Here is a great blog that has taken an old Ambassador College ENVOY from 1969 and posted photo's from it and then goes into great sarcastic comments about the vision it (the college) was attempting to get across.
In 1947, a group of Evangelicals founded a private college in Pasadena, where they imagined they could educate their children in a wholesome, Christian environment, free of the wider world's corrupting influence. Naturally, the 1969 yearbook is pure gold.
It gets worse. "Fashion has brought us the mini-skirt and the micro-mini, 'topless' bars and restaurants have sprung up — and even a few 'bottomless' and 'nude' have attempted to emerge. Now comes the "see-through" fashion for women. A whole new type of society has emerged — the Hippie movement, rejecting and rebelling against the 'Establishment,' putting a premium on slovenliness, filth, 'free sex,' and drugs. [...] The Social Order today is acutely SICK! It supplies no PURPOSE for human existence, knows nothing of the TRUE values, has no knowledge of THE WAY to real peace, happiness, and abundant well-being."
Except for at Ambassador College, where all the students dress like they're going to a John Birch Society social in 1953, and they live and learn in their own little palatial, green oasis of traditional, Godly Education and Values.
Looking through the pictures of all these smiling, perfectly posed, carefully lit, healthy-looking young white people, I couldn't help but think of Joan Didion's essay "Good Citizens", the third section of which gives Didion's account of the 1970 United States Junior Chamber of Commerce Annual Congress. The essay is kind of about how these men and women were prepared for a world that, thanks to the agitations and upheavals of the late 1960s, no longer exists:
"At first I thought I had walked out of the rain into a time warp: the Sixties seemed not to have happened. [...] this resolute determination to meet 1950 head on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time enough for 'turning attention,' for 'problems' and 'solutions.' Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way anymore. Of course they would not join the 'fashionable doubters.' Of course they would ignore the 'pessimistic pundits.' Late one afternoon I sat in the Miramar lobby, watching the rain fall and the steam rise off the heated pool outside and listening to a couple of Jaycees discussing student unrest and whether the 'solution' might lie in on-campus Jaycee groups. I thought about this astonishing notion for a long time. It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not."
