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Each school year most American children participate in an annual rite known as "school pictures." I'm guessing many school pictures have already been shot, printed and delivered by early November.
It's a familiar process. Notes are sent home to parents alerting them to the day school photographs will be taken. Most mothers take extra care on the appointed day to be sure little Johnnie and Susie look just right for their school pictures. Early on I was enthused about school pictures. As I grew older and realized my looks had peaked at age three I grew to dread the annual procedure. When I started school, kindergarten was not as universal as it is today. In the spring of 1954, we went to kindergarten all-day for the last nine weeks of the school year. As a result, we missed out on kindergarten school pictures.
However, we were introduced to the joys of school pictures as first graders. I remember being displeased with someone or something at the time the photo was taken. That displeasure is reflected in the photograph. My mother was not happy. Second and third-grade photos were unremarkable but my fourth-grade picture is memorable. Miserable, but memorable.
In those years my father insisted his four sons have butch (think military buzz cut) haircuts for the summer. In the fall we could let our hair grow out again, which I decided to do that year.
When the school pictures were taken, however, my hair had not yet been "trained." Even with an ample quantity of hair tonic applied, hair stuck out in all directions. That image will live forever in my fourth-grade school picture.
Dad and I finally reached a tonsorial compromise. Instead of a butch in the summer and longer hair in the winter, I went to a flat top year-round. School picture time meant an extra dab of butch wax to be sure every spear of hair stood erect like rows of little soldiers. A fashion sense had budded by seventh grade and I realized that a white crew neck t-shirt looked really smart under an open collar shirt. The Saturday night before school pictures were taken that year, Dad took me to Pep Queensland's men's store in nearby Jewell to buy a couple of new white t-shirts. As much as a seventh-grader can be proud of his school picture, I was proud of mine. Mother Nature plays dirty tricks on teenagers and the first three years of high school my school pictures were pathetic. I cringe when I look at my old high school yearbooks. The only consolation is that Mother Nature afflicts most teenagers to some extent.
I looked forward to having my senior photograph taken, knowing that a professional portrait photographer can work miracles unattainable by the "smile, snap, move along, kid" style of photography. Our small class car-pooled about a half hour to the studio of a popular portrait photographer on a Saturday to have our senior portraits shot. As hoped, when my senior photos arrived I was pleased with the photographer's work. This was back in the days of black-and-white photography. The touch-up artist had removed all my zits and the color artist had given my skin a nice, healthy tone. I had let my hair grow out a year earlier and it was greased down just right.
Even the knot in my skinny black tie was acceptable. I was feeling good until my mother proudly hung an 8×10 portrait of her eldest child on the living room wall. My baby sister, then about four years old, studied it for a while. Then she turned to me and bluntly remarked, "That's a pretty picture, Arvid, but you're not."
She was not the last female to make that observation. So here it is, many decades later, and kids still go through the annual rite of "school pictures." Loving parents pay for the images and mail them to grandparents, aunts and uncles and friends across the nation. Decades from now, one of today's students will find one of their school photos in a box of family memorabilia and cringe. Then he or she will tuck it away even deeper in the box hoping no one finds it.
Smile pretty, kids!
(Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2026 by Huisman Communications).