Dunkirk items belong at museum

It was supposed to be a brief visit to Jay County Historical Museum.

But those brief visits have a way of growing, sometimes exponentially.

My stated purpose was to check out a display of memorabilia related to the W.H. Hood Company.

The Hood Company, a wholesale grocer, built the building in Portland that houses the newspaper’s operations. It’s a four-story, kind-of-ugly-duckling place built in the great age of concrete.

Back in the day of mom and pop grocery stores — before refrigeration gave birth to supermarkets and once-a-week shopping — the Hood company provided just about everything imaginable to dozens of little shops in this part of east central Indiana.

Most of the building was warehouse, with a handful of offices at the front. Orders were zipped up — I have been told — by a pneumatic system to the various departments. Then the goods were sent down to the ground floor via a series of chutes — like slides — from floor to floor. Some of the chutes are still there, so are the trapdoors that concealed them.

The building was constructed in 1908, but by 1952 it was obsolete. The days of the ice house were gone, supermarkets would soon send mom and pop packing, and regional wholesale grocers like the Hood Company would disappear.

For something like four years, the building was on the market. Then in 1956, it was purchased by the Graphic Printing Company and has been our home ever since.

All that was in my mind when I stopped by the museum.

The collection on display was impressive, and I was touched that its contents had been donated by Mike Teeter. Mike’s mother Libby and his step-father Quentin Imel had acquired the items during their years as part-time antique dealers.

Their full-time jobs were for the Graphic Printing Company, and most of their working years were spent in the Hood building.

So I was feeling a little wistful and sentimental after looking at the exhibit.

Maybe that’s why my attention was drawn to the museum’s amazing collection of graduation photos from Jay County high schools.

You know the photos I mean, the ones that used to hang in all of the old — pre-Jay County High School — institutions. Framed and under glass, they were a constant reminder of past generations that had gone through the same school.

And if you happened to be a high school kid in the 1960s or 1950s or before, you inevitably found yourself looking up at them, trying to locate your mother or father or an uncle or aunt or two.

You’d chuckle over the funny hair-dos and funny names. (Zepp Yohe or Halloween Baggs come to mind?)

And maybe you would wonder if your own adolescent portrait — zits and all — might someday hang on those same walls.

The schools are gone, of course.

But the group photos live on.

Look at a composite class photo from the mid 1940s and it’s impossible not to wonder how those young lives fared in World War II.

Look at more recent selections and you’ll be looking for people you might know.

Just the same, there are some real gaps.

Dunkirk’s missing.

Of all the pre-consolidation schools, only Dunkirk’s aren’t fully displayed at the county’s historical museum. Redkey’s there, I.P. Gray is there, Bryant’s there, Poling’s there, Pennville’s there, Portland’s there, Madison’s there.

Dunkirk isn’t.

Instead, a handful of class composite pictures are on display at The News and Sun office in Dunkirk. I was able to enjoy them a day or two later.

But does it really make sense, after all these years, for that important and resonant chunk of Dunkirk memorabilia to be an island apart, disconnected from the rest of the county?

I don’t think so.