This scrapbook was made by the Burdett brothers: Leonard, Wallace, and Edgar Burdett. They were from Swampscott, Massachusetts, and attended between 1907 and 1911.

The scrapbook is in somewhat poor shape; the binding of the book has come apart. Most of the pages are aged and fragile, requiring excessive care to turn without ripping. Most of the items are still intact, albeit also requiring delicate movements. The front cover of the book has several stickers on it, from the Andover baseball team between 1907 and 1909.

The scrapbook’s contents are mostly clippings from newspapers, detailing sports events; it also has other memorabilia from sports games, such as tickets, scorebooks, and photographs. Other than sports events, the album also contains school records, such as report cards, as well as meal tickets. Several copies of the Phillips Academy Blue Book are also kept handy, through several years. The scrapbook also contains brochures and pamphlets.

The material references other schools often, as most of the book contains records of interscholastic sporting events such as the scorebooks. The scrapbook also contains an invitation for Leonard to a dance at Mount Holyoke College. It also contains report cards for the three brothers as well as tickets to athletic events that the brothers attended and participated in. The dance card was used to document who they danced with and when the dances were. Also included are the badges that Leonard Burdett received when he became assistant manager and manager of the PA football team, as well as the contract that he signed when he got a job as a wine boy at the Mount Pleasant Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It also contains the receipt for Leonard’s application fee to Yale.

Through this album, we can tell that the time period had a lot of focus on athletic events, even more so than today. Most of the newspaper is dominated by sports, talking about football and baseball. It also focuses on events that we would consider commonplace or not newsworthy; the Phillipian, at the time, published a section about students who were leaving campus for the weekend. A separate newspaper, unaffiliated with the school, published a piece about several Phillips boys’ acceptances to colleges, which focused on the achievements of the athletes. In this, we can see the commitment to athletics at this age, that still exists today.

by Nicholas Jasaitis, class of 2019

Scrapbook Box 76