A Salinas High alum investigates the shifts of society by digging through decades of yearbooks.

Yearbooks are a glimpse into student life, offering a memory lane full of photos, highlights and stories showcasing the school experience.

It’s a book some people treasure, while others might forget about it. In the case of one sociologist with local roots, it became a tool to learn about how society and student life have changed over the years.

Inheriting dozens of old yearbooks after his father (a former Salinas High School basketball coach and teacher) triggered Michael Messner’s interest, starting him on a quest to investigate his alma mater, Salinas High, through El Gabilan yearbooks from 1903-2024. It inspired him to write The High School, a book that studies the content of Salinas High yearbooks and the stories they tell in an obvious or subtle way about society both inside and outside the school realm.

In the early 2000s, Messner started looking through the yearbooks he inherited from his late father, and during a visit to Salinas he spent time looking at old yearbooks at the Salinas High library.

“I took pictures of them, I took a few notes. I started developing ideas on how this could be a project for me,” Messner says.

Messner is a sociologist who has penned several books and articles with a focus on gender and sports. (He taught sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California for more than 30 years.)

Time went by and before retiring in 2023, he took on the project again.

“How do we think about the history of schools? How do we think about the history of high schools? How does Salinas fit into that?” Messner says he asked himself during the process of piecing together what became his textbook-sized sociology book.

“Access to citizenship rights and privileges and full participation of citizens, and organized sports, have long been a very key part of high school life,” he adds. “So I try to probe the ways in which the history of sports in American high schools is really a microcosm of the history of the United States in a lot of ways.”

One of his favorite parts of the process were the photos and stories he found inside the yearbooks, especially the first two decades of the 20th century during the feminist movement.

The erosion of the movement coincides with the decline of women in sports and its resurgence in the ’70s after Title IX, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in any educational program, including sports, that receives federal funding.

It also shows the demographic shift in Salinas during World War II, when Japanese and Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps.

Getting his hands on old yearbooks wasn’t easy. Over a span of 15 years, Messner received some donations and he bought others in local thrift stores or online.

He has accumulated 100 yearbooks from a 101-year period. “The 1919 book is one that I do not own, and I would never be able to afford buying, because that was the senior year of John Steinbeck and he was very prominent in the yearbook,” Messner says. “But luckily, I was able to access one at the National Steinbeck Center.”

Yearbooks offer a narrow historical view but there are “stories that are bubbling around the edges” that Messner researched from other sources, such as support and opposition for farmworker protests in the 1930s. “I can pull things from the books and then tell these broader stories that contextualize what’s missing,” he adds.

Messner wants people to have conversations about collective memories and history, where they can reflect about the good, the bad and the ugly. “If we just look at it through rose-colored glasses, I think we make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation by commercial interests that might want to tell us that if you buy this product, your life is going to be good again,” he says.

The High School was published on March 11 and is available for purchase on different platforms and for lending at local libraries. Michael Messner will be in various locations in Salinas from April 10-12 to promote his book. More at thehighschoolbook.com.