To the WJ community,

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of WJ’s founding, and even harder to believe how far we’ve come as a school since the 1950s. It’s incredible how, over the past ¾ of a century, our school has been transformed from a tiny campus squeezed between a couple of cow pastures to the densely-packed and diverse community we know today.

To celebrate the seven-decade milestone, the staff of The Pitch have decided to dedicate this year’s specialty magazine to WJ’s history. However, the purpose of this theme is not just to highlight the past; we hope that in looking backwards, our readers will gain a better understanding of the present, and an appreciation for our amazing, albeit overcrowded, school.

This year, we as a staff got the privilege to access dozens of Pitch archives, including issues dating back to 1958. As we read through old articles and pages, common threads appeared. As current WJ students speak of Open Lunch or the problems with new policies, so do students of the past. Provided to the right are some headlines of these articles from years past which helped prompt the writing of our own articles and provided a connection from then to today.

As an Editorial Board, we are incredibly proud of the writers and editors featured in this issue, each of whom put hours of work into their respective articles. We are also immensely grateful for all of the alumni, students and staff members who contributed to our research through the many interviews necessary for this magazine’s creation.

We thoroughly hope that you enjoy reading this issue. We also hope that, if WJ still exists in another 70 years (and if journalism hasn’t been completely taken over by artificial intelligence by then) future Pitch staff members and WJ students alike will be able to look back at this issue and appreciate the history it contains as much as we do.

Here’s to another 70 years of WJ!

– The Editorial Board