Popular Girls Susie, second from right, was probably the most popular girl in school. (She did have two legs; she's just standing strangely.) Lisa, far left, went to Gateway for a year between prep schools. She seemed out of place, in a good way. She didn't believe in big hair, and was known to have read books.
Tough Guys The tough guys in my high school were pretty scary. Fortunately, by this time I hardly ever ran into them. A friend of mine who went to a good east coast high school looked at this picture and said "this looks like a picture from prison." And yet I believe my school was above average, statistically.
Mr. Gateway If kids in my school had spent as much time studying math as they did lifting weights, we could have run our own Manhattan Project in house. I lifted weights too. I started at about fifteen, mostly to protect myself. By the time I graduated I could bench press around 200. It was kind of fun, actually.
Valedictorian (Almost) Here's my friend Rich in gym class. He would have been valedictorian, but came second on a technicality. Rich wrote large parts of Mach and is now a fairly big cheese at Microsoft. Believe it or not, he later took up rowing, and is now an avid mountain climber.
Pep Rally Football is taken very seriously in Western Pennsylvania. When I entered high school, the quarterback of our rival Central Catholic was Dan Marino. Looking at this picture now, what I notice is the uniformity. The same clothes, the same hair, the same facial expressions, the same gestures.
Chess Club That's me, top left. How unhappy we all look. Well, we probably were unhappy. The kind of things we were interested in didn't count for much in our high school. Jonathan Yedidia, lower left, later became a professional chess player. It was not so much a question of whether he would win as how many pieces he would spot you.
A Great Teacher Doc Schultz was a great teacher. His class felt like a college class. What was he doing in our school?
(I was alarmed to hear from several friends that they thought I'd made this page as a joke. So let me state explicitly, all these pictures are scanned from my junior-year high school yearbook. Yes, my high school had bodybuilding contests; yes, that muscular guy was a high school student, and not the only one who looked like that; yes, Dan Marino was the quarterback of our high school rival; and yes, that is me in the upper left in the chess club.) Thanks to new media expert Maria Daniels for scanning these images.