Sorrow and joy, laughter and tears: Studies in Crap presents the 1972 diary of a Catholic high school girl

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power

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Author: Kansas City teen diarist Terri
Date: 1972
Discovered at: Unsorted box buried deep in a Westport estate-sale basement

The Cover Promises: “1/2 Frosh Year + Soph Summer”

Representative Quotes:

• Monday, Feburary 14: “Jeff B. told Kathy he loved her and then turned around and told the guys to pay him 50 cents because they bet him he wouldn’t.”

• Tuesday, February 29: “I got a B on my english test. of all the wierds grade I wood have to get a B.”

Heartache romps at St. Teresa’s!

Last month we met young Terri, teen diarist of 1972, and had a fine time invading her privacy despite her insistence that “No one if I can help it will never flip through the preceding pages.”

In her day-by-day account of January 1972, she dished to us about Mark, that crush-tastic boy from another school who tells some friends that he “likes” Terri and others that he doesn’t. She recounted an epic fight with Patti, the difficult friend who keeps “A list of all the queers” she knows. She described her bounty of Christmas gifts, her mother’s surgery, and her friend Kathleen’s unlikely love for a “dwarf named Jeff.”

At January’s end, all hope of working things out with Mark had seemed dashed. But then, on the month’s last entry, there came a telephone-game hail Mary. Terri asked Michelle to ask “Hollerm” to ask Mark if Mark still likes Terri … and, to everyone’s dismay, Michelle replied that “Hollerm” replied that Mark replied that “he does but does not want anyone to know about it.”