Yes, two years for AP Physics without calculus does boggle the mind! Back in the day, there was just one AP Physics class and exam. I think all my classmates were taking Calculus BC simultaneously so the teacher had freedom to teach how he wanted, which was actually a mixture. Of course, I also don't remember any of my AP teachers teaching to the exams.
Mechanics was a first semester course used to weed out all the freshmen who mistakenly thought they wanted to be engineers. The herd had thinned considerably by the time Electricity/Magnetism rolled around in second semester. Interestingly, I think that Electricity/Magnetism was less vigorous than Mechanics and therefore would have been less effective for weeding purposes. I actually stayed a whole year before switching majors but it was a shock going from a high school AP Physics course to a freshman engineering course on Mechanics.
