Student yearbooks from Wake Forest University spanning the years 1903 to 1995 are now available on DigitalNC. The above image, from the 1967 volume of the Howler, was taken during the 1966 Homecoming football game against Clemson University.

In an earlier post I pointed to a page from the 1920 UNC student yearbook in which the senior “superlatives” were anything but superlative. It looks like UNC’s wasn’t the only yearbook staff with a mischievous streak. In the 1928 edition of The Howler, from Wake Forest University, I found this page, which lists everything from “Biggest Liar” to “Biggest Bum.”

Student yearbooks from Duke University are now accessible through DigitalNC. Browse editions of The Chanticleer from 1912 through 1995 in the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks collection. The image shown here is from the 1969 volume.

Student yearbooks from North Carolina Central University are now available on DigitalNC. The yearbooks, from the James E. Shepard Memorial Library, cover over a half-century of the school’s history, from 1939 to the present, with one early volume from 1929 also available. The image displayed here shows the yearbook staff from 1929.

Greensboro College student yearbooks from 1908 through 2005 are now available online as part of the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks collection. The online collection also includes several early volumes from Davenport College in Lenoir, N.C. Founded in 1855 as a Methodist-affiliated women’s college, Davenport operated for over 75 years before merging with Greensboro College in 1938.

Most schools represented in the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks collection on DigitalNC only published one yearbook per year, but in 1929, Appalachian State University (then the Appalachian State Teachers College) published two. One was for the regular school year, and the other was to “make available some interesting facts about our Alma Mater and to perpetuate some memories that are near and dear to us”. One of these memories was that of “Old Bob”. Old Bob was, as he is lovingly described at length in the eulogy on page 23, “always honored and respected by faculty, the student body, the sextons, workers, and especially the Board of Trustees, for his faithfulness and his honesty of purpose. He did away with every doubt as to whether a horse has intelligence.”

The 1967 edition of The Golden Bull, the Johnson C. Smith University student yearbook, celebrates the centennial of the school with an excellent history of the university. One of the artifacts featured in the historical sketch is this rather unassuming looking chair. In 1909, President William Howard Taft gave a speech to the faculty and students at the university. In surveying the setting prior to the President’s arrival, the Secret Service raised what must have been a delicate subject: the school did not have a chair large enough to hold the famously rotund President. The faculty quickly pooled their money and purchased an extra-large chair in time for Taft’s visit. The chair has remained at the school, known thereafter as the “President’s Chair.”

In the many thousands of yearbook photos now available through the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks collection, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more elegant group of students than the Greensboro College class of 1919. Yearbook photos were clearly an occasion that called for putting on your finest and striking a dramatic pose. Most of the women are pictured in fantastic hats and many of them are wearing furs. There are a few examples here, and many more in the full volume.

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.