Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck is Salinas High School’s most famous alum. The 1919 Salinas High yearbook shows the tall, stern-faced boy with the protruding ears as a member of the school’s basketball and track teams.
He also was elected the Senior Class President, had a lead part in the class play, and was an associate editor on the yearbook. Readers of The High School will learn that Steinbeck wasn’t always celebrated in Salinas. In fact, for much of his adult life he was vilified in his hometown, due largely to his public support for farm laborers during the bloody strikes of the mid-1930s.
While in high school at the end of the 1960s, Michael Messner first encountered Steinbeck’s works in the beautiful 1938 short story collection The Long Valley—still a favorite of Messner’s.
Over the years, and especially since his death in 1968, the people of Salinas warmed to Steinbeck’s memory, frequently connecting emotionally with his book Travels With Charley—parts of which are a veritable love letter to the Salinas Valley.
Salinas High today certainly embraces Steinbeck, and his image recurs every so often in the yearbooks.