1968 Emmanuel Bible College Yearbook

I was thrilled with the idea of posting choice moments from the Emmanuel Bible College yearbooks, but after the 1966 expose things became pretty crazy over here. I'd even gone through the 1968 edition and I had some big plans for it, but I'm afraid I've forgotten my "angles" and all I have on record are the pictures I chose.

So this one will be a quickie without any deep insight. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 1968 Emmanuel Bible College yearbook.


Students! The people in this yearbook are my mother's contemporaries, and she has confirmed that the EBC students were wearing appropriate, up-to-date clothing. It's interesting to note that she found the clothes in the 1966 yearbook to be stodgy and geriatric...what a difference a few years in the '60s made!

Another interesting thing to note is that the woman in the picture -- Donna Barnell of Indiana -- is my nomination for "Queen of Prom!" This is partly because she's got wicked style, but also because she was on every brainy committee that year: Publications (which kept churches in the area notified about the latest EBC events), literary president, student's council (secretary AND treasurer), and school secretary in general. Donna from Indiana, you've earned this honour!


As for KING of the Prom...well, you remember Harry Habel from 1966? He graduated in '68 with a degree in "Special," which I assume meant that they were anxious to just get rid of him. It pleases me to pair a youthful over-achiever with an annoying old farmer. What must it have been like to be Jewish in an evangelical bible college during the '60s? I don't know, but maybe we can glean something from his graduation picture.

Poor Harry. A little older, a little wiser, entirely special.

Anyway, one thing that set EBC apart from other schools was its emphasis on "Practical Work." This usually meant "perfecting the skills which send non-believers screaming in the other direction."


You in West Rouge and Elmira may have kicked Wayne and Tim off your porch.

These last two pictures are my favourites, and they show the "wacky side" of EBC campus life. First, here's Dixie Dean presenting "music from the four corners of the world" at the Christmas Banquet.


Who's "Dixie Dean," you ask? For shame! He started the "Canadian Accordion Club," and was a bright light in Canadian music during the first half of the century. His star appears to have fallen during the '60s but he worked for the Ontario Conservatory of Music here in good old Waterloo, so his appearance at the banquet must have been a real coup. For those who liked accordions.

Finally, here's one of those yearbook pictures that only makes sense to those who were there. EBC students from '68 are invited to explain not only how good Dixie Dean's performance was, but also why a man in rubber SCUBA gear is molesting this woman in her bed.

1966 Emmanuel Bible College Yearbook

"You" said you wanted more pictures from the Emmanuel Bible College yearbooks...who am I to refuse! I just wish I had a working scanner, instead of a small Hewlett-Packard device that makes a terrible grinding noise and whispers "Need more ink cartridges" when I turn it on.

As I've said previously, yearbooks are fascinating and funny things in so many ways. The EBC yearbooks, however, have an additional interest for the secular reader because they're so totally focused on God, but without the "Christianity is COOL!" element that would no doubt be there if they were external, proselytizing documents.

Ready to see the bible students in their natural habitat, like rabbits in a glass-walled hutch? Without further ado, here are some choice moments from the 1966 edition of the EBC yearbook, "The Pilot."

First off, the prayer/bomb drill/corporal punishment picture that will soon be the subject of its own fetish.


Now that we've got that over with, a few words about the degrees. It seems like the ultimate goal at EBC was to be a "Bachelor of Theology," but I find it interesting that the only B.Th graduates were males, at least for the first several yearbooks that I have. The "Missionary Course" and "Christian Education" degrees, however, were granted to both sexes.

Here's the president of the college at the time, Reverend H. B. Wideman, on a day that I charitably assume was windy.


Some sleuthing has revealed that the other man is Reverend Kenneth Geiger, and the book he's presenting -- "The Word and the Doctrine" -- is a collection of papers from a conference about Wesleyanism. What's Wesleyanism? Damned if I can figure it out! That's why Wideman was the president of EBC and the Bachelor of Divinity, not me.

A few thoughts about the teachers that year: none of the women were pretty and most of the men were schlubs, except for Mr. Wilson T. Wiley (English & Guidance Instructor), who wore a small fedora and looked like he wrapped his secret gat in a copy of "Catcher in the Rye." You'll be comforted to know that the "Social Dean of Women" and the "Social Dean of Men" were a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Warner Spyker.

Here's some insight into student demographics:

The afternoons are times of service, study, and wage earning.

Many students work with Child Evangelism, teaching Bible Clubs for boys and girls. Other students find opportunities to witness while working at a part-time job. At Emmanuel, we have a barber, an auctioneer, carry-out boys, salesmen, office workers, nurses, teachers, farmers, waitresses, and construction labourers.

Here are some girls harassing an old lady to score Bible Points.

My favourite 1966 EBC students -- my votes for "king and queen of the prom," so to speak -- are paino-playing Fern Densmore and plump squirrel David Hills. The latter's graduation poem is a good example of the beloved artform of BAD YEARBOOK POETRY:

From working in a paint factory he came,
So that he might better uphold God's name
By studying the Word with hope that he
One day, in the service of the Lord may be.

What makes this a bad poem? The ungainly swapping of sentence fragments, sacrificing style (and clarity) to the altar of Thee Almighty Rhyme.

