidently I had told Gladys of my plan to sail a sloop around the world but hadn’t invited her. But Gladys was not the type to stay home and have dinner waiting.

Alas, I never went.