The library staff has kept many of the countless issues of The Jagwire dating back to 1948. The staff of The Jagwire recently looked through the many issues that were filed away, and we thought we should share a couple of issues and couple of articles.

Many things have changed in Falls Church over the past decades, but some things have stayed the same. For example, Heritage Night has been around for a while. One issue we found was from March 30, 1998. This was the year many of the seniors were born. Heritage Night was the focus of this issue. At that year’s Heritage Night there was an interesting speaker. A Holocaust victim, Mark Strauss, told his story. For the students at the time, getting to hear his story must have been an extremely deep and powerful experience.

Another article in that same issue was an interview with a woman who was a member of the Falls Church Class of 1956. It talked about her experiences and life in Falls Church. She also mentioned how back then Falls Church was the city school and Fairfax was the country school and that those were the only two main high schools in the area. A lot has changed in the past 60 years!

Another issue was from 1956 when The Jagwire was called the Jaguar Journal. A notable part on this issue was a sentence telling Falls Church to “Help Fight Polio.” Now that Polio is no longer a big issue to developed nations, it is hard to picture that in our school newspaper in 2016. An interesting article in that issue was about some of the first College Board tests. It was describing a national, standardized test that we now know as the SAT. The original goal of these tests was to apply for college scholarship, but as we know now, they are used for a lot more than scholarships.

All of the students and the majority of the teachers only know of Falls Church High School as it is now. Having an opportunity to see what the Falls Church student body thought and wrote about let us compare us to them. The Jagwire saw many similarities and differences, from the still-going tradition of Heritage Night to the thankfully-over Polio epidemic. No matter the topic or article, it is undeniably interesting to look back into Falls Church High School’s long history.