The Red Leather Diary

I was describing Permanent Record to my new friend Casey the other day, and she mentioned a story that had run in The New York Times several years ago, about an old diary that been found in the trash and then reunited with its original owner.

The diary is shown above, being held by Florence Wolfson Howitt. She kept the diary from 1929 through 1934, when she was a teen-ager. The photo was taken in 2006, when she was 90 years old and had been tracked down by Times reporter Lily Koppel, who had come into possession of the diary after it had been forgotten in a storage trunk and then discarded.

This would be a great story even if the diary had chronicled a fairly mundane life. But the life described in Howitt's diary was anything but mundane. During her teens she was an aspiring writer, musician, and artist and had romantic experiences with men and women, all of it described in the sort of florid, occasionally overwrought language that you'd expect from a privileged teen-ager traveling in sophisticated New York circles.

Koppel, the Times reporter, explained all of this, and a lot more, in a 2006 article, which is fantastic — highly recommended. She ended up writing a book about the diary, and about the unlikely friendship she developed with Howitt.

That book, called The Red Leather Diary, was published in 2008 and apparently got a fair amount of media coverage at the time (as did the original 2006 article, for that matter, which is why Koppel got a book deal in the first place), but I somehow missed the boat on all of it. The storyline was briefly revisited in 2012, when Howitt passed away at the age of 96, but I missed that as well. Seems like the kind of thing that would have come across my radar, but for whatever reason it didn't.

An interesting footnote to all of this is that the format of Wolfson's five-year diary inspired New York illustrator Tamara Shopsin (daughter of famously irascible New York restaurateur Kenny Shopsin, for you NYCers who are clued into such things) to produce and sell her own blank five-year diaries, which are essentially identical to the one Wolfson used during her teens.

Casey — the friend who told me about all this — uses one of those diaries herself, which is a nice way to bring this story full-circle.

A Mystery Floating in the Water

Have you ever seen an intriguing object bobbing along in the water? Robert Townley, a web developer who lives in Washington, DC, was recently walking along the Georgetown waterfront when he saw a booklet of some kind floating in the water. He took the photo you see above and then borrowed a net from a nearby fisherman to retrieve the book.

It turned out to be a photo album, and it apparently documented the first week of a baby's life. Obviously, the photos are now water-damaged, but many of them are still heart-tuggers:

There's a much more detailed version of this story, along with more photos, on Townley's website.

Townley is now wondering, just as you probably are, "Who are these people, and how did their baby album end up in the Georgetown Canal?" He's set up a Facebook group to help investigate the album's backstory and, ideally, return it to its rightful owners. Feel free to join the group and contribute to the sleuthing!

(Big thanks to Mike Engle for letting me know about this one.)

I've featured many stories about lost class rings being found. But the story of the ring you see above stands out for at least three reasons:

1. The ring was lost in 1970 and found this year -- a 44-year gap!

2. The ring was successfully reunited with its original owner.

3. The ring was found by a St. Louis sewer crew, which found it while cleaning a clogged sewer line. The ring (which was not the source of the clog) had apparently been there for four decades. Hmmm, would you wear a ring that had spent that long in a sewer, or even want to own it?

You can read more about this here.

(Big thanks to James Poisso for pointing me toward this one.)

The camera shown above was recently found in 40 feet of water — and with quite a few aquatic creatures living on it and in it — by marine science students who were doing research dives off of British Columbia, Canada. The divers were able to remove the camera's memory card and access the photos and video that, rather amazingly, were still preserved and intact.

One of the photos appeared to be a family portrait, so the students' professor posted it on Twitter in the hopes that someone would recognize the people in the photo. A local coast guard official saw the photo and recognized one of the family members as a shipwreck victim that the coast guard had rescued two years earlier. The camera apparently went down with that wreck and remained in the sea until the student divers found it.

The camera and memory card are now being returned to their owner. You can read more about the story here, and here's a TV news report on the camera's discovery.

Last week I wrote about a 1975 high school ring that PermaRec reader Frank Bitzer recently discovered while going through his late mother's belongings. There's been a new development on that front.

