Click to enlarge

It's been quite a while since I had anything to report regarding the Manhattan Trade School report cards, which are supposedly the core of the Permanent Record project (or at least that's what it says in that little description over in the right-hand sidebar). Today, however, I have some report card-related news.

I was recently contacted by a woman named Sara Dunphy, whose grandmother, Rose Simone Antonecchia, had just passed away at the age of 102. Rose had attended Manhattan Trade in the 1920s, graduating in 1927, and Sara had come across my work regarding the Manhattan Trade report cards while Googling the school's name. She wondered if Rose's student file was included in my report card collection.

I get a fair number of inquiries like these from people whose relatives attended Manhattan Trade. Occasionally I do indeed have the relative's report card. But more often I end up saying, as I did in this case, "I'm sorry, I don't have her report card," and that's usually the end of it — I never hear from the person again. This time was different, though, because Sara thought I might be interested in seeing her grandmother's Manhattan Trade School autograph book (see photos above), which she described like so:

My grandmother was evidently proud of [Manhattan Trade] and would speak of her time there often. ... She kept a special section of one bookshelf with college and high school yearbooks, and the Manhattan Trade School autograph book became her de facto yearbook from that school. ... When I was growing up, she would proudly take out the autograph book out and show it to us. She seemed to enjoy how it represented her brief independence prior to her marriage and working/family life.

Here's the best part: The autograph book, as you'd expect, features assorted notes and messages written by Rose's classmates, who of course signed their names. And some of those students are represented in my report card collection, even though Rose herself is not.

Let's start with a student named Jennie Grillo, who wrote a note and also included a really endearing self-portrait (click photos to enlarge):

Jennie Grillo's report card is part of my collection. As longtime PermaRec readers may recall, many of the report cards included photos of the students, and I was really hoping that would be the case with Jennie's because I wanted to see how her photo compared to her self-portrait. Unfortunately, her card packet does not have a photo, but it nonetheless features lots of interesting material. Let's start with the front and back of her main card (click photos to enlarge):

As you can see, Jennie was born in August of 1909, which means she is likely now deceased. She was of Italian descent and grew up in Brooklyn, where her father worked as a bricklayer. Like most Manhattan Trade students, she had completed the eighth grade before enrolling in trade school, where her chosen trade was dressmaking. Aside from being cited by one teacher for a "poor memory," her scholastic performance appears to have been solid. (Regarding the grades, P = Poor, F = Fair, G = Good, and E = Excellent.) It's interesting to see that two of her art grades are listed as "Museum" — not sure what that means, but perhaps she had an internship. She left the school in February of 1927.

Manhattan Trade students could not receive their diploma until they'd demonstrated a proficiency in their trade in a work setting, so the school maintained a job-placement office that helped arrange employment for the girls after they'd completed their vocational training. Many of the girls continued to use this office as a de facto employment bureau for many years after they graduated. In Jennie's case, it appears that she was referred for various jobs for nearly four years after completing her schooling, as you can see on these next two cards (click to enlarge):

As you can see, Jennie worked primarily in dressmaking (listed as "D" in the "Trade" column), first as an assistant finisher ("Ass't Fin") and then as a finisher ("Fin"). This is typical of the Manhattan Trade dressmaking students, most of whom were place in finishing jobs. Her wages, which were primarily in the range of $18 to $20 a week, were typical as well. Also of note: Under "Reason for Leaving," you can see that the term "Slack" was frequently used. This does not mean Jennie was a slacker; rather, it indicates that the business had entered its slow or "slack" season and was therefore reducing its staff.

The final card in Jennie's file contains comments from her and from the placement office's staff, which appear in black ink, and from her employers, which appear in red (click to enlarge):

It's mostly unremarkable, but I recognize the handwriting on the little note at the top of the card — "Average. Too much makeup." That's a classic bit of critical commentary from the woman who ran the school's job-placement office at the time, Althea Kotter, who seems to have reveled in the art of the withering critique. (More of her report card comments, many of them quite entertaining, are available here, and you can learn more about her very interesting backstory by scrolling down to about the midpoint of this page.)

That's enough for today. Tomorrow: A close look at the report card of another student who signed Rose Simone's autograph book.

Photos by Ricco Maresca Gallery

I have a new obsession, and it's very PermaRec-ish. It's going to take a while to tell the whole story, so please settle in and bear with me.

