A Couple Of Pictures From 6th Grade 1949

Here are some of the names I could recognize:

Burwell Wingfield, Frank Kelley, Gerald Frierson, Sally Rodes, Grace Fisher, Connie Ford, Joyce McBride, Burnice Forsythe, Jackie Leitner, Betty Folkman, Margaret Beach, Tommy Mc Kamey?, Jack Myers, Rebecca Steuart, Otis Meeker and Jimmy Pickett.

Some of these may be spelled wrong, but this is what I thought I could see.

Don't know why Horace Heley Stinks....

Another Picture

There are no names listed with this picture.

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Here Are A Couple Of Brave, Industrious Girls

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Here are some of the Band Girls.

This picture was taken in 1954 

 

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Frank Ford Sent This, From Sally's Scrapbook

From the DeLand Beacon newspaper on March 23, 1994

From Left: Connie Ford Richards snd Jerry Frierson, Sally Rodes Ford and Frank Ford, Bonnie O'Dell and Herb McRae dance the night away at the 1955 DeLand Hich School prom and in the back is Tommy Lawrence. 

DeLandites' memories reveal Changes in proms over Years

In the 1940s, she said, “You just went home.  There was no going to get a hamburger or anything.          There was no problem with being late, because all the parents knew what time the prom was over.          Well, were probably a few people who left 30 minutes early and took the long way home,” she added.  Generally, seniors were saying goodnight by about midnight.

A decade later, in the 1950s, juniors and seniors were staying up a little later, thanks to the DeLand Kiwanis Club.  In 1955, the club sponsored a breakfast at the armory from 2 to 5 a.m. for seniors who had danced the night away at the DeLand armory, then gathered for a movie – again courtesy of the Kiwanis – at the Athens Theater.

The evening began, recalled Sally Ford (then Sally Rodes) with a banquet at Stetson University.  Tommy Lawrence was the toastmaster.  The theme was “A Southern Plantation Party.”  Nameplates at the dinner were made from tiny bales of hay.

After the breakfast, “We went home, had a little shut-eye and then took off for the beach,” she recalled.  Sally Ford attended her junior and senior proms as the date of Frank Ford, her future husband.

“It was the highlight of our high school careers,” Sally Ford said.

“From the girl’s perspective,” Frank Ford quickly added, with a laugh.

“The boys were true gentlemen.  They danced with all the girls at the table,” she said.  Close friends would arrange to sit together at the dance.

Because dance lessons were standard curriculum for seventh graders in those days, everyone knew how to dance.  The Bunny Hop was a popular prom step, Sally Ford said.

Expenses weren’t quite as high for the 1950s prom as they are today, Sally Ford said.  She remembers spending $40 for a dress one year, but it was passed on to cousins and others.  The fellows generally owned tuxedos, so they didn’t have to rent them.

For the girls, she said, the best dresses she recalled, were full and ruffly.

“The bigger the crinoline under it the better.”

DeLand High School proms were still being held at the armory when Leslie Hall graduated in 1890s 1970s.  In 1972, she recalled, the junior class stopped planning the prom and the job was turned over to a committee.  Attendance was down for a few years after that, she said.

The theme for the 1973 prom at the armory, Hall said, was “The 1890s Recaptured.”  Students had dinner, danced, and then watched a movie.

By 1977, the DeLand High prom was being staged in Daytona Beach.  Entertainment that year for the dinner and dance at the Plaza Hotel included a hypnotist who induced his subjects to hop about on stage like rabbits.

“It was hilarious,” one 1977 graduate recalled.