Senior Ball 1914

After a brief hiatus, I’m back to my grandmother’s scrapbook!  And the next page shows memories from the Monterey High School Senior Ball, 1914. 

My grandmother, Loraine Gunzendorfer, was a junior and her brother, Wilton, was a freshman so both would have participated in this event. 



And once again, DANCE CARDS!  Here’s the cover – someone was quite an artist and this almost looks like an original drawing.  Would someone have hand drawn each cover?



And inside, we can see my grandmother’s dance card was quite full.

These are difficult to read since they were written in pencil and are now almost 100 years old but once thing stands out to me – she danced the waltz with ‘Lacey’.  As I learned when I wrote about the Salinas High School graduation in 1914, this may have been Dean Lacey, future husband of her friend, Dorothy Streining.  It is clearly the same writing on both dance cards.  Hmmm, I’d love to know more about the connection between Loraine, Dorothy, and Dean Lacey.

And she danced the Grand March Waltz, Two-step, and Good-bye Everybody Waltz with her date, George Hunter. 



So George was from Salinas, too? 

And it looks like Loraine helped organize the Senior Ball as she worked on the Door Committee.  I wonder what her duties might have been – collecting tickets, perhaps?  Speaking of which, just what does someone on the ‘dressing room’ committee do?



All in all, it looks like the Ball was a great success!



Congratulations, Grandma, her friends, and even her little brother, Wilt, for preparing such a splendid event!

Salinas High School Graduation – 1914

Here’s a new tidbit in the life of my grandmother, Loraine Gunzendorfer - she attended the Salinas High School graduation in 1914.  I realize that Salinas and Monterey are only about 20 miles apart but I’m perplexed as to how and why she attended.

Apparently, she was a guest of Dorothy Striening.



I’ve done a little searching on Dorothy on ancestry.com and I’ve sent a message to someone who has Dorothy in their tree.  I’d really like to figure out how it was that Loraine and Dorothy were friends.  Or could they have been relatives?  Now that’s an interesting thought!

Of course, this was big news and was even published in the newspaper.  I love that simple things were worthy of newspaper coverage 100 years ago.



Looks like Grandma’s dance card was pretty full.  None of these names look familiar to me, which makes sense since these were kids from another school.



I love dance cards!  These little gems were popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries and were used to record a woman’s dance partners.  Most dance cards were decorative with long strings so the women could wear them on their wrists or attach them to their gowns.  Inside the card were pages with each dance listed with a blank line after each dance.  After a man asked a woman for a specific dance, his name would be penciled in on that line.  Some dance cards had tiny pencils attached to the string, but men usually carried pencils with them.  Etiquette stated that if a man introduced himself and asked for a dance, the woman could really not refuse.  Dance cards weren’t used any longer by the middle of the twentieth century but often times we still hear the phrases “my dance card is full”, “pencil me in”, or “save the last dance for me”.

Here’s Grandma’s description of the weekend she spent in Salinas.



Had a lovely weekend at Salinas as the guest of Dorothy.  Went to the ball with a splendid young fellow from the city – he did not dance because the board forbid strangers to do so.

Wanted to get something for a souvenir at the Lodge at Pebble Beach the day we came over in the machine but saw nothing worthwhile save a finger bowl and Jack would not let me take that.

Who was Jack and why wouldn’t he let her get the finger bowl?  Why would the board forbid strangers from dancing?  I feel like every time I find something it leads to more questions.

More dance cards later in the scrapbook!