I used to work in a wrecking yard, and I worked there for a very long time scrapping out motor parts and then motors. Sometimes, I worked on Saturdays, and when it was time to go home, I would walk around the yard looking for cars, or any vehicle, that looked like they might be hiding some treasure in them.
People leave all kinds of things in their cars, and once they become the property of the wrecking yard, it belongs to the wrecking yard. I've found a lot of neat stuff in those vehicles over the years, but one of the greatest things
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| The Book As I Found It |
I found was a school yearbook from a high school in Mobile, Alabama. I'm a book collector, and I have many books, and some of them are old. I love old books, and the older the better. So, I was always looking for them in those old cars in that wrecking yard. One Saturday, when I went on my hunt for neat things, I came across an old, white Chevy Impala. I think it was a 1985 model. It was leaning into a deep rut that was made in the ground by the fork lift that put it there. It had rained heavy out there for a few days, and the ground would always become very soggy, and the machines would dip down into the soft ground and make these deep ruts with their giant tires. This car looked pretty battered, but it didn't matter, because that make and model always ended up in the crusher and is probably part of another car running around the streets somewhere now.
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| Murphy High School Staff 1932 |
There were other guys that worked there that did some treasure hunting, too. And, they would always pop the trunks looking for what most of them looked for, and that was money. They never cared about finding the things that I wanted to find. So, I always found what they left behind. The trunk for that 1985 Chevy Impala was opened recently. No rain had entered it, and it was a sunny day although muddy, so nothing in it came to any harm.
I looked in the trunk and was surprised to see a lot of books. And, some of them were old and unharmed by the nasty weather that had hit a few days before.
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| Inside Page |
I was really excited by this find. Among the books were some old children's history books of the United States from the '60s, a 1936 copy of The Three Musketeers and a school yearbook from Murphy High School, Mobile Alabama, 1932. This really excited me, and I took the books home and spent the night looking them over.
The book that interested me the most was the yearbook. I spent hours looking through it over the
years, and I think of it as one of my greatest treasures. It's strange that I should feel that way about the book since it was from a high school in Alabama, and I'm from Louisiana. I didn't know any of those people or any of their relatives, but it fascinated me for some reason.
I've always wondered about the people in the book, and I tried to find out if any of them ever became well known or did anything great. I've never been able to find out anything about any of them.
The owner of the car was a book collector, from what I was able to gather. There were cards in the car from antique book dealers, and the license plate on the car was a Louisiana plate. So, I don't think the person who owned it knew any of those people in the book.
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| Yearbook Art By Athalie Hunter |
There was one clue in it, however, and that's the original owner of the book. Her name was Elizabeth "Nessie" Heim, and she lived right near the school. When I first got the internet, I looked up the school to see if it still existed, and it did. It seemed to be untouched by time, almost the same as it was in the year the book was published. Later on, when Google maps came about, I looked at the neighborhood, and that looked the same, too. It's interesting how some things don't change.
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Yearbook Art By Athalie Hunter
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The book has been sitting on one of my bookshelves for many years now, and I hadn't looked at it in a while. I recently took it out to look through it, and those feelings came back about the people in it and the place and times, and a thought came to mind. Everything we own will eventually be owned by someone else or end up in a landfill. Or, in the case of Elizabeth Heim's yearbook, in a wrecking yard. I wonder what she would think if she knew I now owned her high school yearbook.
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| The book as it originally appeared. |
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| Elizabeth Heim |
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| Yearbook Advertisement. |
