Friday Flashback #424

The Class of 1988 is long gone from Staples High School.

Those guys and girls are in their mid-50s now. They’re well into their careers. Many look forward to retiring; some already may have.

Their kids are mostly in high school or college. One or two of those ’88 grads might be grandparents.

They are so different, you’d think, from high school students today.

They took notes in notebooks, not on laptops. They used payphones, not cellphones. Their 1-story school was divided into 9 “buildings”; Staples today is 3 stories, with elevators.

Yet a look at a recently unearthed “video yearbook” from 1988 shows how little has really changed.

Hairstyles and clothes are not wildly different. The gym and auditorium have hardly been touched. Laddie Lawrence is still coaching.

And high school kids celebrate Homecoming, strut through the halls and flirt the same way in 2024 as in 1988.

Once upon a time, people buried time capsules so that future generations could see how they lived.

Now we’ve got video evidence of it.

Complete with a soundtrack that does not sound out of place, nearly 4 decades later.

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