No thanks for the memories

As the classic Boston high school memento, one terribly tardy yearbook failed to make the grade

The annual advent of the high school yearbooks is always an angst-filled time. But for Kendra Alford and her classmates at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, the wait was excruciatingly long.

Having decided to include prom and graduation photos in their 2006 yearbooks, students wouldn't have the tomes in time for their departing classmates to ceremoniously sign. But the books would arrive at the Roxbury school in the fall, they were told.

Alford got her diploma and went on with her life.

She untangled the meaning of medical terms like otorhinolaryngology (the study of ears, nose, and throat), tachypnea (rapid breathing) and pneumonectomy (surgical removal of a lung or part thereof) on her way to becoming a pharmacy technician.

And still, the yearbooks did not come.

She found a fulltime job in a Hyde Park drug store.

And still, the yearbooks did not come.

She would sit bedside with her father as he endured heart and kidney problems, watch her niece take her first steps, and hear her, out of nowhere, utter the words "I see you."

And still, the yearbooks did not come.

It wasn't until last month - nearly two years after her high school days had ended, and she'd already celebrated her 20th birthday, and major technical difficulties with the publication were finally sorted out - that Alford received her 2006 Tigers yearbook.

When at long last she eyeballed the celebrated compendium of her high school life and times, she burned with frustration: With major data lost when school officials put it together on computer, all that could be salvaged as a yearbook was a slim and unattractive mingle-mangle.

For the $60 that students had pre-paid, there was a blasé cover, pages of blurry photographs, many missing pictures, a shortage of sports snapshots, even one senior portrait paired with the wrong student's name. There was no list of noteworthy '06 events, a dearth of snarky text, a lack of cutesy captions, not even those time-honored and telling senior superlatives that can range from the sincere (Most Likely to Succeed) to the silly (Most Likely to Get Abducted by Aliens).

"It's a stinky yearbook," says Alford. "I'm not even going to show it."

With high school sessions everywhere now drawing to a close, yearbook season is once again upon us. While some of O'Bryant's class of 2006 want to hide their yearbooks in shame, seniors elsewhere are joyfully taking part in the longstanding ritual of passing theirs around for signings and other impishness.

For more than 160 years - ever since an early model was published out of Waterville, N.Y., in 1845, according to historians - the high-school yearbook has served as an iconic touchstone for teenagers.

"It's an artifact . . . marking a rite of passage, from adolescence to young adult," says Laura Hansen, an assistant sociology professor at UMass-Boston.

The yearbook is such a cultural memento that it has inspired both a play ("Yearbook: The High School Musical") and a card game ("High school Drama!" - in which all start as freshmen but only the player with the most yearbook signatures at graduation wins). Even such buzzing social networking sites as Facebook and MySpace have not been able to take its place as part of Americana.

While flipping through one's yearbook can provide years of yuks - "Hey look at Dad's frizzy 'do; he once had hair!" or "Hey look at Mom in her cheerleading outfit; she once could wear a skirt!" - there is also a serious side captured on those pages, a validation of one's hard work.

"It's a verification that you were who you thought you were, and who you say you were, and of your accomplishments," says Hansen.

And when that experience is damaged, the sense of loss can run deep. "It's like photographs destroyed in a fire," says Hansen. "They're lost forever. No matter how you remember your high school years, you're still without that artifact."

Joel Stembridge, O'Bryant's headmaster, says he feels terrible about any sense of dispossession. He says he takes responsibility for mistakes made, but was unwilling to detail them.

"I feel very badly for our class of 2006," he says. "The first year or two out of high school is a very intense time for students away from home for the first time, and with not having something to look back on from time to time for comfort and good memories, we're sad we're not able to provide that for them."

Stembridge also says that after the glitch, two-way miscommunications between the school and yearbook company added to the delay. The school was able to renegotiate a lower rate with the yearbook company, he says, and muster a $25 refund for the 153 students who purchased the yearbook. But coupled with lost advertising, he says that has already meant $2,000 to $3,000 coming out of his own school budget.

"That's paper and books and ink," he says.

Stembridge says that some of the problems that beset the 2006 yearbook also held back the 2007 edition, but he believes things are straightened out now.

"We're looking for a more positive experience for our 2008 graduates," he says.

For competitive reasons, Jostens, the yearbook company that worked with O'Bryant and is a leader in the industry, declined to say how many schools it represents, either nationally or locally. Because schools in Boston sign their own contracts with yearbook firms, city education officials say they could not provide such a record, either.

A Jostens representative says his firm tried to make the best of a bad situation and worked to produce a yearbook that the 2006 grads could look back on with pride. Though the school had paid for a partially black and white book, the company printed it all in color as a good-will gesture.

"The yearbook is a permanent keepsake that is the archive of that high school year," says Richard Stoebe, a Jostens spokesman who denied that his firm played any part in the yearbook's tardiness. "We want to make sure every yearbook we put out the door tells that special story of the school year."

Marissa Bushman says she was unable to pick up a yearbook when she last visited the O'Bryant several weeks ago. But the version Bushman has heard about, she says, is a cheap imitation of her high school days.

Now, she figures she won't be duplicating the bonding she experienced several years ago when her mother pulled out her old yearbook and playfully pointed out, "Here's the boy I had a crush on," and "Here's the girl I used to go bowling with."

"It's horrible," says Bushman, now 20 and working at the Museum of Science before returning to college. "A lot of us won't have memories to share with our families some day."

Lakeisha Gerald was a whirlwind of activity at the O'Bryant. Yet when she scans her yearbook, all she finds are two Where's-Waldo-sized photos of herself.

"I feel invisible," says Gerald, a 20-year-old sophomore at Lasell College. "It looks like I didn't go to school there."

There's no picture of her and her Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps mates, a photographic trigger back to those ultra-disciplined days of spit-shining her shoes and centering her nameplate on her ROTC uniform.

There's no pictorial hint that she was the advice columnist for the O'Bryant Edition, learning about the power of the press as she wrote about how to handle tensions with teachers and the dangers of cheating on one's boyfriend or girlfriend.

There's not even the standard senior portrait she says she posed for, for which she was done up in a new navy blue polo shirt, matching headband, fuchsia nails, and a hairdo of primped curls and straightened bangs that took half an hour to get just right.

Still, for Gerald, it seems that more than just pictures were taken from her. "I feel like my high school years were stolen," she says.

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.