This week has been a difficult one for our cadets, as they have been in quarantine for the last week talking at a distance but creating memories just the same as they wait out COVID-19.  Possibly conversation drifted to when the pandemic would be over, the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, the no-hitting season in baseball, George Floyd’s death, or events in the new Biden-Harris administration.

It is amazing to think that inside those walls of Jones cadets have talked, laughed, shared lifelong memories, and grown into adults for over one hundred years and counting.  Looking back one-hundred years, what might they have been talking about?  It was 1921, the Spanish Flu pandemic was at an end, WWI was over, and Wilson was leaving office.  On March 4th of that year Warren G. Harding was inaugurated, having been voted in by the first national election that included women voters.  In 1921, The Kid, staring Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp, was released, possibly they had seen it at the local Bijou.  In May of that year, race riots erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, marking “one of the worst incidents of mass racial violence in the United States.”  In July president Harding signed the congressional resolution declaring an end to WWI with Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and by August we heard the first baseball game ever broadcast on radio, maybe they heard the call.  They probably all were listening later that year when WJZ broadcast the World Series.  It was the New York Yankees vs. the New York Giants – the Giants won 5/3.  By the fall we were recognizing the cost of war, and President Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknowns on Armistice Day, November 11th at Arlington, National Cemetery.

Back at the New York Military Academy, the editor of the yearbook wrote, his hope that: “… a picture here, or a line there, may strike a chord of memory in the mind of the reader.  As time passes, we, and the classes which have preceded us, will look backward through the archway of memory to the happy days of our prep. school life.  If this volume can serve as the key to the land of yesterday, if it can call up the dear ghosts of the departed past, or brighten the glow of recollection in years to come, we shall feel that our efforts have not been wholly in vain.”  As the 2020-2021 academic year comes to an end– things have not changed — we hope the same.

-Christine C. McDonald, Dean of Academics