Closed campus? Mean girls? LSD? Established in 1893, FUHS has a riveting past, and a newspaper that has seen it all.

I was first drawn to looking at old issues of The Pleiades because I wanted to share the newspaper’s evolution. It was mostly out of plain curiosity, being a history geek, and always living in the past.

What I found within the dusty binding proved to be exciting, different, and interesting.

Beginning in the early 1900s, The Pleiades focused mainly on incorporating personal stories of student life — stuff we don’t typically publish today.

In a Pleiades publication I dug up from 1913, the newspapers were filled with personal poem-like articles from students on campus. Poems like “To a Maiden” written by an unnamed student who called himself “El Literato,” are an example of what you could find in our paper a century ago.

In the 1920’s, The Pleiades was dubbed the “New Pleiades” and included a column called the “Kampus Kidder,” a section where students could place gossip and talk about what was “hot” at the time.

Checking out the news of the 40’s, an article titled “Think This Over Girls,” was especially captivating. It criticized girls at FUHS for creating a spiral notebook with “prejudiced” messages about other girls at school. 1940s Mean Girls, huh?

A decade later, The Pleiades spoke extensively about Timothy Leary, an American psychologist.

While Leary advocated for LSD experimentation, The Pleiades news staff advised against its use, warning students of the dangerous hallucinogenic effects.

As the decade rolled on, new vibrations startled suburban America, as The Beatles took the country by storm in the mid 1960’s.

The Fab-Four flooded our pages more than current events of the time, and the Pleiades was one with the trend, creating polls for our school to vote on whether the Beatles would last or not.

As I moved into a whirlwind of 70s articles, it was evident that popular culture had enchanted the beloved Pleiades. I was delighted to find that reporters wrote about the musical surplus of the era, including Rolling Stone-style reviews of albums by artists such as Eric Clapton and Jefferson Starship.  

However, staff also touched on more serious topics, writing about more taboo issues, such as suicide. A 1976 article warns about the uprising of suicide victims in Fullerton at the time, and offers alternate solutions to students who might’ve been unaware of their options.

On a brighter note, the more recent 90’s experienced a dramatic change in culture. As hip hop erupted from the underground, FUHS saw it in all its glory.

Flipping through the pages of 90s articles, I stumbled upon a 1995 article that covered the popularization of a “new dance style” called Breakdancing, a dance described as being a “way of life” for FUHS students of the 90s.

And that brings me to the present, the 2000’s, as The Pleiades sees an even newer change as we become The Tribe Tribune.

To put it simply, the decision to switch from newspaper to online site was surprising to staff, but proved a thrilling new venture in our history. With the switch came choices, including a new name, chosen especially to accommodate you, our readers, so you could better access our site.

The Pleiades, however, is still The Pleiades. This is a very exciting move for our paper and who knows? Maybe someday future staff will look at this story with the same starry eyes I did.