History of the Snooze

Before the Snooze, there was chaos. The year was 1912, and the primordial creators of The Blue & The Gray, the school newspaper at the time, were in crisis. Readership was down as students were seemingly addicted to their almanacs, while few underclassmen wanted to join the failing club. In a last-ditch effort to drum up interest for the sinking ship, editor-in-chief Walter Lord wrote a parody of the recent Titanic disaster, comparing it to having to sit through Mr. Schmick (Sr.)’s class. While it did lure new underclassmen writers into the club, all the new writers exclusively wrote satirical articles. These articles were part of a section called “Riddle Me This!: The Gilman Comical Column of Conundrums” (or R.M.T. for short). 

After Walter Lord graduated and wrote a mediocre book about the Titanic that would be forced upon students by middle school English teachers for generations, the R.M.T. seceded from The Blue & The Gray to form their own publication, causing the old school newspaper to disband. After an article in the paper compared headmaster Frank Pine to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he ordered the R.M.T. to be shut down. As a result, Johannes Hamron, leader of R.M.T., started a serious newspaper in 1914 called The Gilman News to hide the satire articles from the prying eyes of the administration. 

In 1919, when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt was visiting the school to give a commencement speech, the future president got his hands on the satire articles hidden deep within The News, saying, “By golly! These youngsters’ minds really have been corrupted; they just keep oozing out bad ideas. They might as well have tinfoil hats on!” When editor-in-chief at the time, Alexander Howe, heard these comments, he decided to name the publication the “Snooze” as a combination of the tinfoil (Sn) hats and the ooze from the writers’ corrupted minds. 

When Gilman was under siege in 1954 from communist networks with ties to the Soviet Union, such as FLIK (Food for the Leninist Insurgent Komintern), editor-in-chief Leonidas Swertis used the Snooze to find proof of any un-American leanings. After placing a trap article making an extremely offensive joke about capitalism not being the most perfect way of life in the Snooze, he secretly recorded the reactions of the Marxist lunch staff, most of whom dared to laugh. Following this courageous action, he immediately contacted the School Un-American Activities Committee (later renamed the Gilman Honor Council), which nobly hired a new, proudly American lunch service in its place: Taco Bell (this remained until President Johnson unpatriotically introduced nutrition standards ten years later). 

In 1977, the Snooze ran an article about the new Spanish teacher, Sr. Joe Duncan, titled “Duncan’s Death Star,” with a failing Spanish student writing, “Just like in the movies, Sr. Duncan’s moon-sized class full of work will last less than five years.” Incensed after reading the article, Sr. Duncan made a pact with the teaching gods to keep teaching for at least half a century to prove the Snooze wrong. 

Exactly twenty years later, in 1997, senior editor Yaj Araavolas penned a Snooze piece titled “Football Team Sells Soul to MIAA in Exchange for Good O-Line,” which had a line directly calling out then-sophomore Jeffrey Gouline. When the prodigal guard read that his glasses would do a better job of protecting the quarterback than he, he began his deep-seated distaste for the entire News organization, which continues to this day. 

Since then, the Snooze has continued to play a vital role in the Gilman community. From causing the 2016 Baltimore blizzard to singlehandedly saving the old Finney mascot from being fed to the new one in a ritualistic cannibalism ceremony held in the athletics office by the cage staff at 2 AM, it has outgrown its humble roots to become an enormously powerful institution, entertaining hardly-working Gilman students for generations to come.