Senior T-Shirts

Previously, the boys made their own “Chester’s Chargers” t-shirts to honor their principal, Mr. Chester Turner.  They would not let the girls place orders for the masculine baseball-style shirts that they made, so the girls took it into their own hands and made a special shirt that meant something to them. 

The girls’ shirts featured a female bluebird wearing a queen’s tierra, and said ‘Campus Queens.’  They put ‘campus’ because their choir teacher, Mr. Knauf, would always say, “See you around the campus.” They put ‘queens’ on their shirts because the boys would call them queens behind their backs to poke fun at them. Eventually, Campus Queens became a nickname for all the senior girls.  Mr. Knauf sometimes referred to them as Campus Queens, which became their senior t-shirts' focus.  

“Our choir teacher was very special; he was really involved. He was a lot of fun. He'd tease you in the halls. Also, every other year he had a talent show, which we called The Variety Show and he ran the whole thing… We were really connected with him,” said classmate, Linda Thompson Stewart. 

Highlands High School's chorus teacher, Mr. Knauf, was very important to the students. He was a big part of their academic lives. He was always cracking jokes, putting lots of work in, and he was very involved with the students. They also had a similar love for their principal. 

Thompson said about the principal, Mr. Turner. “He was just a nice guy, because of his cheerful smile, his constant concern for us, his willingness to listen, and his readiness to try new ideas. We dedicated the yearbook to him. What an honor to be a principal the kids liked.”

Lori Deckert Holladay started first. She took her pencil and started drawing designs.  After the design was complete, they made order forms for their classmates.  

“We didn’t have copiers back then, so you had to mimeograph everything, so you type it up on a special paper and then hand crank it through to get extra copies you needed to pass out to all the girls, so that's how we took orders. 

They had to tear off the bottom and give us the money, “No Venmo,” Baumann Roth said. 

So their little group went around the school giving all the girls forms to sign for shirts. The students were excited to be a part of a whole class thing. 

“I think almost every girl bought one, I don't know that there were any stragglers, everybody wanted one,” Lindeman Piper said.

They printed these shirts at Velva-sheen T-Shirt Company, on the western side of Cincinnati. This company used a velva-sheen machine to create the shirts. 

Once the ordering campaign was complete, they all got in the car without any idea of where they were going. They didn’t have a GPS so they had to write down the directions to Velva-Sheen on paper, so they could drive there and place their bulk order.  Finally, when the shirts were complete,  they picked them up, brought them back to school and handed them out.

Once everyone had a shirt they wore it many times. Specifically on Fridays; they would dress down and wear long, collared shirts under the senior shirts. Highlands had just made a change in the dress-code allowing girls to wear pants to school, so that made it easier to wear their Campus Queens shirts with either skirts or pants.