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El Paso's
Austin High School
1943 Yearbook

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox

At first glance, the old high school annual looks like any vintage yearbook.

In the traditional style of secondary school publications, it has a puffed, embossed cover. The rope-like typeface, once gilt-covered, says “Round Up.” The Western motive continues with an artful image of a saddled horse bowing its head as if nosing a high-crowned cowboy hat. Nearby is a campfire with red flames.

Everything matches what you might expect from an annual produced in El Paso, which is about as western as you can get in Texas. But then the eye catches a fainter image above the campfire – the silhouette of a young serviceman wearing a dress uniform cap. Finally, in a font left over from the Art Deco days of the previous decade, is the year this publication covers: 1943.

Any browser who might be a little slow in grasping the symbolism of the rider-less horse need look no further than pages five and six, a two-page spread dominated by a large red, white and blue V. Inside that V, as in V for Victory, are photos and the names of eight young men, along with the names of four others lacking photos. All graduates of El Paso’s Austin High School. All killed in action or missing in action in a war that for the second time that century had engulfed the world.

One Austin High grad had died at Hickman Field when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Another was missing and presumed dead at Clark Field, in the Phillipines. Someone else was missing in Bataan.

“We, the staff, dedicate this Round-Up as a loving tribute to those Austin High students who have made the Supreme Sacrifice, to those on our far-flung battle fronts, and to all others training to serve their country, grimly determined that the liberties for which they fight ‘shall not perish from the earth,’” one of the teenager members of the school’s annual team wrote for this page.

In addition to photos of former Austin High students who had already died in the war, the double-spread feature includes a dozen columns of small-print type listing the names of other graduates (and likely, some dropouts) who had enlisted or had been drafted into the service.

For a publication put out by a bunch of kids finally through with the compulsory part of their education, the tone of the yearbook is decidedly staid. A dozen teenagers who could have been in college that year, all from Austin High, were dead or missing. And likely some of those who bought a copy of the 1943 annual would die before World War II ended. Of course, any high school annual produced during the war at any of the nation’s 28,000 high schools would have a similar look and feel, but El Paso was different.

The U.S. Army had been a presence in the City of the Pass since 1848. Horseback soldiers stationed at Fort Bliss had protected the town for nearly a century, first from hostile Indians and later, Mexican bandits. Even during the early years of World War II, companies of soon-to-be-permanently-dismounted cavalry still paraded at the post every Sunday.

Earlier in the war, as Americans tried to recover from the shock of losing some 3,000 sailors and soldiers at Pearl Harbor, people in El Paso worried that the Japanese might try to invade the U.S. via the relatively unprotected shores of Mexico. Nervous families kept their larders stocked with as many extra staples as their rationing stamps would allow them to buy, and survival-minded heads of households got into the habit of making sure they always had a full tank of gas before they went to bed at night.

Obviously, the war never touched El Paso as directly has some had feared early on, but the impact of the global conflict could be felt by practically everyone in the mountain-flanked city of 100,000.

Printed on shiny coated stock that has endured through subsequent American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East and which should last for generations more, the Round-Up chonicles what life was like on the home front.

In addition to those El Paso high schoolers who entered the military, scores of other students did their part to support the war effort. Kids from Austin High collected more scrap metal – 130 tons -- than any other school in town.

Austin High mustered five R.O.T.C. companies that year. The school also had a co-ed Victory Corps, part of the national High School Victory Corps organized on Sept. 25, 1942.

The objective of the federally run program was to “foster and promote” career counseling for “critical services and occupations,” as well as “wartime citizenship; physical fitness; military drill; competence in sciences and mathematics; preflight training…; pre-induction training for critical occupations; and community services.”

In the section devoted to Corps activities at the school, one of the students wrote: “There is a war to be won; a war for survival; a war which demands unstinted work and sacrifice and devotion of every one of us.”




© Mike Cox - October 9, 2014 column
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