Zephyrus Articles Through History: Part IV

One year ago: A brave Zephyrus news editor ventured to talk to the weather demon, Milton, about what weather we could expect for the upcoming year. Although the predictions were somewhat vague, some of the more notable hints were that there would be drought, heat-waves, and plagues of locust and frog.

Five years ago: A bizarrely short four-page issue of Zephyrus featured an opinion piece complaining about complaining. It stated that the United States economy and educational system were not as bad as many made it seem, an unlikely opinion in January 2009 while the U.S. was in recession.

Ten years ago: Four Edina High School students with a passion for building and detonating explosives were featured in an article. The students, who couldn’t be named for legal reasons, weren’t just messing around with roman candles. They used sulfur, potassium nitrate, aluminum, carbon, sugar, and a microwave to make pyrotechnics so powerful that they had to take cover so that they “don’t end up losing a limb when the bomb goes off.” Although the activities were suggested to be safe, the pyrotechnicians had accidentally been burnt, cut, and inhaled toxic fumes.

Twenty-five years ago: In an especially politically charged issue, two separate opinion articles dealt with topics that were then current events but are now historical. One argued that the Supreme Court case, Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier, was detrimental to free speech and that students needed to have full control of what went into or got pulled from student publications. The other reported on the then-recent diplomatic meeting between the US and the USSR which pertained to the very real possibility of nuclear armageddon. The writer praised the decision made at the meeting to remove the more than 2,600 nuclear weapons from Europe, but said that it was but a step in the right direction to a less nuclearly-dangerous world. The writer also bizarrely stated that President Reagan was planning some sort of war in space against the Soviets.

Fifty years ago: An article congratulated student Kea van der Ziel for winning Edina’s 1964 Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow. Ziel scored the highest in Edina in the test, which another source revealed was only open to women.

Sixty-eight years ago: An article featured a speech to the middle school entitled, “The story of ‘G’ man.” The article started out by recording how the speaker, Mr. Grathwell, had praised the students, then disconnectedly jumped to the fact that eighteen people are murdered every day. It went on to report how the FBI had foiled a plan to bomb the Panama Canal, then ended with a short biography of Grathwell’s life.