Yearbook: San Jose Sate

Here's another addition to the yearbooks. San Jose State has their La Torre yearboks available online.

This one is pretty nice small collection of online yearbooks with 55 yearbooks from 1910 to 1965. The publication was named the Senior Year Book in its first few years and was published under the name La Torre after 1915.

As with any texts of historical value, it's nice to have any of these texts digitized and available, but it's better to have a comprehensive year-to-year collection. SJSU's ContentDM system works, and it has some things going for it but I don't think it's the best in-browser viewer we've seen, and overall the content of the books is a little bit ho-hum. You can search at the collection level, but within each yearbook, only the full-text version is searchable. You can search the text version and toggle over to the .pdf version, but it's still pretty clunky.


There are, however, some interesting stories from the football pages. Most notably was San Jose State's December road trip to Hawaii in 1941. Hawaii was scheduled to play both Hawaii and Wilamette University on the trip - but after the Japanese attack on pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th - San Jose State players were deputized by Hawaii police to assist in the institution of martial law.

This story goes into further detail about the Spartans Hawaii visit.

It's a telling snapshot of American history. To have a group of university boys show up for work on what should have been their season-ending vacation speaks to the maturity, character, and compassion of the students of that era. If you finish reading the La Torre's 1941 season review you will encounter the yearbook's description of a Nevada-Reno halfback as a "great negro back" which, taken with the Hawaii trip, to me, shows that for better or worse - we live in very different times.

You can find a number of other college yearbooks along with the San Jose State University La Torre under the Yearbooks tab above.

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