The one thing many students wait for in June (besides the end of the school year) is the WHS Weather Vane yearbook. Nothing is better than flipping through the book to see your friends’ photos and reading all of the senior quotes. But, does anyone know how much work really goes into putting together our yearbook? 

WHS Guidance Counselor Ryan McGarrigan and Special Education Teacher Paulette DelRosso are the two advisers of Yearbook Club, which meets every Tuesday and Thursday from 3 to 4:30 p.m. starting mid-October to plan and design the yearbook. During the previous school year, they hired a sketch artist who designed the cover over the summer for the next yearbook. 

Currently, there are about 10 students involved in putting together the yearbook. “The most difficult part is probably the fact that it’s an after-school activity,” said Mr. McGarrigan, who has been working on the Weather Vane for 13 years. “We have a core group who come each week, and there are some students that come in and out.” Some of the students in the club are new and others have been doing it since their freshman year, which can cause difficulties due to the varying levels of experience.

WHS junior Jason Lara-Rodriguez was on the yearbook committee in eighth grade at EIS and is currently the president of Yearbook Club at WHS. “I feel like it’s a big commitment since you have to gather the pictures together in one book and we have [a lot of] deadlines,” explained Lara-Rodriguez.

In recent years, there have been several changes to the look of the Weather Vane. While McGarrigan has been co-adviser, the book went from being partially in color to entirely in color, which McGarrigan feels “makes it look more vibrant and more interesting.”

Overall, the yearbooks made today are much different from the yearbooks 50 years ago. The 1970 edition of the yearbook is quite political, likely because it came out during the Vietnam War right before the end of the draft. 

The 1970 yearbook is filled with mostly black and white photographs and quotes such as, “The true protest is beauty” and quotes about Woodstock saying, “Maybe the older generation did wrong things, but at least they did not stand out in the rain and sleep on an open farm along with 400,000 other people; sometimes I wonder what is wrong with our generation.” It also includes pictures of racial injustice, students smoking, police brutality and soldiers in Vietnam.

Even though the yearbook has become much less political and our school has changed a lot, there are many similarities to past editions, such as senior superlatives and quotes, candid pictures of students in classrooms and clubs and sports pages.

The WHS yearbook takes a picture of what each year is like and is a great way to view the history of WHS. It’s thanks to the Yearbook Club that we get to enjoy it each year.