My mother would never let us look at her HS yearbook when we were younger. Turns out there are references in it to her being caught hiding in a hotel room tub with a bottle of gin during the senior class to NYC. In 1954
Those handwritten notes are priceless. Too bad son’s HS did not distribute yearbooks until after school ended. References to the annual NHS camping trips… Hey- we did something educational as well. No references to specifics of the stupid things we kids did and our photos did not make the yearbook (cool shot of the blanket toss- I was chicken to be tossed in the air).
The inside front and back covers of my high school yearbook show a huge photo of the school, taken from a helicopter, with the entire student body out in the front of the school.
Part of the central section of the photo has been deliberately blurred out in the yearbook. That’s because the group of students in that section chose to arrange themselves to spell out an obscene word.
Stupid is nothing new.
I was stoned in my high school year book picture. You can tell just by looking at the picture.
I was at a private school and only 28 in my graduating class. We each got a whole page.
I quoted a Roger Daultry song under my picture.
There are quite a few pictures of me in my college yearbook at parties, even though I went to a school with 30k+ students, because one of my housemates was a photographer for the yearbook.
A cross country runner, in uniform, with a beer in his hand. He wasn’t running in a meet at the time, it was after his race. But still. Maybe he was 18 and it was legal, but probably discouraged in uniform. Probably a fun guy, I didn’t know him.
oh, @emilybee , that is hilarious!
Well I was a straight arrow who has stuff written by others that would point to less than perfection on my part.
And the name of our school newspaper referred to pot.
And we had some crazy pix.
My dad’s college yearbooks from the forties are hilarious. Captions written by yearbook staff which imply all sorts of shenanigans that wouldn’t go over today. Different times.
In the back of our yearbook was a list of “patrons” – parents who had contributed $$$ to the yearbook. I used that list when I was organizing my 50th HS reunion, to track people down. Frequently the parent’s obituaries mentioned the kid and where he or she was living. It often gave me a lead to find my classmate.
But one thing slipped past the censors: One of the “patrons” was listed as “Mr. and Mrs. Cliffard Trojan.” Trojan – ha ha, get it?? (I have no idea what, if anything, the “Cliffard” meant.)
I had 1000 students in my HS class, so the only thing under our pictures was our names.
Don’t have a college yearbook, but I do recall my H had a page to fill in his medical school yearbook. As I recall (no idea where it is now), it’s all pictures of our kids (kids and med school = no social life, lol.)
Good grief! I just looked and realized there is a reference to me (along with a friend) being caught swimming where we were’t supposed to be. The pond we were swimming in (and is named in the yearbook) is a pubic water supply for nearby communities. I still live nearby-good thing I never plan on running for public office, lol.
My tiny (senior class of ~40) HS let us design a page of our own (as it appeared his med school did as well), with our photos, quotes, drawings - whatever we wanted. An adult did make sure it wasn’t offensive. But we absolutely designed that page, every photo on it was our own, provided (and laid out) by us.
…and then we wrote in our friends’ books on our own pages (an option unavailable to the edgier students who chose a black background for their page, unless they procured a decidedly un-edgy metallic marker in silver or gold to write with).
My yearbook didn’t have anything “offensive” in it, except one: the centerfold was entirely covered with the image of my Bruce Lee-like flying side kick accompanied by a wonderful poem by a fellow classmate about daring to fly high with aspirations and dreams. 
Our D wasn’t in her JR class yearbook at all—no photo, no name, nothing. She was in a lot of photos the following year, when she was no longer a student at that HS. Her friends had her on their SR page photos. There was nothing offensive on any of the pages.
I was the yearbook editor in chief in HS and I remember that we all had to read about ethics and responsibilities. We were told that somewhere in some yearbook (not in our town) that a kid who liked to fish had been described by yearbook staff on his page as a master baiter and had then committed suicide when it came out. Urban legend? Not sure. The worst thing anyone did was try to include a less than flattering candid photo of a student who wasn’t liked by the staff member in charge of that page. Our advisor read everything before it was submitted.
I went to a very large U and bought the yearbook my senior year. Apparently I went to get my picture taken to be included. Don’t remember that. The college yearbook is bland and doesn’t seem to have anything in appropriate in it either.
My HS yearbook has a picture of me as president of the Science Club - which should tell you everything you could ever ask about my social status in high school.
It could be worse; you could have been president of the AV club. Although in hindsight, those guys are probably sitting on millions in stock options. 
It costs about $250 to put in a senior page around here. My HS did not have that option. One bad picture of me and a group picture with the student newspaper. The yearbook was at my folks’ house and it’s one thing I was not sorry to see go.
Just don’t interview my friends from those days.
There is nothing racist or questionable in my yearbooks. I don’t have a college one, though. I am surprised that photo was included, people were not ignorant of racism at that time.
I forgot my most important quote - it was the definition of a limit. That probably tells you just how nerdy and weird I was! Along with all the British historical stuff and the Lord of the Rings.
I actually thought it was pretty cool that my older son got voted “Most likely to be a rocket scientist”, I thought he was flying mostly under the radar. It’s a huge school and he’s the one for whom they made the t-shirt, “I’m not anti-social, I’m just not user friendly”.
@OHMomof2 not sure if I was the only one who thought you were close to 100 years old. On first glance I thought you referring to your HS class of '40. LOL…