He wasn’t sure how he had come into possession of it, long ago, but he knew its contents pretty well.

At his suggestion, I read the essay on the Walking Club:

“These are troublous times, and the war does not leave untouched even so humble an organization as the Walking Club.”

They were truly “troublous times,” as a generation of young men fought – and died, many of them – in the trenches of Europe. It was called the Great War and later the War to End All Wars, which of course it wasn’t.

It was a time of technical innovation, and when the senior class, chaperoned by the Misses Howland and Brownell, visited Washington D.C. that spring, they saw in Ft. Myers “wireless stations, a hundred feet higher even than the Washington Monument, where every day at noon communication is held with Eiffel Tower, Paris.”

It was a time of sacrifice, as well, and the girls of Shipley, the yearbook reports, did their part. They raised over $8,100 in “Liberty Bonds” for the war effort during the year. (About $125,000 in today’s money!)

Waste was frowned upon, and girls who left food on their plates were punished “by a system of fines.”

And “In March, we had a lecture on French orphans, and almost every girl in the school (alone or with one or two others) volunteered to support a child for a year.”

The Walking Club, too, made its sacrifices: “Although we had to cut down on the number of luncheon parties, those that have taken place have been delightful, from both a social and a nutritive standpoint. The members taken into the club this year have shown a capacity for walks and waffles seldom, if ever, equaled in the history of the school.”