First, a quick recap: As you may recall, Frank's mother found the ring on the side of a highway in 1984 but apparently never attempted to locate its owner. Frank had trouble reading the school's name on the ring, so he sent it to me, hoping I could find the owner. I determined that the ring had belonged to Jeff Weeks, who had graduated in 1975 from Indian Lake High School in Ohio. I had two short conversations with Jeff's brother, Todd Weeks, and traded a few awkward voicemails with Jeff, but Jeff never actually gave me his shipping address for returning the ring. For that matter, he didn't seem particularly interested in the ring at all. Then he stopped responding to my calls.

For the next few days, every time the phone rang, I thought to myself, "That's gotta be Jeff Weeks." But it never was. And whenever I received a voicemail, I thought to myself, "That's gotta be Jeff Weeks." But it never was.

Then I came home one day to find a voicemail from Todd Weeks — Jeff's brother. The message, which was spoken in a very slow, almost disinterested-sounding voice, went like so:

Hello, this is Todd Weeks. My brother said you keep missing each other. You wanted the story on the ring, but he doesn't even remember — it was 30 years ago. [Long pause.] He doesn’t even know. I was thinkin' you might wanna mail him the ring. It's Jeff Weeks, [address redacted]. That's Jeff Weeks, [address redacted]. [Long pause.] He doesn't remember anything about the ring. [Long pause.] Thank you. Bye.

There was an additional long pause — about seven seconds — between "Bye" and the official end of the voicemail. Very odd. Even odder, if Todd and Jeff discussed my attempts to return the ring, as appears to be the case, why did Todd call me back instead of Jeff? Those Weeks brothers — such inscrutable characters!

And just to be clear, I never asked Jeff or Todd for "the story on the ring." Rather, I thought Jeff might be interested in hearing the story of the rather circuitous route the ring had taken on its way back to him. But I guess he doesn't care, which of course is his prerogative.

Anyway: Since Todd gave me Jeff's address, I dropped the ring in the mail. I included a note with my phone number, just in case he wants to get in touch and provide a bit of closure, but I don't expect to hear from him. If I do, though, I'll provide an update here.

For all photos, click to enlarge

I've written several times now about lost class rings being found. But the ring shown above is different — it's been found twice, in two different contexts. And it doesn't seem to want to go home.

The story begins with an email I recently received from reader Frank Bitzer, as follows:

I recently rummaged through my now-deceased mom's old cedar chest, where she kept a lifetime's worth of keepsakes. I came across something odd: a 1975 class ring. My mom had it in a plastic baggie with a note saying she found it in the emergency lane on Interstate 271 east of Cleveland in September of 1984. (She was moving my kid brother to college; they made an emergency stop.) Mom died in 2005 and I just discovered the ring now.

My eyesight isn't good enough to make out the school's name on the ring. But if possible, I would like to see it returned to its rightful owner.

So the ring was first discovered by Frank's mother and then again, nearly 30 years later, by Frank himself. I told Frank I'd be happy to look into the situation, so he sent me the ring, along with his mother's note, which is shown above.

Frank wasn't kidding about the school's name on the ring being hard to read. The lettering is teeny-tiny and a bit weathered. I couldn't make it out with the naked eye, so I took a close-up photograph of it and then enlarged the photo, at which point the words "Indian Lake" became apparent:

School rings are often marked with owner's initials, but this one has something much better. The owner's name, Jeff Weeks, has been engraved on the inner shank:

Some quick Googling revealed that there's an Indian Lake High School in Lewistown, Ohio (about 170 miles from Cleveland), and that the school's class of 1975 included a Jeff Weeks. So I contacted the school, where a helpful staffer agreed to post something about the ring to school's alumni group on Facebook.

About two weeks later I received a call from a gentleman named Todd Weeks — Jeff Weeks's brother. He had seen the Facebook post and wanted to know more. I explained the situation and he said he'd pass my contact info along to Jeff.

About 10 days went by with no further developments, so I called Todd Weeks and told him I hadn't heard from Jeff. He sounded surprised, and then he gave me Jeff's number and encouraged me to contact him myself. I called the number, left a voicemail about the ring, and went out to run some errands.

When I came back, there was a message waiting for me. The voice sounded rather distracted: "Um, yeah, this is Jeff Weeks, just returning your call. [Pause.] Thank you." That was it — no mention of the ring, no curiosity about how I came to be in possession of it, no nothing.