It all started in January, when my friend Jack told me about a cool-sounding exhibit at the Ricco Maresca Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibit featured 250 vintage employee photo I.D. badges, primarily from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. These were badges that many companies used to require their workers to wear for identification purposes, just as many employees nowadays have to wear laminated I.D. cards around their necks.

Vintage photo badges had never been on my radar before, but I immediately saw their appeal. For starters, they're beautiful little objects. They're also a great source of vernacular photography and portraiture. The tiny I.D. head shots offer a rich cast of faces offering a full range of humor, pathos, menace, and more, just like the head shots on the Manhattan Trade School report cards that gave birth to the Permanent Record project.

Also, the badges capture and evoke a very industrial, manufacturing-y sense of America's bygone production economy. Part of this is because many of the badges were used by industrial companies, but it's also because the badges themselves feel like industrially produced objects — a very satisfying parallel that you can see in, for example, these two badges:

The badges also reflect certain realities about the American workforce of generations past: The overwhelming majority of the photos show employees who were white and male. This isn't surprising, but it's still interesting to see.

Best of all, though, the badges represent a mother lode of stories waiting to be told. Who were these people? How did they come to be working for these companies? Were the photographers professional studio cameramen, or were they just "the guy who takes the head shots" at each company? What happened to the companies (most of which are now defunct)? Were there certain manufacturers that specialized in making the badges? And how did the badges become available on the collectibles market — like, did the employees keep them when they retired and then the badges became available at estate sales when the employees died, or did the companies keep the badges and then the badges found their way to vintage dealers after the companies went belly-up?

It took about two weeks until I was free to go check out the exhibit. But during those two weeks I became increasingly obsessed with photo I.D. badges. As I quickly discovered, there's a brisk market for them on eBay, where they can usually be found by searching on "employee photo badge" and "worker photo badge." Perfect, I thought — I'll buy a few of them and start a little collection. Unfortunately, as I also discovered, they tend to sell for at least $50, and often for considerably more than that. That was more than I was willing to spend, especially for such small items. (I mentioned this to my friend Robin Edgerton, who's very knowledgeable about various collecting subcultures. "You used to be able to get them for around $10 each," she told me, "but they went through a collector's frenzy the last few years and have gotten pricey." Dang.)

But if I couldn't afford to collect the photo badges, I could at least collect photographs of them. So I spent a few days downloading over 100 badge photos from assorted eBay auctions, just so I could look at them, study them, obsess over them. Here's the gallery I ended up with (if the slideshow below doesn't work for you, or if you'd rather see the photos as a gallery instead of a slideshow, click here):

As I looked at more and more of the badges, one thing that occurred to me (and is probably occurring to you) was that many of the employee photos looked like police mug shots. More specifically, they reminded me of the photos in Least Wanted, Mark Michaelson's amazing 2009 book of vintage police mug shots. It had been a while since I'd poked around Michaelson's Flickr page, where he posts his latest mug shot acquisitions, so I went there and discovered, to my surprise, that he has a set of employee badge photos. As I clicked through them, I saw that in 2010 another Flickr user had asked Michaelson, "Where on earth do you find them all?," to which Michaelson had responded, "I've been getting them from eBay from time to time for years now. I think I have a couple hundred." Well, at least I was on target when I saw the commonality between the mug shots and the badges, but I also started realizing that I was very late to this party.

Meanwhile, I still hadn't gone to see the gallery exhibit. I finally did so in mid-February, just before it was taken down (it's now gone, so you can't go see it yourself — sorry). After having spent a few weeks poring over photos of the badges, it was exciting to finally see the real things. They were mounted on a single row of pegs that stretched along the gallery walls (first photo by me, the other two by Ricco Maresca Gallery; click all three images to enlarge):

Most of the badges were about two inches across — a bit larger than I had assumed (it was hard to gauge their size from the eBay photos, most of which had nothing to provide any sense of scale). Seeing hundreds of them lined up one after the other was mesmerizing. So many gorgeous badge designs, so many fascinating faces.

There was very little information about how the badges had been collected or arranged, but I had read that they were all from the collection of one of the gallery's owners, Frank Maresca. As I walked through the exhibit, I noticed someone sitting at a computer in an office off to the side of the gallery space, so I stuck my head in and, on a hunch, asked the guy if he happened to be Frank Maresca. He was.

