Photographs and Memories

NOT LONG BEFORE COMMENCEMENT EACH YEAR, Lawrenceville’s annual yearbook, the Olla Podrida, is distributed on campus to graduating Fifth Formers, faculty, and others. Named for a classic Spanish stew that combines a broad array of meats, beans, and vegetables, and translated literally as “rotten pot,” the phrase found its way into English beginning in the 1600s as a metaphor for a “diverse mixture of things or elements.”

The similar meaning of the French word potpourri is not coincidental; pot-pourri began as the literal French translation of the Spanish olla podrida dish, although it evolved as a French shorthand for the now familiar mixture of fragrant dried plant materials. It is not recorded anywhere why the first publishers of Lawrenceville’s yearbook chose this tongue-in-cheek title, but the first few issues of the annual were often introduced lightheartedly as if describing a tasty dish prepared for the reader.

The tradition of academic yearbooks began as personal scrapbooks in the late 17th century among the oldest established schools in the northeastern American colonies. Students were encouraged to collect items from their school life as memorabilia and to sign one another’s books with poems, comments, and quotations. In 1806, Yale University published the first official academic yearbook in the United States, containing information about the school year, the students, and the faculty. It would become the model for those that followed.

Lawrenceville’s Olla Podrida was published for the first time in 1885, two years after the reorganization of the School under the John Cleve Green Foundation. The initial, paper-bound issue was eighty pages long, of which thirteen pages were advertisements for local businesses of interest to schoolboys or their parents. Information in the volume included the annual school calendar; lists of school founders, trustees, and faculty; and names of students who had attended in both the 1883-84 and 1884-85 school years following the reorganization.

Although there was an engraved image of the newly built Memorial Hall in that first issue, the Circle Houses were not yet complete, so the House directory included engraved drawings only of Hamill House and two Main Street houses no longer used today as student residences. Athletics and clubs, then as now, were popular and took up more than a quarter of the volume with detailed rules, statistics, and student-drawn illustrations. The issue also included detailed Retrospectives of 1883-84 and 1884-85, giving a timeline of notable campus events.

It didn’t take long after the first edition was published for the more casual “Olla Pod” moniker to catch on, and the new yearbook quickly evolved, too. The first class and team photographs appeared in 1888 and by 1891, the book was bound for the first time in hardcover and included club photos as well as class histories for all grades. However, photographs were provided only for those teams or organizations able to pay for their inclusion.

The yearbook price was increased from 75 cents to one dollar (a jump from $24.46 to $32.62 in 2023 dollars) in 1892 after the Olla Podrida board argued that the yearbook would be more affordable for a student under the new flat fee. Thus, the existing 35-cent fee (today’s $11.42) previously charged to all students to have their names included in the book was waived.

By 1895, group House photos had been introduced, although the primary form of artwork for the yearbook continued to be drawings submitted by students. Illustrations were initially drawn for every House, sport, and club, but by the late 1920s, the hand-drawn illustrations were generally reserved for the cover pages of various sections of the yearbook.

Drawings were solicited from all students, and by 1920, the student who had the most sketches selected for use earned a leather-bound copy of the yearbook for himself. Surprisingly – or perhaps not –many of the illustrations during the days when Lawrenceville was still an all-male school featured attractive young ladies, from Gibson girls wielding golf clubs to glamorous flappers in the Roaring Twenties.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the fundamental contents of the Olla Podrida became somewhat standardized and focused largely on providing official information. The faculty section expanded significantly to include not only faculty photos, but a detailed overview of all their role at Lawrenceville beginning from the year in which each had been appointed: heads of houses, coaches, and administrators, for example. In keeping with a Lawrenceville tradition, from 1922 until 1969, faculty members were not listed alphabetically but by order of faculty appointment, a custom still reflected in the order of faculty procession at formal ceremonies such as Commencement.

Prior to World War II, Fifth Formers – first consistently pictured with individual senior photographs in 1906 – during this era had an entire pages to themselves with a formal portrait, a candid photo, details of all their activities and associations at Lawrenceville, and an essay written by the yearbook staff describing their personalities or sharing stories. House histories summarizing the events of a given year were introduced in 1910 and would remain a prominent part of the yearbook until 1972.

Perhaps the most revolutionary issues of the Olla Podrida are those of the 1970s, where almost every year brought an experimental change to what had come before. The 1970 Olla Pod became more visual, introducing large candid photos for the graduating class and faculty, rather than the traditional portraits.

In 1971, the Olla Podrida again broke tradition and printed the annual not as a single volume but as three different volumes boxed together, a format repeated in 1973. The move was driven in part by a dilemma that had challenged Olla Podrida editors since the beginning: how to document spring activities and yet have the yearbook complete by Commencement. For decades, the solution had been to include spring sports and activities in the following year’s edition, but by the 1960s, editors began to print spring information as paper supplements to be inserted in the back of the correct yearbook at a later date or, in some cases, bound separately, well into the 1990s. Today’s more rapid publication technology allows at least the spring sports to be included, although Commencement itself remains too late for publication.

Following the avant-garde approach of the previous decade, the 1980s editions of the Olla Podrida marked a move toward today’s format. Group photos of academic and professional staff departments replaced individual faculty portraits, while technological advances and the decreased expense of color printing have also allowed the yearbook to be printed fully in color since 2006.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the modern Olla Podrida are the approximately one hundred pages of congratulatory family ads in the back of the yearbook. While sponsors have always been part of the publication, ads placed by families to honor their graduates have almost completely replaced those of businesses. Designed by the Olla Podrida staff using images and words provided by the families, the family ads have proven financially successful; revenue from the ads, combined with the school-provided baseline budget, permit the $120 Olla Podrida to be provided free of charge to all two-hundred graduates and to faculty.

In many ways, the line from the early scrapbook-style annuals upon which early yearbooks were based to the 21stcentury Olla Podrida remains clear. Fifth Formers’ entries continue to focus on relationships, including lengthy “thank yous” to friends, family, and faculty; quotes and reminiscences; and photo montages of pals who shared their special Lawrenceville years. n

For more information on leaving a bequest to Lawrenceville or for other planned giving opportunities, or if you have included Lawrenceville in your will but have not yet informed the School, please contact Sean Grieve at the Lawrenceville Office of Planned Giving at 215-237-3899 or sgrieve@lawrenceville.org, or go to lawrenceville.giftplans.org.