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The recent 100th-anniversary celebration at Washington-Liberty High School saw current-day students poring over yearbooks from the 1960s-70s.

They seemed both perplexed and excited about the lives of their predecessors a half-century before.

Imagine the reaction if students looked back another 50 years to the very start of their high school, known the first 90 years of its history as Washington-Lee. The easiest way to take a time machine to this period is to leaf through the pages — either in print or online — of the very first W-L yearbook.

This was published in the spring of 1927, at a time when the graduating senior class consisted of fewer than three dozen students. It shows a student body fully embracing the look of the Roaring ’20s with an optimism not yet tempered by ensuing decades, which would bring a depression followed by a second world war.

For those graduating seniors, most born from 1908-1910, it was a time to look forward to opportunities, not dwell on challenges. And while they are all now gone, those students are captured in time in the flower of youth, preparing to step into a world that their generation would shape until well into the 1980s and beyond.

Before delving into their lives as depicted in the yearbook, it’s worth setting the broader stage.

Arlington’s high-school history is both complicated and clouded by gaps in the historical record.

When Washington-Lee opened in the 1920s, it wasn’t the only public high school in the county. Further south, in the Del Ray area, was George Mason High School.

Some will ask, “Isn’t Del Ray in Alexandria?” Indeed it is, but until 1929 it was part of the southernmost portion of Arlington County.