She was valedictorian of the class of 1963, newspaper editor in chief, honor society inductee, psychology club member, budding scientist and rock collector. She won scholarships and prizes and studied math on Saturday mornings. She was bound for Brown University, where, she said, she would study math, anthropology or economics.
But the editors of The Tower, the yearbook of Fort Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, did not think Janet Yellen — who is poised to become the first woman ever to lead the Federal Reserve — merited the designation “Most Likely to Succeed.” Instead, she was named “Class Scholar.”
Ms. Yellen’s high school career is chronicled in yellowing back issues of The Pilot, the newspaper she edited, archives of which are still kept in the Brooklyn Collection of the Brooklyn Public Library. From the achievements recorded in those monthly issues, it seems clear, as her high school classmate and friend Charles Saydah said of her, “that this was a way station to better things.”
Nowhere was her ascent more apparent than in The Pilot, in whose pages she first appeared as a cub reporter. By the fall of her junior year, she had made her debut in the newspaper’s masthead as the assistant to the co-editors in chief.
Her name also appeared on the front page in the same issue, in an article about students who had made the honor roll the previous year. Ms. Yellen, as a sophomore, had achieved the highest grade average of any student, at 96.75.
Like most of the items that ran in The Pilot’s pages, Ms. Yellen’s articles were usually dry and to the point. She wrote profiles of the Parent Teacher Association president and the science department chairman, an article about the school placing first in a citywide contest and one about senior class gifts, to name a few. But in a joke issue in April 1962, Ms. Yellen wrote an absurdist column on current affairs called “Yellen Around.” On the masthead she appeared not as the editors’ assistant but as, simply, “scapegoat.”
By the time she became editor in chief in the fall of 1962, Ms. Yellen was racking up honor after honor: she earned a National Merit commendation letter, led the junior class with a grade average of 97, and was admitted to a selective science honors program at Columbia University, where, the newspaper reported, she would (voluntarily) study mathematics on Saturday mornings.
She was one of 30 students to win state Regents scholarships for college, and one of a select few to win the mayor’s citation for scholarship. Under her leadership, The Pilot continued its 13-year streak as the first-place winner of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association awards, a prestigious competition for high school newspapers. She earned second place in a citywide essay contest on the topic of preserving historic buildings in New York.
About the only competition she entered and did not win, it seemed, was one to host a foreign exchange student.
The editorials The Pilot published during her senior year were unsigned, and the newspaper gave no clue as to who was responsible for writing them. But they seemed to reflect a liberal, if somewhat bland, bent. One urged students to consider joining the recently founded Peace Corps, calling the organization “a new and unique outlet” for young people’s “adventuresome spirit.”
Her career at Fort Hamilton culminated with The Pilot’s last issue of her senior year, when the newspaper, as was traditional, devoted most of its front page to profiles of the senior class valedictorian and salutatorian. Both honors that year went to editors of The Pilot, so Ms. Yellen and the salutatorian, Lois Leewe, interviewed themselves — “not because they are schizophrenic, but because they thought it would be interesting to look at themselves objectively,” they explained.
Describing herself as “a small figure,” a traveler and an avid rock collector, Ms. Yellen mentioned her many awards, but displayed a flash of self-deprecation.
“‘I understand,’ I began, ‘that you are a versatile, attractive, talented senior,’” she wrote. “‘Come now,’ Janet replied, ‘you’re letting The Pilot go to your head!’”
Her other hobbies, according to herself, were “attending Off Broadway theater, eating, riding the 69 St. Ferry, exploring New York City, and reading philosophy so that I can write unpopular essays.”
In one of the last issues Ms. Yellen would edit, The Pilot reported that 40 senior girls had taken a civic-minded sightseeing trip to Washington. Ms. Yellen was one of them.
Her trip to the nation’s capital was “exciting,” she told The Pilot, “and exhausting.”