1936 El Solano Yearbook

The 1936 Santa Paula High School El Solano Yearbook is now online! This edition of the El Solano was unusual in that it was spiral bound. This made the scanning of the pages easier, as the binding wasn't a concern, but many of the pages extended past the metal spiral and this made it difficult to scan the entire page. For the most part though, nothing significant was lost.

The pages were textured and this tended to cause some problems with the sharpness of the image scans. The images were "re-sharpened" digitally, but show some moiré patterns here and there due to the scanning and editing process. Oddly, many of the actual photographs were more blurry than in earlier yearbooks.

Containing very little prose (although there is an interesting bit of poetry on page 62 that appears to describe every member of the senior class), the yearbook contains mainly photographs. It is also interesting in that it shows some of the last pictures of the "second" Santa Paula High School building, a two story classical structure that was damaged during an earthquake in the early 1930's and torn down later that decade. Page 2 shows a couple of good photos of the building.

Although the yearbook was published a few years before World War II, there are signs of the developing conflict. One of the photos shows a student reading a textbook page on "The Spread of Dictatorship 1936" and the same page has a paragraph on "The Need for Patriotism" The yearbook also contains a number of blue "Art" pages which are in the Art Deco style of the period. The graphic on page 21 by Manual Victoria is particularly interesting in that it contains a dirigible flying above a stylized cityscape. The Hindenburg disaster occurred the next year and signaled the end of the huge lighter than air ships.