Here's another good poem, for Mervin ("Merv") Richardson, notable for its vague attempt at being personal:

A goal, a goal in hockey
(Even when the road is rocky)
Leading music at Lincoln Heights
Keeps him busy various nights.

I think the yearbook staff got that one in just before the deadline.

To wrap up the 1966 year, here's my favourite picture of them all. I'm not sure if it's supposed to mean what I think it means but I sure hope so!

Imikimi Makes Me Slightly More Ill

I don't go LOOKING for online kitsch, it just comes along and hits me. Similar to the terrifying Dance Heads gimmick, I've just noticed an even more bizarre phenomenon: Imikimi.

The Imikimi idea seems to be that online artists create thematic images, and then leave a spot in the frame for you to place your picture. This is like those fairground "stick your face in the hole and look like the fat lady" displays, except it's instantly customizable and therefore totally disposable.

Most of what you see on Imikimi is unbearably cute in that "angels and hearts and babies" sort of way. Tellingly, in their "Editor Tips" FAQ, topic four of six is "How to make a heart" (or rather "Hot to make a heart," since the Imikimi instructions are rife with typos).

The great thing about Imikimi is that most of the content is user-generated, so you get all sorts of crazy stuff that you'd think nobody would ever want, and then you find out that those things are extremely popular and people really do want them. Here are some of my favourite discoveries:

The Cabanting family, pill-shaped...but something's wrong with Lebrado!

Sweet baby with horn in ear!

To appreciate this one you must understand that the kitten's eyes blink and its paw waggles up and down. And it sparkles.

There's lots of Twilight on Ikimimi.

Cthulhu fhtagn!

If you've got a minute or two and you feel a bit insecure about your sense of style and taste, check out Imikimi. You will learn SO MUCH MORE about the world.

Stereotypes Come True

Jesus Christ. Just LOOK at them.

(From the July, 1985 issue of Antic Magazine)

From the Dot Matrix Digitizer to the Thunderscan: '80s Technological Kludge

Hey kids! Put down your DNA-sampling iPhones and listen up. This is how it used to be.

During the mid-80s, scanner technology was just entering our consumer consciousness. We knew that lucky businessmen had something called "Fax Machines," but those of us at home were totally unable to get photographs of lingerie models into our 8-bit computers (without tracing them on a transparency, sticking the transparency to the television set, and then drawing under it with a joystick-driven "fun with art" program).

But all this changed during April 1985, when Antic Magazine published instructions for..."The Dot Matrix Digitizer."

Here's the basic (and totally ass-backward) idea: you remove the printhead from your dot matrix printer and replace it with a homemade light pen. Instead of putting blank paper in your printer, you roll in the picture you want to digitize...say, this picture of handsome devil Sam Tramiel.


Then you ran a program which fooled your printer into thinking it was actually printing something, meanwhile retrieving the information from the light pen which was now creeping back and forth over the picture in your printer. Sixty minutes later you got this!


That's right! Not only could you cheaply digitize pictures of Sam Tramiel in the comfort of your own home, but you could ALSO make him look like Gene Shalit!

When I first read this article I thought "Wow, what a ridiculous Kludge...I bet nobody ever did it except the staff at Antic Magazine!" Then I learned about the "Thunderscan," a product for the first generation Macintosh which did exactly the same thing.

We truly live in a world full of inventive and crazy people. It's a good thing the inventors of this technique never decided to "Go Galt!"

Nineteen-Eighty

The Real Reason for the Death of Laserdiscs

There are a lot of reasons why Laserdiscs never caught on. They were bulky, they couldn't hold more than about thirty minutes of video a side, they tended towards glitchiness, and you couldn't record on them. Videotape was bound to win out in the consumer market.

But ever since I've discovered this 1977 article about "Videodiscs" I'm convinced that the REAL reason Laserdiscs failed was because they were being promoted by a guy named Alfred Bork, and he looked like this:


Crazy Sasquatch! Considering the rigid standards of cleanliness required during the manufacture of laserdiscs, his Rasputin beard and woolly-mammoth arms must have sent scientists and technicians fleeing their laboratories.

All that said, however, I do have a point to make about computer technology in the '70s...they were so darn obsessed with the EDUCATIONAL potential of computers, in the same way that everyone was ga-ga about the educational applications of laserdiscs. Even in the 1980s, the manufacturers of home computers were insisting that their personal computers had the best quiz and tutorial programs, even though the children forced to PLAY those programs ran like scientists from a tech-guru's beard.

As computers got smaller and more affordable they entered schools and homes for the first time, and I imagine that educators and parents had to convince themselves that they weren't buying toys, they were buying TOOLS, and the companies were more than willing to play along. Jeez, remember all those awful exercise and recipe-storage programs they used to try to sell us, and all those "educational games" to teach you touch-typing?

Eventually it sank in that playing games WAS a great reason to buy a computer, and as the price of memory decreased the home computer became a viable business facilitator as well. Nowadays I suppose most people buy computers so they can use the internet and get email, which makes me wonder if the PC will be supplanted by the Smartphone someday.

I'm just happy as long as we never see software like this again:

Another in Our Series of "What the '80s Were REALLY Like Pictures"

For the record, this is Fernando Herrerra and his son.

Fernando wrote "My First Alphabet," a bizarre and obnoxious game that I remember far too well from my childhood.

The eyeglasses, the collars, oh shit.

Portrait of the Rich '80s Nerd