Santa Monica High Yearbook

* Controversy is the basis for spicy journalism. The fact that Santa Monica High School’s yearbook is an impressive show of students’ creativity is not. In the June 17 article on this year’s Nautilus, your reporter took far-fetched rumors that the yearbook was racist, satanic and explicit, and printed them as fact.

In the opening section of the yearbook, our homecoming page is titled with a typographical error. You (reported the inference) that this was a racial slur. The yearbook staff proved that the accusation was false by showing your reporter a letter from the printer apologizing for the error. In fact, minorities were represented fairly, as is evident from the racial integration of the candid pictures in the yearbook. But that doesn’t make a good story.

You reported that when the yearbook’s cover is looked at upside down, the reader is “jolted” by the word Satan hidden in the title. The yearbook’s title, “Nautilus,” and “Satan” contain many of the same letters, the first, middle and last of which are the same both upside down and right side up. The word Satan is neither intended nor readily apparent to the eye. But that doesn’t make a good story.

You wrote that there was a “nude drawing of school mascot Vicky Viking” on the cover. The drawing, however, was not our mascot stripped of her uniform, but instead the depiction of a bronzed statue of a woman, much like you would find in the UCLA sculpture garden. But that doesn’t make a good story.

The Times should be ashamed to give any of these unsubstantiated rumors credibility. But they made a good story.

KATIE SOBEL, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Santa Monica High Nautilus

* After reading about the controversy over the Santa Monica High School yearbook I am reminded of the old joke about the psychiatrist who showed a series of ink blots to a patient. After every example the doctor asked him what he saw. The patient responded to every example by saying that he saw people engaged in various sex acts. The doctor said to the patient, “You are apparently preoccupied with sex.” The patient responded, “Me? You’re the one with the dirty pictures.”

MICHAEL A. McNAMARA

Culver City