View the Entire 1960(s) Naval School Catalog Here!

Mr. Flora suggested this one, and I agree…it’s the complete Naval School catalog from…well, I’m not sure the exact year. Perhaps I’ve missed the date listing on it, but I couldn’t find it. It’s the 1960s, at any rate. There’s some beautiful photography in there, of course, and lots of vintage detail about the Naval School offerings of the day.

I have to thank Dr. John Houghton for the donation of this, and other Culver artifacts to the library for our collection. If you’re not familiar with John, besides being a Culver grad and former teacher at the Academy, he’s a scholar with a lengthy pedigree. Goculver.com readers will be likely to enjoy his 2005 novel, “Rough Magicke,” which is set at Culver and features TONS of Culver-pedia sorts of detail. It’s fun to read the thing and try to pick out landmarks and people we all know, but it’s all the more interesting because the actual plot is part ‘Harry Potter,’ part theological mystery thriller, and part military school fiction. You’ll want to check out his website here as well — it’s a “fake” military prep school website designed around the fictional school in his novel based on Culver…if that makes any sense!

I interviewed John (his picture’s at left) for a library event about his book last year, and asked him about the Culver connections in his novel. You can read the interview here. John also wrote a series of articles for the local newspaper, The Culver Citizen in the 1970s on Culver history, and there’s some fantastic information in there. You can read those on our website here.

I didn’t intend this post to turn into one about John, but his work is worth investigating for the “Culverite”!

Back to the Naval School catalog: you can view this catalog either as a slideshow here, or as a gallery of clickable thumbnails here. The images are kind of large, so I apologize. If you’re using dialup, you’re probably going to want to start with the thumbnail gallery so you can pick and choose your images.

If you didn’t know, that catalog comes from an ever-growing collection of complete, scanned vintage catalogs, yearbooks, booklets, and other historical publications on our website. You can browse the current offerings here…but check back, we’re adding more all the time!