It's funny to look back at yearbooks. Say, for example, you saw just the close up of this young woman. She looks like she's in college. The cateye glasses and haircut put her about mid-1960s. She was in high school, no doubt, when Kennedy was shot.
There's a certain assumed innocence of that time--before the assignations of both Kennedy brothers, and MLK, before the riots and before Vietnam became nightly news. Perhaps it was a small bubble of American history, bound to burst. But for a short time, Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best set the tone of the times. Dad went to work, mom cooked dinner, and the family said grace before eating.
Looking at old yearbooks, the women with shoulder-length, flipped hair, and the men in crew cuts, it's easy to imagine they were barely a few years past Boy Scouts and Home Ec class. If these faces were the onces we saw on TV, they said, "Aw sucks," and "golly" a lot. They asked Veronica if she'd "go steady."
Take the photo in a wider lens, in color, see that Veronica goes camping with friends in the Colorado Rockies. She's set out coco and coffee, as the kettle heats over the campfire. Above the the kitchen counter she's set up, she looks like the All-American girl. And below, is another story.
What a wonderful image. It reminds us that we were all young once, and never that innocent.
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