That was five days ago. I've called Jeff twice more since then and have left messages, but no response. Maybe he doesn't want his ring back..? Could be — I can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the ring might be a bad reminder of unpleasant times.

I'll post an update if I ever hear back from Jeff. For now, though, this story remains frustratingly unresolved.

When I was a kid, if I had contraband items that I didn't want my parents to see (dirty magazines, firecrackers, booze, etc.), I hid it in a secret spot in our garage. But why hide something in a garage when you can hide it a tree?

That's what someone apparently did in Vermont, where a crew of Earth Week clean-up volunteers recently found an old VHS cassette hidden inside the hollow of a tree. Inside the cassette were several military medals (shown above), along with some commemorative coins and a Civil War pay stub. As you can see, the medals were attached to little price cards, which suggests that they were stolen from a dealer.

The volunteers who found the medals turned them over to the local police, who in turn contacted the group Purple Hearts Reunited, which is devoted to returning lost military medals to their rightful owners. They were able to return one of the medals — Robert Gene Woody’s 1945 Good Conduct Medal — to Woody's son, Myron Gene Woody. It turns out that that Myron had a complicated relationship with his father and knows very little about his military service, so the medal will help provide a more tangible connection to that part of his life. You can get the full story here.

(My thanks to James Poisso for letting me know about this one.)

I've recently come across a bunch of PermaRec-ish stories from the past 15 months or so, all of which I missed when they originally moved across the news wires. Here's the rundown:

1. A South Carolina woman whose pocketbook had been stolen back in 1990 was surprised when she received a call from the local police, who had found the bag with most of its contents (shown above) still intact. The bag had been found in the ceiling tiles of a bathroom a few miles from where it had been stolen — presumably stowed there by the thief, who took the cash but left everything else.

2. This is pretty good: A Michigan man named Joshua McKinney was removing some old insulation in his attic when he discovered a bunch of old love letters and other ephemera from the 1940s. He was able to return it to its family of origin but nobody could explain how the letters ended up in McKinney's attic, because the family that had originally owned the letters had never lived in McKinney's house, or even in his town. After some further investigation, it turned out that the family had lived in the house after all — but in another city! The entire house, complete with the letters tucked away in the attic, had been moved to McKinney's town after the family moved away. McKinney later bought the house and found the letters. You can get the full story here.

3. Last May I wrote about a hatbox full of old letters from the 1940s, which had been purchased for $1 at an estate sale. When I blogged about this story last year, the woman who bought the hatbox had enlisted the aid of a researcher, who was trying to find the family connected to the letters. It turns out that the researcher's efforts were successful.

4. Last month I wrote about the issue of class rings that are lost and later found. Here's another story in that same vein, about a class ring that was found at the bottom of a lake by a diver in the early 1960s and then returned to its owner nearly 50 years later.

5. And speaking of rings, an Indiana woman was remodeling her bathroom and was surprised to find a wedding band wedged behind the vanity. The ring was engraved with initials that matched those of the house's original owner, making it relatively easy to return the ring to the woman who had lost it 40 years earlier.

Photo by Colin McConnell / Toronto Star

One winter day in the mid-1970s, when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was walking home from elementary school in Blue Point, Long Island, when something glinting in the snow caught my eye. I bent down and discovered that it was a class ring from our local high school. I don't recall the class year, but it was the same as the year in which I found it, so it belonged to someone who was due to graduate in a few months' time.

I brought the ring home and showed it to my parents, who saw that the owner's initials had been stamped into the ring's inner shank. They brought it to the high school, and we were later told that it had been returned to its rightful owner.

I hadn't thought about this episode until a few days ago, when I learned about a Toronto-area man named John Slade (shown above), who had a childhood experience remarkably similar to mine. In 1979, when he was nine years old, he found a then-current high school class ring in the snow while walking to his elementary school. Thirty-five years later, he hasn't been able to track down its owner, although I suspect that will change now that this article has been published.

When I found that ring back in the mid-’70s, I assumed that its owner had simply lost it. When I got a bit older, I learned that high school girls often wore their boyfriends' class rings as necklace pendants, or even on their fingers (after wrapping a bit of yarn around the shank to help the rings fit on their smaller hands). Once I became aware of that ritual, it occurred to me that the ring I'd found might have been tossed into the snow by the owner's girlfriend in a pique of disgust after a nasty breakup. If that's the case, then the discovery and return of the ring would have added an interesting epilogue to a little high school soap opera.

