• Activities helped student become ‘socially apparent’

Jaxon Salsbury sang and danced his way out of his childhood shell at Marion High School, transforming from what he calls “not socially apparent” to appearing in seven school productions and even sometimes building and painting backdrops for his performances. 

Yet finance calls him. The 3.98-GPA co-salutatorian is headed to Kansas State University to major in raising, managing, and investing money.

As much as he loved the arts activities like “caking up” to play the Tin Man in the school production of The Wizard of Oz, he said: “I’ve kind of been misappropriating my time with it.”

It weighed heavier in the balance of his extracurriculars than other activities; though he did manage to squeeze a college-level accounting class and Future Business Leaders of America activities into his high school schedule.

The struggle to manage that schedule was his biggest high school challenge, he said, echoing the lament of other top graduates in his class. Though his college activity balance will be heavy on his major, which is aimed at “financial security,” he doesn’t expect to abandon activities that brought and keep him out of his shell, he said.

In a Record conversation with him and three of his top classmates, it emerged that his entertainment talent isn’t limited to the stage. He is both respected and feared for a comic pastime.

“I’ve been amassing a sort of quote book over my years in high school. Whenever someone says something really ridiculous or questionable, I’d write it down as well as their name [so that later] out of context it would just be funny,”  he said, smiling archly at mock moans and pleadings  from classmates not to divulge their embarrassing quotes stored in his smartphone over the past four years.

One random quote he shared: “Why do I look like Jennifer Coolidge?” The musing once was issued into the ether by his brother.

He won’t say whether the compendium will play into graduation ceremony humor, but he does say that the lesson he’s learned from high school is that when “you find something that pushes you out of your comfort zone a little bit, you still have something in there that could be fun.” 

And, along the way, become quite socially apparent.