I explained that I was a journalist interested in the stories behind found objects and asked if he had a few minutes to talk about the badges. He graciously agreed. I didn't record our conversation or take notes, but I've reconstructed as much of our chat as I can remember. All of this recollected dialogue should be considered paraphrasing, not direct quotation:

Permanent Record: How long have you been collecting the badges?

Frank Maresca: About five years. I started collecting them with the specific goal of creating this exhibit.

PR: Did you get most of them on eBay?

FM: A few of them came from eBay, but for the most part I put the word out to vernacular photography dealers, who were able to procure a lot of them for me.

PR: Why did you collect the badges from this particular period (i.e., the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s)?

FM: It was an incredibly eventful 30-year period — maybe the most eventful 30-year period we'll ever see, what with the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of the postwar middle class.

PR: Have you tried to research the stories behind any of the employees shown on the badges?

FM: Several people have asked me about that. No, I haven't done anything like that. But I'm going to be doing a small book about the badges, and that kind of research might be a good to include. Maybe I'll put a few interns on that. I assume it would take a fair amount of time, though.

PR: I really like the way you arranged the badges in a single row instead of, say, in a rectangular grid.

FM: Thanks. I laid them out in a very specific sequence. As I'm sure you could see, they form a narrative, almost like frames in a movie.

PR [totally bullshitting]: Yeah, I picked up that.

In fact, I didn't discern any kind of narrative in the badge sequence. After I spoke with Maresca, I went back out in the exhibit room and looked at the badges again — still no narrative or pattern, at least that I could see. Maybe I was too dense to see what he was up to, or maybe he was up to something so esoteric that it only made sense to him. Either way, I was happy to enjoy the badges as a random collection of extremely evocative objects.

But while I wasn't able to find any narratives in Maresca's badge sequence, I'm assuming there are lots of narratives to be found within the individual badges themselves. Most of the badges just show the company's name, a head shot, and an employee I.D. number. But some of them — maybe 25% or so — also include the employee's name. I've gathered a bunch of these name-inclusive badges (some culled from eBay listings, others from the Maresca exhibit) and gathered them into their own photo set.

Once you look at the name-inclusive badges, a few interesting things become apparent. For example, it appears that at least three members of the Stump family worked for the Goshen Rubber & Manufacturing Company (click to enlarge):

I was curious about this, so I didn't some quick Googling and learned that Goshen Rubber & Manufacturing was located in Goshen, Indiana. In 1999 it was acquired by Wynn's International, which in turn was acquired the following year by the Parker Hannifin Corporation, a New Jersey engineering company. I made a phone call to Parker Hannifin and confirmed that the Goshen plant still operates today under Parker's ownership.

I didn't know exactly when Irvin, Alice, and Elise Stump's badges were from, or how old the three Stumps were when those badges were made, but it seemed obvious that all three of them were now retired and probably deceased. I'm no whiz at this kind of research, and I don't currently have an active Ancestry.com membership (always helpful for this kind of thing), but here's what I found with some basic Googling:

• An Irvin Stump, residing in Goshen, was listed in the 1940 census. He died in 1964, and his obituary specifically mentioned that he worked at the Goshen Rubber Company.

• An Alice Stump, residing in Goshen, was listed in the 1940 census. I was not able to find an obituary for her, but the census lists her year of birth as 1910, which means she would now be 103 or 104 years old. She's likely deceased.

• An Elsie Stump, residing in Goshen, was listed in the 1940 census. She died in 1982.

• Elsie Stump's 1940 census entry notes that her household included a Lloyd Stump — presumably her husband. A Lloyd Stump was also listed in Irvin Stump's obituary as one of Irvin's surviving brothers, and there was another surviving brother named George Stump. Although we don't have employee badges for Lloyd or George, it appears that they worked at Goshen Rubber too, because they're mentioned in the text of the decision from a 1940 lawsuit brought by the National Labor Relations Board against Goshen Rubber. Here are the two pertinent passages:

"On May 12 there appeared in the [Goshen Rubber & Mfg. Co.] plant a petition, prepared by foreman Harold Kintigh, stating opposition to any labor organization 'other than that which might be organized solely among the employees.' It was signed by 40 production employees and 6 foremen. Lloyd Stump (foreman of the trimming department) took it into the trimming room and told the employees therein that 'they could all read it and use their own judgment about signing it,' adding that he 'believed the office might approve of it.'"

