CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
"There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine." —Marianne Moore
You already noticed that five of their heads are remarkably too small, and more than those have been pasted onto other bodies. What's also peculiar is that only one runner, L. E. McKibben, was unable to be present when the photo was taken. From Oberlain's 1923 yearbook.
To learn how to use a printed owl like this magical purposes, see How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook. From The Cornhusker Yearbook of the University of Nebraska, 1916.