Photos take him back

It looks like a bunch of cardboard boxes, but it’s really a rabbithole.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was filling in at The News and Sun office while editor Bob Banser deals with some health-related issues.
And when I’d caught up on a few things and felt I had a handle of this week’s edition of the Dunkirk paper, my eyes were drawn to about a dozen boxes of various sizes at the back of the office.
Their contents are a jumble.
And their contents are addictive.
The boxes are home to hundreds of old photos from the files of The Commercial Review and The News and Sun. They’re relics from the era of film, which has now passed by.
Neither of the company’s darkrooms in Portland are in use anymore. We’ve been fully digital in terms of news photos for several years, and this summer we installed a very nifty computer-to-plate unit which leapfrogged over several generations of newspaper production technology.
We still have all of our photo negatives from 1949 on to the last roll of film shot by reporters for Jay County’s newspapers. But negatives can be cumbersome in the digital era.
And the hundreds of prints in those boxes in Dunkirk are simply leftovers.
They’re jumbled because volunteers from the Jay County Historical Society occasionally paw through them, looking for images that should be part of the county’s permanent record. The newer prints are more faded because fixative wasn’t used; the prints were put to use then tossed in a box.
The best and crispest ones are also the ones that I found most seductive. They’re from the 1950s, my childhood, and looking through them was truly a trip down a rabbithole into a kind of wonderland.
The late great Frank Kenyon shot most of those during the heyday of The Graphic, the weekly my parents launched 63 years ago this month.
So it wasn’t long before I’d deserted my post at Bob’s computer and was looking through the boxes.
There I found, in short order:
•Two shots of an Indiana history pageant presented at Judge Haynes Elementary School when I was in fourth grade. Madonna Miller, who with Paul Macklin taught that grade at Haynes, had written the pageant script, incorporating songs like “Back Home Again in Indiana.” If I squinted just right, I could see myself at one end of the chorus, dressed as an Indian.
•A black-and-white 8x10 staged by Frank as a publicity shot for a junior high play. My old buddy Tom Stith and Vickie Renbarger, one of my best friends, were in the cast, along with Don Hanlin and Ken Tatman.
•A picture from kindergarten graduation at “the rec” in Portland in 1953. A very young June Ireland sits by the piano as Carol Weinland — about a dozen years later Miss Jay County Fair — crosses the stage with her kindergarten diploma.
•A group photo from a Girl Scout Halloween costume party in 1958. I could name all but two or three of the girls in the photo, despite their costumes.
•A somewhat out-of-focus 8x10 that was marked on the back “unused.” Too bad it wasn’t in focus, because it’s a great picture of Jim Caster fishing with Bill and Tim Caster back when they were all less than 10 years old.
And then, in one last box, a real gift: My parents — young and full of life — smiling back at me.
Now that’s what I call a trip to wonderland.

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