I don't even know if any JDHS people read this blog, but found: Ort Smith
Someone in my high school's dusty past created a fake student named "Ort Smith" and his photo -- always taken with the camera facing the light so his face was in shadow -- showed up in the yearbook every year. I don't know exactly when he "attended," but the yearbook staff figured he started showing up in the 1970s, sometimes in the class sections of portrait photos, sometimes as an otherwise unidentifiable figure or somebody's torso in a candid action snapshot: "John Doe (l.) and Ort Smith (r.) mix compounds over a bunsen burner" or "Jane Doe and Ort Smith dance the night away at Homecoming."
When I was a senior and working for the yearbook, we were told that Ort Smith wasn't going to be allowed in the yearbook ever again after that year. I forget if it was an institutional decision -- though the school wasn't too heavy-handed with the yearbook -- or if the staff wanted to honor the art teacher, who had been with the school since it opened and who was retiring with our class's graduation. Whatever the reason, we "graduated" Ort Smith and put a portrait cartoon of him in as a senior. He was wearing a mortarboard down low over his forehead, wore aviator type sunglasses, and was drawing a magician's cape over his nose and mouth. Every senior was allowed to write a pithy little comment to be printed next to their portrait photo that year, and Ort Smith wrote something about how happy he was to be permitted to finally graduate.
I don't know if he showed up in later yearbooks. My sister graduated two years after I did, but even if I looked for Ort Smith I don't recall if he was in there.
Anyway, Ort Smith's on Facebook now. Whoever created the Facebook page put him in the JDHS Class of 1977.
When I was a senior and working for the yearbook, we were told that Ort Smith wasn't going to be allowed in the yearbook ever again after that year. I forget if it was an institutional decision -- though the school wasn't too heavy-handed with the yearbook -- or if the staff wanted to honor the art teacher, who had been with the school since it opened and who was retiring with our class's graduation. Whatever the reason, we "graduated" Ort Smith and put a portrait cartoon of him in as a senior. He was wearing a mortarboard down low over his forehead, wore aviator type sunglasses, and was drawing a magician's cape over his nose and mouth. Every senior was allowed to write a pithy little comment to be printed next to their portrait photo that year, and Ort Smith wrote something about how happy he was to be permitted to finally graduate.
I don't know if he showed up in later yearbooks. My sister graduated two years after I did, but even if I looked for Ort Smith I don't recall if he was in there.
Anyway, Ort Smith's on Facebook now. Whoever created the Facebook page put him in the JDHS Class of 1977.