The Handbook of Return

Each September carries the sense of return. Students gather. Households resume rhythm. Rituals of learning and belonging resume. For more than a century, handbooks, desks, and small inherited objects have quietly marked these transitions.

Not all heirlooms are carved from walnut or upholstered in velvet. Some are paper-bound and easily overlooked. A student handbook carried in a satchel in 1918, preserved for more than a century, is one of them.

That year, as the world moved through war and influenza, Los Angeles was a city in transformation. Streetcars traced newly laid boulevards. Oil fields edged the horizon. Neighborhoods expanded as families arrived seeking work and stability. Los Angeles High School, the city’s oldest, had recently relocated to its imposing Bee Hive campus, where thousands of students gathered each morning. Within this shifting landscape, a young student was issued a modest handbook.

The 1918 Los Angeles High School handbook, now preserved as an heirloom, bears a penciled name on its opening page. The cover is plain. The typography unadorned. Inside, order is laid out with precision: schedules, subjects, conduct, expectations. It was designed to be handled daily, consulted often, and replaced the following year.

Its pages reveal more than timetables. The handbook records a city at war. Students trained in first aid and nursing. Red Cross auxiliaries were organized. Scarves, sweaters, books, and magazines were collected for soldiers abroad. Nineteen French orphans were adopted through coordinated fundraising efforts. Mottoes appeared above the stage: Obedience to Law, Mastery of Self, Respect for Others, Joy in Service, These Constitute Life. The handbook functioned not as sentiment, but as instruction. It shaped behavior. It structured responsibility. It taught students how to return each day into civic life.

Academic requirements were detailed with equal clarity. Thirty-two credits were required for graduation. English, American history, mathematics, science, and drawing formed the core. Physical training, hygiene, and music were compulsory. Upper grades could add bookkeeping, stenography, commercial law, foreign languages, or nursing. The school library, containing 11,000 volumes, the largest of any high school in California, was open daily and actively used. Finances were published in full, accounting for everything from alumni funds to chemistry supplies and bleacher repairs.

A portrait from the same year captures the student herself. She stands with youthful poise, dressed in stripes, a parasol angled across her shoulders. The image records neither certainty nor fear. It holds a moment of readiness, suspended between repetition and departure.

More than a century later, the handbook survives. Its pages, once carried daily, still open and close. What was produced for a single academic year has endured as a record of repetition and return. The object outlasted the routines it was meant to guide, the buildings that housed them, and many of the lives shaped within its margins.

Each autumn brings its own version of this gesture. Schedules resume. Interiors settle back into use. Objects re-enter circulation. Institutions, like households, rely on material forms to train memory and behavior. The forms change, but the structure remains. Beginnings, it turns out, are rarely acts of invention. More often, they are acts of return.