So Much More Than Just "Things and Stuff"

The pages of my mother's scrapbook are yellowed and crumbling fast. The photos, like this one taken in Des Moines, Iowa at 3 years old, are black and white, and they too are beginning to fade. My hope is to preserve this book, innocently titled "Things and Stuff," by scanning its pages and saving it digitally. I'm not sure how well this will work, but it's certainly worth a try. I've talked about doing what Jeanette suggests -- having it restored and/or preserved by an expert in this sort of thing -- but I've never actually gotten around to it, and I'm not so sure that I ever will. Scanning just seems more likely to me.

The title is ironic, in that the things found inside this scrapbook are so much more than mere stuff, and I don't just mean this from my entirely biased point of view as my mother's son. Rather, I believe, the more I study its contents, that this book is an important historical document. My mother was born in 1930, just at the start of the Great Depression. Her father worked extremely hard in the maintenance department on the Rock Island Railroad throughout those lean years, just to keep from going under, the way he'd seen so many of contemporaries do. It makes me wonder how much it cost him to dress his young child in this dress and baby shoes, what kinds of discussions he and my grandmother had to have about whether or not to buy her the doll in this picture, and if they ever considered selling the cast iron Jack Russell terrier doorstop, which I still have today.

As the pages progress, you find newspaper clippings declaring the end of World War II, when my mother was fifteen years old. ("Peace! Remember how it came on the night of August 14, 1945? No matter where it caught you -- on Times Square, Market Square or Main Street -- the big news made a noise like the birth of a bright new world.") Suddenly, the world had changed completely. A new era of prosperity came about, just as my mother was graduating from high school, in 1947. She had no way of knowing, of course, that exactly ten years later, that school, Little Rock Central High, would become the first integrated public high school in the south.

The book has many of the other usual items you'd find in this sort of compilation. In fact, my mother checked off the "rough outline" provided in the book's introduction:

• your pet dance programs
• goony telegrams
• menus from your favorite haunts
• place cards from fun parties
• dreamy birthday cards
• snapshots of friends and fiends
• gift and corsage cards
• items from the school paper
• funny valentines
• a page of autographs from the gang
• invitations

In addition to these items, there are some other interesting things, as well. There are pencil drawings my mother did of her teachers, parents and friends. There is evidence of various honors, including mention of "first place in the statewide short story contest of the Little Rock chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters," "The Distinction of Being the Most Gorgeous Girl, awarded to Carol Runyan on the night of the Delta Phi Omega spring dinner dance, June 23rd in the year of our Lord, 1949," and her signed membership card to the National Junior Honor Society of Secondary Schools. There is a letter from a German pen pal and former soldier named Klaus, dated June 28th, 1948, in which he states, "I was wounded [in Holland] and came to a hospital for three weeks. Then I came to the Air Force headquarters in Berlin. I often saw there Herman Goering, Hitler and Goebbels." Enclosed with his letter is a studio portrait, date stamped April 1943, in which he looks like a boy, leaning forward, perhaps a little bit scared of what his future may hold. Like a movie star, he has signed it "As ever, Klaus." She has several letters from a sailor in the British Navy named Arthur, with whom she also corresponded.

I'm both thrilled and sad to learn new things about Carol as I flip through the decaying pages -- that she was a member of a Masonic girls' group called the Rainbow Girls, that she lived in Trenton, Missouri, Rock Island, Illinois, Des Moines, Iowa, and Molline, Illinois, all before the age of four. I say sad, only because I'd love nothing more than to be able to ask her about all these little gems I've uncovered here.

I believe what I'd like to do is this: I would like to contact someone in Little Rock, some sort of Historical Society archivist, and see what the interest would be in restoring and/or preserving the items in my mother's scrapbook. They might be able to help me find someone in my mother's family or group of friends who is still alive. And if that were the case, maybe I could have some of these questions answered after all...