We’ve worked with the Greensboro History Museum to add more publications from Greensboro High School (now Grimsley High School) to DigitalNC. Included in this most recent batch are more of the school’s student newspaper, the High Life, from the 1920s-1960s. You’ll also find The Sage, one of the school’s literary publications, with issues from 1910-1918. Finally, there are three additional yearbooks – 1930, 1968, and 1969. Our partner provided this succinct history of the school’s yearbook and other publications:
Greensboro High School’s first annual was published in 1909 and named The Reflector in 1910. To help with the war effort during World War I, the school chose not to publish the yearbook in 1918, saving funds by using the May 1918 edition of its magazine, The Sage, as a smaller, abbreviated version. This continued even after the war, in 1919 and 1920, before publication of The Reflector resumed in 1921. In 1926, 1928, and 1929, there were both January and June editions, a result of adding mid-term graduating classes starting in 1926. By the mid-1920s, because of growing difficulties funding the yearbook, The Reflector‘s content was significantly reduced, and it went from hardcover to paperback in 1926 before publication ceased after 1930.
While the Depression did not fully impact Greensboro Senior High and its other programs until 1933, when a local bond-supplement failed to pass, the already financially strapped yearbook was affected and publication stopped. Despite interest in restarting an annual soon after financial stability for the Greensboro schools was restored in 1936 (via a successful bond vote), Principal A.P. Routh insisted that the yearbook have full and strong financial stability before being resumed, hence it did not occur then. The effort was further delayed a few years later by the significant impact of World War II on school life.
After the war, interest in publishing a yearbook continued to grow. The financial situation was finally stabilized, and the first edition of the newly named Whirligig was published in 1950 (after almost occurring in 1949), ), the yearbook that is still issued each year at Grimsley today. During the 19 years of no annuals (1931-1949), photos of seniors were published on souvenir photo sheets or in the year’s final issue of the school newspaper, High Life.
Click through to view all of the Greensboro / Grimsley High School publications available on DigitalNC.
