After months of work done by the dedicated yearbook staff, led by Mr. Orozco and Ms. Wright, the 2024 yearbook will make its debut on May 21st, the second to last day of school. Designing and producing the Albuquerque Academy yearbook has been a long lasting tradition within our school. 50 years ago, however, this tradition was broken. The 2024 yearbook, titled “On the Record,” seeks to tell the story.
Many influential events took place 50 years ago in the year 1974. It was the year girls were first admitted and integrated into the Albuquerque Academy community, Richard Nixon resigned from his presidency following the Watergate scandal, and Bob Dylan’s album Planet Waves became his first album to hit number one on the Billboard Album chart. What did not come of the year 1974, however, was the Albuquerque Academy yearbook.
To explain this mysterious glitch, the 2024 yearbook writing team, led by Ms.Wright, began their quest by reviewing an Advocate article written by David Anderson ‘74 on the incident 50 years ago. He wrote that “there was a lack of time and a lack of competent workers.” By the yearbook’s due date, “not a single page had been completed.”
This critique, however, still didn’t explain why the students and teachers failed to publish the book. So, the team dug deeper. After an email interview with former student Randy Sanders ‘75, they discovered a complication with the yearbook vendor who was in charge of printing the book. Sanders said that the “vendors were not something the students directly worked with.” He explained that “either the schedule was mixed up or they went out of business.”
Mike Wiener ‘75 had a different theory. He blames the neglect on the students, claiming that many of the yearbook staff at the time started out strong, “but then they transferred or something.” He said ultimately, “the club lost all its momentum.” Another student confirmed this story. Mike Conklin ‘75 described to the yearbook team that “one of the students was going to run it,” although like Mike Wiener said, the student “left the school halfway through [the school year]…and no one else picked it up.”
Between the absence of student involvement and a possible mix-up with the yearbook vendor, the yearbook was never published, and the Albuquerque Academy students and staff of 1974 will be forever missing from the written and visual record we call a yearbook. Luckily for the 2024 Albuquerque Academy community, this is not the case.
With a detailed open spread of the tale of the lost yearbook and a unique senior section titled “Off the Record,” featuring vinyl albums picked by the class of 2024, this year’s yearbook not only provides a found narrative for the Academy community of 1974, but also creatively showcases the Academy community of 2024.
