Impossible Possibilities from the Katherine Fay Hunt Black Photo Album

Impossible Possibilities from the Katherine Fay Hunt Black Photo Album

Author: Katherine Fay Hunt

Year: 1925

Page 30 of Katherine Fay Ports’ album, titled “Impossible Possibilities,” is the natural companion to the preceding “Camas Beauties” page. Where the earlier page presents three young women from Katherine’s Camas High School circle, this one turns to the boys, offering a larger lineup of “eligible bachelors” arranged with equal care and a good deal more humor. The page is especially interesting as a glimpse of high school social life in the mid-1920s. These were almost certainly Camas High School students, most likely around 18 or 19 years old, standing just at the threshold of adult life. The playful title says a great deal: this is part joke, part social document, and part snapshot of the expectations already gathering around courtship, marriage, and adulthood. Several of the young men are identified with nicknames or handwritten comments that must have carried immediate meaning at the time. Jack appears to receive special attention, with three separate photographs. The page preserves not only faces, but traces of personality, preference, and teenage humor. Most of the photographs appear to have been taken around Camas, likely including areas near the Ports family home and Crown P