Wednesday, April 8, 2009

THe B.H.S. Spotlight


-click to enlarge-

One of the most anticipated events of the week was the Thursday morning local publication and on the last inside page, the 'spotlight'.

Cars stopped in front of the post office and kids ran in to get the paper on those days. They were usually reading it on the run going back to the car for the trip to school.

As shown in the top photo, it had pertinent information on students that was noteworthy.

The most important thing it seems, however, was the "snooper" column on what was happening on the dating scene. Snooper, aka "sniper snooper" was never identified until the end of the school year and then had some couples approaching him or her asking for clarification on some of the reporting.

From the blog staff, a belated "job well done" to all of the staff and snoopers of the Spotlight.
_______________________________

From the Betty Massengill collection.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know exactly how long the Snooper tradition lasted at BHS but do know it was at least early 40's thru 1960.

Anonymous said...

The class of '58 will remember "Psssst, Mary!", our Snooper.

Anonymous said...

Wallis, or David; What were "smear Artists", pray tell????

Anonymous said...

Bets heck out of me,,David do you know? I only remember us typing.
Wallis

Carl Houston said...

Legend has it that the snooper reporting may have helped lead to disaster once. In the 40s a good place for couples to park and smooch was the old North Bridge. It was located on N Second Street about a mile north of the brickyard. North Second was the main highway (45) until about 1938 and the bridge was built across a large creek.
Information on dating including reports from Snooper was that some Booneville girls were visiting the bridge with Baldwyn boys, so some Booneville guys burned it down.

Anonymous said...

Carl where do you get all these rediculos tales? The north bridge was there for many years and may probably still be there.

Carl Houston said...

Q. "Carl where do you get all these rediculos tales?"

A. Some of the "ridiculous" stuff is in print. This was from Simon's "Do it All Over Again" book and from stories I heard at Wheeler High School from Mr. Howard Long and others.

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work, Carl. We appreciate all your stories and photos.

Anonymous said...

Carl, is there any way you can install spell check on the blog? It's greatly needed!

Duke said...

SO FAR, I'VE SEEN NOTHING ON THE BLOG THAT SEEMED "REDICULOS" WHAT I SEE IS A REFLECTION OF MY PAST AND THE REALLY GREAT PEOPLE I GREW UP WITH, I SAY "DON'T CHANGE A THING" !!!

JOHN MELVIN DUKE

PS AND I DON'T MIND SIGNING MY NAME.

Carl Houston said...

Many thanks to all the readers of the blog whether they choose to remain anonymous or not.

There is a spell check already in place unless you are using Opera as your browser. I use Mozilla Firefox and it works fine with it. I will assume that the IE7 browser does as well, or did the last time I used it, long ago.

To test your spelling check, deliberately misspell a word while writing a comment in this box. If the word is underlined in red, it is either not recognized as a common word or it is spelled incorrectly. When you see a red line under the word, right click on it for the correct spelling.

Thanks, all posters. We would like to know who you are, but it isn't necessary.....

Milton said...

Carl, of the five browsers I have on board, only FireFox has a built-in spell checker.
There is a little plugin you can download for Internet Explorer called "ieSpell" which works well.

Keep up the great work. mc

Carl Houston said...

OK, Milton. Thanks for the info. I have used Firefox for years and as far as I'm concerned, it has 'em all beat for speed, reliability, and features like add-on programs such as "Download Helper" which allows a copy of videos from YouTube and other sites to be saved to the hard drive with just a click.

The only thing I have found that will not work in it was Google Accelerator which has since been discontinued anyway.

Carl Houston said...

And by the way; Google Chrome is useless. Don't even bother to download it!

Paul Roper said...

The north bridge is, in fact, still there. It was rebuilt and widened and updated over the last 50-60 years, so rediculos is correct in a way.
Before looking simple, some folks should analyze fact when speaking about other people's opinions.