1939 Mount Vernon Academy student scrapbook with drawings related to Seventh-day Adventist eschatology (plus photos and cartoons and boy stuff)
Hardcover scrapbook with cork-lined cover and shoelace binding, 12.5 x 10 inches. 34 pages of scrapbook content; many additional blank pages with ephemera laid in. An ordinary-looking scrapbook of cartoon birthday cards and family photos presented to Eddie by his parents for Christmas 1939, and (at least) partially compiled by them, with various notes and captions encouraging good behavior—perfect attendance certificates are annotated I hope to see this repeated, and a pamphlet urging Never touch alcohol... remember Pop has a speech bubble, I promise Dad.
Another inscription, May your good works continue on to the end, is ominously flanked by young Eddie's pencil diagrams of barefoot Nebuchadnezzar and the figurative/beastly representations of the Ten Kingdoms ("the interpretation thereof”). They are among the 8 pencil drawings and diagrams relating to Adventist eschatology and timelines derived from the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Three of the drawings are labeled diagrams no. 2, 3, and 8, but they were not necessarily all from the same series, despite the matching quantity. Though the scrapbook is dated 1939, when Eddie was in his last year in school, the drawings would date from earlier in the 1930s. The cruder penmanship and drawing style on the labeled diagrams seems inferior to the fairly accomplished beasts (the last, labeled “dreadful and terrible”) and “Little horn of Daniel” drawings. The "Investigative Judgement" (the Adventist postscript to Millerites' 2300-year-ending "Great Disappointment" when the apocalypse failed to arrive in 1844) is represented by a doodle of a figure at a desk surrounded by open books, like a college student preparing for final exams, or a bookseller marooned in bibliographies.
Mount Vernon Academy was founded in 1893 in the former Mount Vernon Sanitarium in central Ohio. It was established to "give character to the work" of Seventh-day Adventists in the region after the guidance of church co-founder Ellen G. White. The school closed in 2015, then the oldest boarding academy in the largest Protestant educational system, second only to the Catholics amongst Christian schools. One modern Adventist school advertises, "educating not just for life, but for eternity!" The idea of "educating for eternity," and the weight of eternity's implications, is in high relief here, juxtaposed against the cheesy birthday cards and cartoon fish.
Eddie’s mother worked at MVA as a laundress; his father was a metal polisher with a military background. They shared dyslexia and an interest in aviation. Among the personal items are a beautifully illustrated envelope with a letter signed “Carey” that hints Eddie's had some trouble: I hope you are doing o.k. now, since you were straightened out. At least I’m betting on you for senior president—“C” so don’t fail me. I know you can do it. You owe it to your mother Eddie, someday you may not have a mother. Then you’ll see different, but it will be too late then. Carey also talks about some cute gospel singers and writes, "Don’t say anything about it, but Elder Robbins told me before I left that all of Kenyon work was going to be thrown out," which seems like pretty hot gossip, even if the meaning eludes this particular cataloger.
OCLC shows little in the way of Mount Vernon-related material, especially from the period. While there are spaces in the scrapbook where photos or other items have since dispersed, it offers some notable pieces of MVA and SDA ephemera: An issue of The Spirit of M.V.A. school bulletin; the complete 16-page "Health Educator" booklet warning against alcohol and tobacco (published by The Associated Lecturers, Inc. at Madison College another Adventist institution active in the mid-1930s (unrecorded in OCLC); and a rare “Ohio Harvest Ingathering Campaign” ribbon given for raising $10 in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of J.N. Andrews going to Europe as the first Adventist missionary.