Urban Archaeology: Granby High School Yearbook, 1948

The strange thing about thrift stores is that they deal exclusively in merchandise second hand in nature. Each and every item in a thrift store has a story behind it, whether you realize it or not. You wander among shelf after shelf of items once treasured but which eventually lost luster and were relegated to the donation bin, cast out of memory and gone forever. But who owned this stuff? Who held these items in treasured possession until they were surrendered to unknown hands? The fact of the matter is, you rarely get a chance to put a name or a face to these artifacts. More often than not, you don't even give the chain of ownership a second thought. I mean, who cares who owned this copy of the Hardy Boys or who decided that they no longer had need for this Polaroid Land camera? Most things in our lives are meant to be transient, they are impersonal by nature. We own things until they outgrow usefulness then we cast them away. But sometimes as you dig through piles of these cast away objects, just sometimes, you stumble upon something that was meant to be held on to, something so personal that it is almost a tragedy that it would find itself on a shelf nestled among heaps of this transient garbage. Such was the case with something that I found on the shelves of Thrift City USA. It was a Granby High School yearbook dated 1948. What struck me about this yearbook was that between the pages, among the notes personally addressed to its rightful owner in such painfully careful cursive, were newspaper clippings detailing the lives and exploits of the people who inhabited the pages of this archival record. Wedding announcements, scholarship announcements, engagements, and so on. The owner of this book had painstakingly tracked her classmates as they moved along in life and, by assembling these clippings, had documented the finest points of their lives. But the care it took to do this stood in stark contrast to the neglect that this book had fallen into and ultimately led it to being classified as "unwanted". It almost hurts to think that this book has been separated from owner and/or next of kin. This is not a transient object, it was never meant to be. It is an assemblage of memories, an archive of achievement that should be in the possession of someone who would treat it as such. It is now in my care and it is now my mission to find this book a proper home. There has to be a place for this book even if it tucked away in the dark reaches of a local library or in the care a community archivist. The transient life of this book is coming to an end.

If you want to help the search or know of a good home for this book, please feel free to contact me. Just shoot me an e-mail at theliterateidiot@gmail.com and share some knowledge with me. What I know so far is that the book was owned by a Dollie Tarrant of Norfolk, VA. She had a brother named Frank Tarrant. So, if you are an OG Norfolk resident and know of the Tarrant family, please, please, please let me know. I very much want to get this book into proper hands.