Despite the war, despite the athletic milestones, high school life continued in the 1940s to be filled with the day-to-day events that never seem to change from decade to decade. These events were recorded in The Red and Blue until June 1, 1948, when the newspaper printed its last copy. According to Warren White ’39, the moderator of the first Inside SI, The Red and Blue did not return “partly because it was expensive, and partly because its news was quite old by the time it was published.”
The school also had a new publication that was gaining favor: The Ignatian (not to be confused with the yearbook of the same name). In 1945, the school published a 36-page literary magazine containing “a student-composed Greek oration, ten types of literary expression, [and] a number of fine-line illustrations.”11 In 1947, the literary magazine became a news magazine, and ran on a quarterly basis until 1950. This publication modeled its design on Time magazine; sadly, there was “an uncertain period spent reconnoitering with Time about copyrights” in 1947, according to the annual, and it changed its look to avoid legal action.
Another publication, the school yearbook, resurfaced a year later, also calling itself the Ignatian. (The school abandoned the name The Heights, which it had called its yearbook from 1928 to 1932.)
Replacing The Red and Blue was a one-page mimeographed sheet that called itself Inside SI, published weekly by the English students of Warren White ’39 beginning in 1949 “as a practical task for his Journalism class… reviewing the past week and pre-viewing the week to come,” with Bob Amsler ’49 as the first editor. White, who taught at SI between 1946 and 1955, volunteered to start the newspaper “so I wouldn’t have to supervise JUG,” he said in a 2003 interview. The magazine was able to succeed where The Red and Blue failed. It published quickly because, as an in-house publication, it did not require review by a professed Jesuit priest. “The concern was that The Red and Blue went off campus to other schools in an exchange program and its contents needed to be vetted to insure that they reflected properly the AMDG mission of both SI and of the Order itself,” said White. “Fr. Harrington had the misfortune of having the censor duties added to his already considerable responsibilities, and he probably gave them a low priority. In any case, a Red and Blue edition might wait several weeks before it cleared to go to print by which time any claim to currency had vaporized.”
The in-house nature of the publication gave it its name as did the sly reference to the then very popular John Gunther books (Inside USA, Inside Europe and Inside Latin America). “By using the ‘Inside’ title gimmick, the students and I did an end run. If our logic was Jesuitical, well, we had been well taught. Fr. Harrington was, I think, relieved to be rid of the responsibility.”
White kept expenses down by mimeographing the publication and producing it in an after-school journalism class. “Students had fun doing it,” White added. “They were delighted to have something current to read on Monday mornings.” The publication expanded into a four-page magazine in 1950 (“Rag to be Revamped” read the headline of the last one-pager) and continued to grow over the years.
Finally, The Quill appeared in 1951 as a literary magazine publishing short stories and poetry. It published until 1954, and then appeared again in 1992 as the school’s official literary magazine.
Currently, students receive Inside SI in newspaper form, and The Quill andIgnatian yearbook, which appear annually. SI publishes the Principal’s Newsletteronline three times a year as well as the quarterly Genesis, the alumni magazine that started publication in November 1964. (A previous alumni publication, theIgnatian Bulletin, was published from 1956 until 1967 when Genesis took its place.)