Zephyrus Articles Through History, Part III

One year ago: An in-depth section was devoted to the upcoming end of the year 2012, and, more importantly, the apocalypse that many assumed would follow. The section included helpful information like how the end of the world would play out and how to survive the upcoming post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Five years ago: An opinionated sports piece explained the rules of the popular Harry Potter sport Quidditch, and tried to persuade the reader that Edina should start its own real-life Quidditch team. The article ignores glaring problems in the very premise of Quidditch, such as the hyper-violence of the sport and the fact that only one player actually matters to winning the game.

Ten years ago: This issue featured a Q&A with Jesse McManus, a student who published a fifty-page comic book, which was sold at local bookstores such as Wild Rumpus. He said in the interview that he planned to make a living on cartooning. The link contained in his article still leads to an active website, displaying the bizarre drawings and cartoons he created: http://www.heyfu.com/index.html

Twenty-five years ago: A piece delved into the interesting history of Helga O’Brien, a counseling office secretary at Edina High School for twenty years. She was born in Czechoslovakia and was the junior national fencing champion there before she and her family were forced to leave by Russian soldiers in 1945. She lived in West Germany for a time, then moved to Chicago. In the interview she recalled how her European friends felt that Americans are without a heart or feelings.

Fifty years ago: An article about Latin class exposed some bizarre happenings in that class a half-century ago. Apparently, students were allowed to “Assassinate” or “Crucify” each other and each month a new boy in the class was elected the queen. Like other language classes that have students choose a name in the language they are studying, Latin students in this time period were also given a name. Instead of choosing it, however, it was forced upon them based on an aspect of their personality that the class found especially visible, such as cloudy thought (Neb), or a tendency to discuss romance novels (Fer-lab).

Seventy three years ago: Zephyrus, then called Edina-Morningside BLUE and GOLD ran side-by side opinion pieces about World War II. Both of them took a strongly America-first stance, listing bloodshed, economic problems, and isolationism as reasons for staying out of the war. On the same page was a poem about snow, a letter to the editor about a mother who beat her son, and a use of the word “gay” to mean happy.