FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS

Robert Triptow with contributions from David Jensen

CLASS PHOTO

The stories, characters, and the school depicted here are all fictional. The people in the public photograph that inspired Class Photo were real, of course, but must either be dead or, if surviving, no longer resemble those images which inspired me. The Public School 49 in this book is imaginary and has nothing to do with any real school by that name. The building in the photograph no longer exists.

To the best of my knowledge, all the names are my fabrications, with the exception of two. One was the name of a childhood friend; searching for her on the Internet revealed several other women with the same moniker, so I figured it was fair game. Just as we were going to press, I discovered another name belonged to a person (now deceased) in my father’s high school yearbook. This usage was a result of “Eleanor Rigby syndrome.” (The name on a Liverpool headstone that Paul McCartney admits he must have seen and forgotten, yet it lingered in his subconscious memory.)

There’s plenty of offensive material in these pages, but the very rare use of milder labels for minorities or the handicapped are in this book only as a reflection of the times in which the stories are set.

This book is recommended for your bathroom, as each page is about the right reading length per sitting and handy if you run out of tissue.

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Dedicated to John Gadd,the teacher everyone loved,

who became a lifelong friend

and to classmates who made a difference:

Laura TaylorShawn Christensen

Ron Good Shauna Mayne

Cathleen CastilloRichard PhelpsCraig Taylor

Sheila BuckleyScott Cafarelli

Didi HuffCoralie Wilkes

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