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A while back, while cruising Ebay, my mind wondered off and I begin thinking about my old high school days. On a lark, I entered “Martin High School” just to see what would happen. To my surprise a 1937 La Pitahaya school annual came up for auction. I placed a bid on it and won. Once it was in my hands I looked through all the pages. Unfortunately, all the senior pictures were ripped out. I continued to scan though the rest of the annual and upon reaching the back of the annual; I was astonished to find my father’s signature. I asked my Dad if he was a senior at that time. He replied that, “No, he had finished his junior high school year in Monterrey, Mexico and had moved to Laredo in 1936. He applied to continue his education here in Laredo, but they told him that while he would be admitted to high school, he would have to start out as a sophomore since he didn’t have Texas History, English, etc. So he said forget it and went and got a job in the parts department at Sames Ford Motor Co. My question of course was, so why did you sign the annual? He said that he hung around school whenever he could because, “Son, that’s where the girls were.” The more I learned about that annual the more interested I became in Laredo’s history in public high schools. 1937 was the year that Laredo’s only public school (Laredo High School, located in the present day “La Posada, Hotel) moved to the present Martin High School in May of 1937 so that the class of 1937 could graduate from the new school. I have not found out yet where the first public high school was in Laredo, But Laredo High School started in 1916 in a building that is located on the south side of St. Augustine Plaza now known as the Posada Hotel. From that time until the 1964 when Nixon High School became the second public high school in Laredo, there was only one high school. We were a small town. Since there was only one public high school, everybody knew everybody. The classes were fairly small, the students all knew all other, and their parents knew each other as well. When Nixon High School came along, the character of Laredo began to change. Now there seems to be a new high school on every corner. I got so interested into this history that I wanted to see more annuals, especially the early ones. The Laredo Public Library had some, but nowhere near all of them. The obvious place to go was the Martin High School library itself. There I found the mother load. They even had a copy of the first annual, a booklet really of 54 pages, originally tied together with a ribbon. The annuals were locked in a room and then further locked in a cabinet. I wish right now to thank the library staff and especially the Principal, Roberto Gonzalez for trusting me to take these annuals off campus for scanning. I wish I could take credit for all that went into creating this scanned record of the annuals, but I can’t. The one person that spent countless hours scanning, collating, rotating, etc. was Raquel Cruz, a student presently at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, working here during her summer vacation. We were missing volumes 1959, 1983, 1993, 1994 and 1997, however, after the story in the Laredo newspaper was published, we received many calls from people willing to lend us their annuals for scanning. We like to thank those people because they helped us finish the full collection. I don’t think there were volumes produced in 1918 and 1919 because of WWI or volumes produced from 1931 to 1936 because of the great depression. If you, however, know that annuals were indeed produced in those years, I would like to hear from you. Enjoy, Evan J Quiros CEO, Border Title Group P.S. Who is that guy on the top middle of page 31 of the 1961 annual?
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