Q: Who says coffee that lets you sleep has to taste "tired"? (Together, 1959)

A: We do!

From Illinois State Normal's 1951 yearbook.

Reblog to bring back formal portraits wih mop wigs.  From Saint Jerome's College's 1952 yearbook.

From Nebelspalter, 1958.

A precursor to Gilligan's Island?  From Illinois State Normal's 1951 yearbook.

"Perhaps you should sit quietly."  From Lighted Pathway, 1958.

"What you can't see matters most."  From Michigan State College's 1950 yearbook.

From Improvement Era, 1951.

From The Old Line, 1954.

The yearbook staff posed like fashion models.  From Wittenberg's 1956 yearbook

"A painter sees the world in terms of what may be painted" (Luis Camnitzer, "Looking Through Art and Around It").  From Goshen College's 1959 yearbook.

From Texas State College for Women's 1953 yearbook.

A clock-eyed owl can't be hypnotized with a standard pendulum.  From Together, 1957.

From North Texas State College's 1951 yearbook.

The neatest thing about this is a detail in the caption.  The presence of a broken clock is offered as evidence of human habitation.  It's as if not having a grasp of time is what distinguishes humanity.  That, and a leaf collection.  From Earlham's 1959 yearbook.

Q: "Do your studies haunt you?"

A: Yes, quite literally!  But we exorcise them into books like Of Feeding & Caring For Sheet Ghosts.

From Northwest Christian College's 1952 yearbook.

From Earlham's 1959 yearbook.

If your eye immediately went to the guy wearing his eyeglasses upside down, you most likely have a somewhat kooky nature and are fun to be around.  From Earlham's 1959 yearbook.

From Improvement Era, 1955.

The highly rare Fortello Crystal Ball sold in 1953 for $4.95, which the inflation calculator says is more like $55 today.  Made of glass (approximately 5 inches in diameter) and filled with a thick black liquid, it was crafted by Larno Novelties of New York.  It worked like a Magic 8 Ball: when shaken and turned upside down, little playing cards inside the ball floated to the top to tell one's fortune.  Its full name was "Fortello: The Gypsy Crystal: A Fortune Telling Game."  We found a photo on an auction site of one owned by a magician.  The ads are from Mystic Magazine and Fate Magazine, 1954, when it had gone down in price to $3.75 (about $42 today).  Larno Novelties is itself so little known that we could find only a single ad mentioning them by name, for a lucky fishing lure.