By way of comment on the autograph book practice, my mother (high school class of 1934) had one, with most of the rhymes possibly derivatives from popular songs of the preceding decade or so.

My father (high school class of 1932) didn't have an autograph book, but he did have a mandolin so maybe he played the songs.

At my own junior high final year (1954) a few of the girls circulated autograph books for signings, but almost none of the boys knew (or could make up) anything clever enough to sign in them, so the circulation and signing quickly became a "girl thing" despite a few half-hearted attempts by a very few girls to induce a fewer number of the boys to sign one.

There were isolated "graduation pictures" found in my parents' records, but it appeared that individual pictures were very rare. It was common by then to have a "class picture" taken of each graduating class. Because of the small class sizes, my father's "class picture" included four years from three schools and still only got to about 80 individuals in the photo.

By the mid 1950s, and probably sometime before, it became almost universal for high schools to produce annual year books, with (usually) individual pictures, by class, of all the students. The individual pictures for the graduating class were customarily larger than for following classes in each book. The practice of taking "class pictures" with all members of a class in one picture largely disappeared in schools in my area (class sizes 300 and up to 800+) but may have persisted in smaller schools.

In my class, a small but significant number of the students skipped the earlier yearbooks, but nearly all bought a copy of their Senior yearbook.

The almost universal availability of the year books, that students could pass around to exchange autographs, quite probably was a significant factor in the disappearance of autograph books. The disappearance of rhymes and other "fancies" was concurrent with the appearance of the year books, but whether the cramped space in which one could "sign their picture" was a factor, or whether homilies of the older kind just fell out of fashion would be hard to say.

It might be obvious that "yearbook autographs" would fall within the scope of the present solicitation, but the gleanings from them may be sparse.

John