Unpersons

I was looking through my 1973 Nicolet High School yearbook:

https://archive.org/details/nicolet73f

Page 156 and up were the seniors (I was one in 1973) and they each got an individual picture but the underclassmen on pages 132 to 155 were by alphabetical groups (Nicolet had gotten rid of homerooms).

But starting on page 135 student pranksters showed up who wanted to appear multiple times in the yearbook.  But the yearbook staff fought back with their Sharpies and didn't give the pranksters any satisfaction.

My total count was 76 of these wacky jokesters.

Of course this has been done before, for example in Stalin's USSR:

https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/05/farewell-facebook.html

In previous yearbooks when pranking occurred the yearbook staff just labeled the students as repeats but left the picture as is.  There were also young people who extended certain digits, sometimes they would slip through the yearbook staff.
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This was 1973 not 1984 but yikes !

I can remember my Dad telling me about the panoramic cameras that were sometimes used to take full class pictures on a stepped riser in the olden days of the 20th century.  These cameras had a rotating lens/slit assembly that would start on one side of the frame and then progress through all the people finally closing the shutter at the other side. There is a wiki about panoramic photography that touches on this (it's meant more for buildings/landscapes):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoramic_photography

The class picture jokesters of the late 1940s would situate themselves at one side and then after the lens had rotated past them they'd run around the back of the riser and get in place on the other side before the camera had fully rotated, thus appearing twice in the same picture.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm