SEQUIM — Sequim High School seniors David Richards and Harrison Mitchell, who teamed up to produce a 12-minute video with interviews of alumni dating back to the class of 1939, learned from the sources how times have changed.
The days of extreme freshmen hazing, getting the big paddle as punishment for misbehaving in school and drinking beer by the keg atop school buildings are long gone, the two seniors in Charles Kleinberg’s multimedia class learned straight from the sources and their lucid memories.
Richards and Mitchell produced the video, which includes a string of class photos, past and present, which will be presented for the first time at a 1:30 p.m. assembly today celebrating the high school’s centennial celebration at the school gym, 601 N. Sequim Ave.
The two worked on the video two weeks before Christmas break, using pocket-sized Flip video cameras to record the interviews and school computers to edit them.
Among the history they learned: The military took occupancy of the school for up to three months during the early days of World War II.
“That was surprising,” Richards said.
The oldest interviewee was Cliff Vining, 89, a volunteer at Sequim Food Bank. Vining graduated from Sequim High School in 1939.
Bob Clark, class of 1946, recalls in the video how freshmen boys were hazed.
They were made to dress as girls, even made to push peanuts across the stage with their noses while wearing a skirt.
Vining remembered students being swatted with paddles for bad behavior in school.
Another graduate recalled hoisting a beer keg up to the roof of one of the school buildings for a graduation party.
“It was the ’70s,” Mitchell said, explaining it away with a smile and a shrug.
“You learn that school has definitely changed when you get face to face.”
Students can’t even climb on the roof today, let alone drink beer, they said.
And corporal punishment? Forget about it.
“The difference is you couldn’t get away with paddling today,” Richards said.
The biggest cultural difference was how many former students once labored on the Sequim-Dungeness Valley’s more than 100 dairy farms prior to the 1960s, instead of the more modern-day jobs of working in retail stores or flipping burgers.
Mitchell and Richards said it was tough to edit down more than two hours of interviews to less than 12 minutes and include photos, but they learned that those were some of the tough calls video editors have to make.
Both are music students in Jazz Band and hope to attend college.
Richards hopes to attend Seattle Pacific University to study music technology — the guy behind the soundboard, as he put it — and Mitchell wants to study at Brigham Young University in Idaho and teach music education after he completes his mission with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Associated Student Body needed help in producing the video for the centennial celebration, and Kleinberg called on Richards and Mitchell, whom he described as two of his best students.
“I’m proud of the video,” Kleinberg said. “I wanted two of my top students to do it.
“It was important because you are going to have a local audience.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
