If one flips through the pages of Ramsey's 1970 high school yearbook, the Rambler, many of photographs obviously belong to a different time. Beyond hair and clothing styles, much has changed but one thing stands out: virtually everyone who attended Ramsey in 1969-70 was white. There is one student who appears to be African American, and three who appear to be Asian -- every other face and name is Caucasian, typically Swedish or Norwegian. There are 17 students with the last name, Johnson. There are eight Andersons, seven Olsons and seven Nelsons.

Roseville Area High School today is diverse, even slightly more diverse than the average Minnesota high school. Today 57 percent of Roseville high school students are white, while 18 percent are Asian, 13 percent are Black and 10 percent are Hispanic.

The other thing that is different is technology. In 1969 there were no smartphones, IPads or personal computers. There were pay phones in the hallway. There were classes on operating key punch machines, and every other issue of Blueprint had an ad for Midway Typewriter repair.

If you drove to school (and only 15 percent of Ramsey students did), there was a good chance your car had an 8-track tape player. There were no CDs, no IPods, no downloads, and the now obsolete Sony Walkman cassette player wouldn’t exist for another nine years.

Blueprint would cover all of these issues and more and would be cited as “one of six noteworthy high school publications in the country” for its “provocative and imaginative coverage.”

One thing that allowed Blueprint to cover controversial topics fearlessly was an enlightened school administration that never censored the paper, even when editors strongly criticized school officials’ actions. That kind of freedom was not the case generally for student publications in the 1960s and 70s, and censorship of school newspapers and other forms of student expression remains an issue today.

In addition to bringing back memories, the publications available here contain some excellent reporting and writing. There are features, editorials, commentaries, reviews and even a few poems that recall the things that were important then and would remain with us as we moved on. There are stories about homecoming, Sno-Week, Friday night football games and all the other school sports -- with girls athletics notably absent. There was no girls’ basketball or track team at Ramsey in 1970. It wasn’t until two years later that Title IX would open the floodgates and allow girls to compete in varsity sports.

I wish we’d done more and done it better. I wish we’d explored topics like gender roles that were becoming part of our national conversation. Or provided a different perspective on life at suburban Ramsey by looking at the lives of less-privileged students at inner city schools.

The school year ended. We ran out of time.

But we did pretty well with the time we had.