Early issues of The Golden Bull, the student yearbook from Johnson C. Smith University, are now available on DigitalNC. One of North Carolina’s early jazz bandleaders is pictured in the 1930 volume. Campbell Aurelius Tolbert, known professionally as “Skeets” Tolbert, grew up in Lincolntown, N.C. Tolbert’s professional career spanned the 1930s and 1940s, first as a backup musician and then as the leader of a group called The Gentlemen of Swing. The Gentlemen of Swing toured the east coast, and had a few of their songs captured on film, one of which, “No No Baby,” is available on YouTube.

Tolbert lived in Charlotte again in the late 1940s when he taught high school music before moving to Texas, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

Elon College used to have one of the most original mascots in college athletics: the Fighting Christian. Shown here in images at a football game from 1998 and congratulating a homecoming queen in 1985, the Fighting Christian didn’t look especially combative or overtly religious. The choice of mascot may have been inspired by the proximity to nearby Demon Deacons and Blue Devils. In 2000, when Elon’s athletic programs joined a higher division in the NCAA, the mascot was officially changed to the Phoenix, in recognition of the school’s recovery from a 1923 fire.

These images are from the Phi Psi Cli, the Elon University student yearbook. Ninety-four volumes of the yearbook, from 1913-2009, are available online as part of the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks project.

I found this great photo in the 1942 edition of The Quaker, the Guilford College student yearbook. These “nimble-footed coeds” were members of the college Modern Dance Club. It sounds like it was an interesting group. According to the yearbook, “the dancers practiced composing musical pantomimes of their own to a given rhythm, imitating scenes of campus life — a couple enfolded in each others arms, and sitting on a few moaning corpses, typified Guilford’s steady couple having a rendezvous in the graveyard.”

Alabama native Emmylou Harris spent time in North Carolina in the mid 1960s when she was attending the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on a drama scholarship. This photo, from the 1966 edition of Pine Needles, the UNC-Greensboro student yearbook, shows Harris with faculty member Arthur Dixon during rehearsals for The Tempest. Harris played the role of Miranda, daughter of the book-loving magician Prospero. It was apparently (according to her Wikipedia entry) at UNC-Greensboro that Harris began to pursue music seriously, eventually leaving school to try her luck in New York.

Eighty-eight volumes of The Quaker, the student yearbook of Guilford College, are now available online at DigitalNC.org. The yearbooks, part of the Friends Historical Collection at Guilford, range in date from 1911 to 2005.

I’ve just been looking through some of the early Chowan College (now Chowan University) yearbooks that are now available online. One thing stood out to me: the clubs. They had the standard clubs that you usually see on college campuses, like a glee club and an art club, but in the early days at Chowan, there were a whole lot more, like the Air Castle Builders Club, the Taffy Club, and the Canoodlers Club. The names changed every year, and all had comical pages in the school yearbook. Here are a few of my favorites: the Societa Italiana (1914), the Toasters’ Club (1916) and the Cooking Club (1917).