Those of us who had older brothers and sisters were somewhat aware of the existence of Poly and Handley. In fact, some of us dated and even married some members of those classes. However, those of us not having older siblings were only aware of their existence if a girl we liked was unavailable because she was dating someone from one of these other schools. It was always a bit confusing to me.
Fine reunion sites have proliferated over the past few years and continue to improve as time passes. Some of those old questions are increasingly being answered through the availability of this additional information. We tend to have good recall of our own years of attendance but understandably, none at all of the years that just preceded or followed our own.
I’ve long been curious about the particulars of how EHHS came to be with respect to its population having originally been drawn from both Poly and Handley. Influences from both of those schools were palpable when we were there, but in my mind, more strongly from Handley.
The pictures show the 1959 graduating classes from both Poly and Handley, the last graduating classes of both of those schools before the effects of EH were felt. In them, you can clearly see the relative sizes of the 2 schools, 424 Poly seniors; 74 Handley seniors. All of the Handley juniors, about 60 by George Bradford’s count, and about 85 Poly juniors were assigned to Eastern Hills as its first graduating class…the Class of 1960. A number of names in both of these classes are familiar to me and most likely older siblings of many of our classmates.
HQ scans of these individual yearbook pages can be found on the 1959 class sites, POLY and HANDLEY.
Clearly Poly was the principal donor school for the first EHHS classes, contributing about 20% of its 1959 population to EH. And it appears that the Handley population may have been in some decline from 74 (1959 Sr.) to 60 (1959 Jr.that became part of the EH Class of 1960)
Adios
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