for graduation!

Yearbooks: Most Likely To...

By Rick Horowitz

"I found my father's high school yearbook," the woman is saying, "in which a classmate wrote that in 20 years he'd be a grocer and my father president."

That classmate didn't miss by much. Twenty years later, give or take a couple, the woman's father was elected vice president, at the ripe old age of 39. It took him a while longer to capture the top job, be he did that, too, eventually. Fella name of Nixon -- you've heard of him. This was daughter Julie talking.

It's graduation time again. Don't the students look grown-up in their caps and gowns! Don't the parents look proud! Don't the teachers look bored! (They're proud, too, deep down.) And wherever there's a graduation, there's also this question, posed time and time again: "Will you sign my yearbook?"

Some simply do as they're asked -- they find their picture, sign their name, hand back the pen and the book. Others provide information ("Your seatmate in English"), or conversation ("Have a nice life.") Others try to strike a chord ("Remember the frogs?") or share a mood ("Always...")

Then there are the ones who predict.

"In 20 years," they write, "you'll be president." Or an opera singer. Or a movie star. And it happens. It's simply amazing how often it happens: The person they're writing about does become president, or an opera singer or a movie star, and the rest of us read about it when the now-famous person's yearbook is pulled from a shelf for some visiting reporter. There it is, in black and white. Uncanny!

It's the same with names. Mickey Mantle's dad was a rabid baseball fan, so he named his boy after Mickey Cochrane, then a star catcher. Willie Mays Aikens, who'd later make the big leagues himself, was born (and named, presumably) just days after the end of the 1954 season, a championship season and the first truly great year for the "original" Willie Mays. And didn't Dustin Hoffman's mother name him for the silent-movie cowboy Dustin Farnum?

It's almost as if they knew!

Almost. But what we've got here, don't you see, is a skewed sample. For every Mickey and Willie and Dustin following in their namesakes' footsteps down the path to stardom, there are dozens, hundreds more Mickeys and Willies and Dustins, named for exactly the same reasons, who never came close. We never hear about them; they do what they're doing -- sell real estate, push paper, pump gas -- far from the spotlight.

And for every Richard Nixon who becomes president and has an entry somewhere in his yearbook that predicted it (and who knows what other entries predicting what other things on other pages?), there must be thousands more with the same prediction somewhere in theirs -- but with lives that turned out very different. It's just logical: Do you really think that only once every four (or worse, eight) years some student somewhere in the country feels moved to write in a classmate's yearbook, "You're going to be president"? Can't be.

The difference is, those other yearbooks stay on the shelf. No reporters come to call. Besides, maybe the owners of those books aren't all that keen on remembering the gap between "might-have-been" and "is." So we never find out.

For that matter, for all we know, the kid who saw the White House in young Dick Nixon's future wrote the very same thing in every other classmate's yearbook, too. A practical joke, perhaps, or simply hedging his bets. It's like those psychics with their long lists of disasters on the way -- they only have to be right once to make their reputations.

So yes, it's nice to hear, as a new set of yearbooks gets passed around, that somebody may see a glimpse of future fame in the futurely famous. But what I really want to know is: Did the other guy become a grocer?