Last week I had the opportunity to visit with Leo Schumaker, a Bellingham disc jockey/producer whose weekly radio program, “Bluesland,” airs on KMRE 88.3 FM (his podcast is on Facebook at LeosBluesland). Some months ago, Leo had approached me about an doing an interview based on my podcast series entitled “The Mountain Runners” — a three episode telling of the unlikely story of America’s first “adventure race” from Bellingham to the top of Mount Baker and back that took place between 1911 and 1913. As much as I was flattered by Leo’s request, I demurred, recommending instead that he contact the documentary film makers/historians who were the interview subjects for my series.

In the course of our phone conversation, Leo and I discovered that we had not only spent a part of our youth in San Jose, California, but had graduated from the same high school in 1969. When we finally got together last week in downtown Mount Vernon, I brought along a copy of the 1969 “Delian,” our high school yearbook. We marveled not only at how young we had been more than half a century ago, but how much the world had changed in that time. For one thing, there was not a single photo in the entire yearbook that showed someone gazing into a hand held device.

It would only be a matter of weeks following the receipt of our high school diplomas when humankind would first step onto the surface of the Moon, ushering in the age of integrated circuits and the digital technologies that our grandchildren take for granted in the second decade of the 21st century. In the summer of ’69, cell phones would have been the stuff of science fiction, not the mundane accessories of our daily lives that barely leave our hands.

It was this sort of musing that made me pay special attention to a display of yearbooks at the Anacortes Museum. One in particular caught my eye: the 1934 “Rhododendron.” What was most immediately remarkable about it was its cover, which appropriately for the Pacific Northwest was fashioned from wood rather than paper. Although the binding had faded a bit over just shy of nine decades, the cover itself, engraved in bright blue lettering, didn’t seem to have aged at all. I had never seen any yearbook like it, and opening it was like unsealing a wood grained time capsule into which I peered briefly at the life of its owner, Jeannette Wilson.

Just inside the yearbook cover was a newspaper clipping with the images of Anacortes High School’s Grand Honor Roll Students of the Class of ’34, with Jeannette’s picture at the top left corner. She was obviously an accomplished student, with an average grade point of 90.3 percent in “Scientific” courses. Leading the honor roll list was classmate Robert Melvin Newell, with an impressive GPA of 95.7 percent, and who not surprisingly had been chosen as the class valedictorian. He was followed by William V. Wells, whose GPA of 94.8 percent earned him the honor of “salutatorian” (Do high schools even hand out such honors in the 21st century?).

I was struck by the calm, unassuming, and straightforward gaze that met mine in Jeannette’s photo — one of five accomplished young women among the nine honor roll graduates that year. What I found especially touching, however, were the comments made by another of her fellow honorees, one Byron (Bud) Norman. Judging from his inscription in her yearbook, she had apparently instructed him to “Write a lot in this annual,” which he obviously took to heart in his tribute to his classmate. Were they sweethearts? It’s hard to say, since teenage romance was cloaked in a bit more restrained innocence “back in the day.” But it’s clear that Byron Norman thought highly of Ms. Wilson, judging by the words he wrote in an emoji-free cursive.

Dear Jeannette,

During my acquaintance with you, which has been since the eighth grade, I have known you to be an industrious and most capable student, as well as a good debater. One accomplishment of yours which I shall remember for a long time is the self-composed poem, by you, of some of your follow debaters trip(s) to Friday Harbor, which you orated several times in fine style.

Naturally, my wish for you is for happiness, luck, and multi-success.

Cordially —

Byron (Bud) Norman

“Orated in fine style” may seem a rather stilted turn of phrase, but that’s how we spoke nearly a century ago. I recall a visit from my grandmother during a summer off from college, when upon viewing my long hair and beard she commented, with a beatific smile, “Oh, Mikey…I am so impressed with your hirsute adornments.” I blush to say that, having read a lot of Dickens in my youth, her choice of vocabulary was completely understandable to me, however anachronistic. But we just don’t talk like that anymore.

Following Jeannette Wilson’s “order,” Byron made other notes as well in her yearbook. He apparently had interviewed his class valedictorian and salutatorian, having penned his byline to their acknowledgements. His salute to Robert Melvin Newell makes a pointed reference to the economic travails that the Class of ’34 faced upon matriculation, with all the optimism you would expect from an 18 year old facing the world with high school diploma in hand.

“Yessir, in spite of the four long years of depression in the United States, my grades seem to have acted contrary to stock market tactics, so here I am, on top of the roost,” explained Valedictorian Robert Melvin Newell.”

In the assessment of his class salutatorian (“Industrious, ambitious, tactful, diligent: such words indicate the presence of William V. Wells…”), Byron Norman concluded his tribute to both Wells and Newell with the following words:

So, with the Class of 1934 supplying two men like these to the world, our country will be assured of a statesman capable of starting a war, and a sailor capable of fighting it for him.

You can’t open the bound time capsule of a high school yearbook without wondering about the lives forever preserved in the amber of photos and inscriptions. Did Jeannette Wilson go on to the “mutli-success” wished for her by her admiring classmate — especially given the more circumscribed opportunities that existed for even the most accomplished young women in the third decade of the 20th century? Did Jeannette and Byron remain friends? And what of the “statesman capable of starting a war, and a sailor capable of fighting it for him.”?

In just a little more than seven years after the Anacortes High School Class of ’34 walked off the commencement stage, the world would be engulfed in global war, and Robert Newell, William Wells, Jeannette Wilson, and Byron Norman would likely be a quarter century old. Whatever their career paths and life journeys, they would, like every other American of their time, be profoundly affected by World War II. If, as Byron Norman’s remarks about his classmates proved prescient, William Wells could very well have been in combat in the Pacific theater, and Robert Newell could have been preparing for leadership in the emerging “Pax Americana” that followed the war’s end. But for one brief shining moment in 1934, in the opening of a wood grained time capsule, anything was possible.