Oddly enough, I have no idea what happened to my own class ring, which disappeared at some point during my 20s. I'm not sentimental about it — no need to return it if you find it in the snow. On the other hand, I care a lot about the class rings that belonged to my father and brother, both of whom are deceased:

I have those rings as keepsakes, and every now and then I'll wear one of them when I want to feel closer to a departed family member.

I do a fair amount of thrift-shopping, but I don't recall having seen many (or perhaps any) vintage class rings for sale. There are lots of them, however, on eBay and Etsy. Since they tend to be stamped with the original owner's initials, these artifacts would seem to offer lots of possibilities for PermaRec-style reconnections. Hmmm — a subject for further study, perhaps.

(My thanks to Taha Jamil for alerting me to the story about John Slade.)

Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register

Okay, this one's a little freaky-deaky. The woman shown above is a California resident named Marion Shurtleff. She's holding a 65-year-old essay that she found in a Bible that she recently purchased at a used bookstore.

Here's the freaky part: The essay was written by her.

According to this story, Shurtleff didn't even look closely at the sheets of paper tucked into the Bible for about two months. Then she took a closer look, recognized her own childhood handwriting, and saw her name on the first sheet. She had written the essay to get a Girl Scout merit badge back in 1948, when she was a 10-year-old girl in Kentucky -- 2,000 miles from where she now lives.

The used Bible in which Shurtleff found the sheets of paper was not as old as the papers themselves. So someone had saved her essay and then put it in the Bible at some point, and then Shurtleff just happened to purchase that Bible by bizarre coincidence.

I have to admit, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. You can read more here, and here's a video report:

(Special thanks to James Poisso for alerting me to this one.)

The photos shown above, as well as the others interspersed throughout the text of this entry, are all part of a remarkable project that's been unfolding in southwestern Missouri. As you can see, most of these photos have been damaged, some of them severely. That's because they were all whisked away in the devastating tornado that hit the town of Joplin in May of 2011. A project called the Lost Photos of Joplin, organized by a church in the neighboring town of Carthage, has been collecting them, archiving them, and attempting to return them to their owners.

The photos -- more than 35,000 of them -- were found in four different states. Some of them ended up in Paducah, Kentucky, more than 350 miles away. Some are professional portraits; others are amateurish snapshots; many were wet and dirty when they were found. But all have been treated like the precious family artifacts they are. As of mid-April, 15,563 of them had been claimed.

The Lost Photos project has cleaned and scanned all of the photos and uploaded them to Flickr and also to the project's own website, where Joplin residents (or, um, journalists who happen to be interested in found objects) can view them. If Joplin residents see photos on the site that belong to them, they can fill out an online form to claim them. The project also periodically holds "claim days," during which Joplin residents can come and search through binders of photos.

It's a pretty inspiring story -- so inspiring that a short documentary film about it, called Photos in the Wind, is being made. Here's the trailer:

You can learn more about the film here. Meanwhile, you can also follow the Lost Photos project on Facebook.

(My thanks to reader Jeff Whitener for bringing this one to my attention.)

We often encounter stories about found photographs. Sometimes we'll even see a story involving found negatives. But this is a story involving a much less common phenomenon: a found memory card.

Here's the deal: A man named David Nieland was recently hiking in the mountains along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina when he spotted a memory card near a stream. He picked it up, took it home, and accessed the photos on the card, a few of which offered enough visual clues to help him track down the family that had taken the photos.

The family was particularly appreciative to have the photographs because they included a few shots of a family member who had since died of cancer. This angle made the story irresistible for the Today show, which recently produced an extremely hokey (but nonetheless informative) segment about the memory card:

As noted toward the end of the Today segment, one of the most interesting aspects of the story is that Nieland -- the guy who found the memory card -- was recently reconnected with a lost object from his own past. His grandfather's high school diploma had somehow ended up in a garbage truck, where it was found and ultimately returned to him.

(Special thanks to Jennifer Hayden for pointing me toward this one.)