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By Missie Mills
Johnson City Press Staff Writer
mmills@johnsoncitypress.com
A 1922 Milligan College yearbook, The Buffalo, was found tucked away inside the late Tom Hodge’s office. Hodge was longtime editorial director of the Johnson City Press, and had many such treasures in his office.
By all accounts, the book was cared for.
“It looks pretty good considering its age,” said Dr. Billie Oakes of the Milligan library archives. “There are no pages missing or loose. It has weathered the time period.”
“This is amazing — really amazing,” said Jim Dahlman, associate professor of communications at Milligan College.
“This book is in remarkably good condition,” said Dr. Ted Thomas, Milligan College associate professor of humanities, history and German. “It was a different world then,” he said.
The aged yearbook gives a glimpse into life in the 1920s, right in between World War I and the Great Depression. Females wore sailor-style dresses. Some of the men were older than the typical college student. Thomas hypothesized they had gone to war and returned to school. Their faces show a maturity atypical of youth.
Businesses have disappeared. There are advertisements for banks, laundry services and stores in Johnson City that are now simply shadows.
Drastic changes have also occurred in yearbooks in general.
“It’s funny what has changed and what hasn’t,” Dahlman said while flipping through the 114-page book.
Milligan was a tiny college. “The whole student body wasn’t very large. And that’s the whole faculty there,” Thomas said of the 11 faces on the page. Interestingly, he noted the faculty names were not listed.
“They didn’t need names — everybody knew who they were.”
“It (the yearbook) was for temporary use,” Oakes said. “They didn’t intend for this to serve as a historic piece.” Following this thinking, there are no pages in the annual for autographs.
Thomas also noticed The Buffalo has no alphabetical order. “I wonder how they determined order back then,” he said.
Like modern yearbooks, classes are listed in graduating order. Class presidents were listed on the front page of each class category. For example, Gretchen Hyder was the president of the senior class. She is pictured on the first page of student pictures.
Hyder is a family name in the area that Oakes is familiar with. “She (Gretchen) was well known. Her name floated around this area and around the college.” Samuel J. Hyder was the professor of mathematics and bursar (treasurer) of the college in 1922. “Sam Jack” as he is commonly called lived in the Hyder House, now on Milligan’s campus.
After the student pages and scattered around The Buffalo, one finds several pictures of campus. Recent yearbooks focus more on students and activities. Why all the fuss about buildings and Buffalo dam?
“I wonder if it’s because people didn’t travel as much, so there was a chance they wouldn’t get back here again,” Dahlman said. Maybe people in the past cherished yearbooks because they served as a reminder of good times.
Technology has certainly changed since 1922, and The Buffalo was a product of the technology of the time. “It seems to me that in1922, fun and whimsy was found mostly in words — in the parts you read,” Dahlman said. For example, instead of the words “in conclusion” to end the book, the senior class designers chose “in confusion.”
On a page titled “Heard on the campus and in the halls” is this quote: “Lucille — When you told him I was married, did he seem sorry? Depew — Yes, he said he was very sorry, though he didn’t know the man personally.”
“The whimsy was not in the photos, but how they treated the photos,” he said. “Now, humor is found in what you see.”
“It was truly amateur,” Dahlman said. “Amateur actually has the root to love something, to do something for its own sake. Professionals do it for the money. Amateurs do it for the love. And they loved it.”