A hundred years ago, the students of Van Nuys High School built their yearbook around the sea and the ships that cross it. The 1926 Crimson and Gray is now online, scanned page by page, leather cover and all. It is a beautiful object on its own, full of wave-crested section plates printed partly in the school’s own shop. It is also something more interesting than a relic. Tucked into one of its honor rolls is the teenage version of a man who would later build a University of California campus from bare ground.

Start with the theme, because it explains the whole look of the book. The foreword borrows a line from John Masefield, and the “Classes” divider quotes him outright: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” Masefield was the most famous poet of the sea in the English language at the time. He had gone to sea as a young man aboard a merchant ship, and he turned that life into verse like “Sea-Fever,” the poem those lines come from. In 1930 he was named Britain’s Poet Laureate, a post he held until his death in 1967. So when the 1926 staff compared their school to a dock and graduation to a launch, they were reaching for the writer every reader of the day would have recognized.

It is not a cheerful book at the start, and that is part of what makes it honest. The annual is dedicated to Coach Harold R. Youngman, but its first real pages belong to the dead. Mary Kerr of the Class of ’24 had died that October at twenty. So had Nathan F. Smith, the man who organized Van Nuys High School and ran it as principal for nine years. The students dedicated the new athletic field to him weeks before the book went to press, and they called it Smith Field, which is still its name. Smith had spent his last years securing eleven acres behind the buildings so the school would have room to grow. The 1926 staff understood they were standing on ground he bought.

The Van Nuys Mirror was already running in 1926. The yearbook records that the Mirror placed fourth in the Southern California press contest that spring, and that the campus print shop had just taken over the press work. Louise Wood edited it the first semester and Helen Malcolm the second, with Miss Halsey advising. The masthead has changed a thousand times since, but the paper a student picks up today descends in a straight line from the one those editors put out a century ago.

Now the surprise. Read the membership roll of Sigma Pi, the school’s chapter of the California Scholarship Federation, and one name stops you. Dean McHenry. According to the UC Santa Cruz library’s biographical records, Dean E. McHenry was born on a bean farm in Lompoc in 1910, moved to Van Nuys in 1925, and attended Van Nuys High School before entering UCLA in 1928, where he was elected student body president. He earned his bachelor’s degree from UCLA in 1932, then went to Stanford for a master’s, and there he roomed with a fellow graduate student named Clark Kerr.

The two stayed close for life. Decades later, McHenry helped Kerr, by then president of the University of California, write the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, the document that still defines how California sorts students among its community colleges, state universities, and UC campuses. In 1961 McHenry was named the founding chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. He opened that campus in 1965, led it for thirteen years, and stayed close to it until his death in 1998 at the age of 87.

The boy in this yearbook is almost certainly that man. The timeline fits cleanly, since a student who arrived in Van Nuys in 1925 and left for UCLA in 1928 would have been on campus for the 1925-26 year this book covers. And the entry is no minor footnote. The Sigma Pi roll marks “Dean McHenry, 1, 2, 3, 4,” meaning he qualified for the scholarship society all four quarters of the year. A teenager carrying straight scholastic honors, who then went on to lead the student body at UCLA, fits the record of the man who would help design a state’s entire university system. One caution is worth stating plainly. The yearbook gives no birth date and no middle name, so the proof is the published biography placing McHenry at Van Nuys High in precisely these years, not anything printed inside the book. That is a strong circumstantial case rather than a signed admission. Given how specific and unusual the overlap is, it is hard to read it any other way.

The rest is the ordinary, vanished texture of a school year. The Gray Wolves were already the Wolves. The basketball team went all the way to second in Southern California before losing the final to Fillmore by four points, and the campus hosted its first invitational tournament. The glee clubs staged H.M.S. Pinafore. Junior high and senior high still shared one campus. The back pages carry advertisements for businesses that built Van Nuys and then mostly left it, among them Hanson Drug, Sweet’s, Cowdrey’s, and the jeweler Chas. W. Clark, whose studio shot the portraits inside. English department head E. Ethel Clarke supervised the whole production, a detail that should please anyone who has ever advised a student publication and wondered whether the work lasts.

It does last, in ways nobody on that staff could have predicted. The prize story, “Glowing Embers” by Emily Cocks, still holds a reader. The prize poem, “In Harbor” by Josephine Young, still scans. A page of jokes from 1926 still earns a laugh or two. And in the honor roll, a 16-year-old’s name sits in plain type, decades before anyone would attach the word chancellor to it. The students who signed the autograph pages at the back hoped someone would remember them. One of them turned out to be easier to remember than the rest.