"George Stump testified that Hoffman had told him that 'he believed someone caught him smoking.' There was evidence that other workmen had been discharged for smoking."

We've already seen Lloyd listed alongside Elsie in the 1940 census, which said he was born in 1899. He appears to have died in 1978. As for George, he too was listed in the 1940 census, with a birth year of 1897. I was unable to find a death notice for him, but he would now be at least 116, so I think it's safe to say he's deceased.

In short, Goshen Rubber & Manufacturing employed a whole lot of Stumps. As it turns out, the Stumps appear to have been one of the area's pioneer families, which presumably explains why there are so many Stumps currently living in Goshen. (In fact, according to this PDF from two months ago, the current president of the Goshen Redevelopment Commission is Thomas Stump.) So just about any Goshen employer is likely to have its share of Stumps. (Update: Reader Bill Maselunas, who has an Ancestry.com account, did a little Stump family research. And reader Scott Jackson came up with a page from the 1946 Goshen city directory that shows how many Stumps were listed back then. Interestingly, the addresses for several of them are rubber companies!)

That's just the tip of the narrative iceberg that emerged from about two hours' worth of Googling regarding a few randomly chosen badges. I'm sure there's plenty more to learn about the Stumps and about Goshen Rubber, and a whole lot more to learn about the employees and employers shown on the other badges.

I hope to delve into this a bit more, time permitting. If anyone else would like to do some research, please get in touch and we can assign specific badges to specific people. I'm pretty sure there's some good stuff waiting to be discovered here.

(Special thanks to my pal Jack Kirr, who let me know about the gallery exhibit and therefore got this whole ball rolling. See what you've started, Jack?)

When you were growing up, did you ever write your name on your LPs and 45s, either on the jacket or on the label? I never did this myself (the idea of it always struck me as distasteful, like an act of defacement or vandalism), but I knew plenty of other kids who did, and I'm sure you did too.

One such name-inscribed LP is in the collection of my friend Jeff Ash, who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin. His copy of the Beatles' self-titled 1968 album, which he purchased at a used record store at some point in the 1980s, bears the signature of one Riffat Kamal (see above). A little over a year ago, Jeff became curious about Riffat and decided it was time to try to track him down. I'm happy to report that he succeeded.

I was surprised that Jeff's story didn't include any mention of the the little "44" beneath Riffat's name, so I asked him about that. "You know, I never asked him what it meant," Jeff replied. So he got back in touch with Riffat, who responded with the following:

That was just part of my numbering system, where I sequentially numbered all my albums from 1 to probably about 300 or so. Between my Minnesotan roommate Steve Portugese and myself, we had a few hundred albums, some of which were the same, so numbering each album was a way of keeping track of it....

Looking at the picture of the White Album again, I just noticed that I don't write "4" the same way anymore. Not sure when I switched to writing "4" the way it is typed here now, but maybe that was part of my becoming Americanized.

I love this story — it gives a whole new dimension to the term "Permanent Record."

But Jeff's experience has gotten me thinking. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, I used to spend a lot of time in used record stores, and I certainly came across plenty of name-inscribed LPs along the way. But I don't think I ever purchased someone else's personalized record. In fact, I went out of my way not to purchase such items. Part of this was due to that thing I mentioned earlier about the record being defaced — I didn't want to purchase a record that had been marred, even superficially.

But there was more to it than that. At the time, I identified quite strongly (read: far too strongly) with my record collection. I wanted it to be about me, not about anyone else. Even a ballpoint-scribbled name from years ago felt like an unacceptably foreign element, a contaminant. How could I make a record fully mine if it carried the reminder of having been someone else's?

The odd thing about this, of course, is that I love artifacts that have stories to tell about their past lives — that's the essence of Permanent Record. But for whatever reason, LPs were their own special category for me, and I never saw the potential in tracking a used record back to its previous owner.

Nowadays, like so many people, I've sold off many of my LPs and consume much of my music via electronic streaming. (I'm listening to the new Beck album on Spotify as I type this, in fact.) But now that Jeff has opened my eyes, I see lots of PermaRec-ish possibilities in name-inscribed records — I may have to start dropping by used record stores again.

Do you have any records with other people's names written on them? Would you like to try to track down those people? Let's discuss.

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.

The tattered envelope and letter shown above date back to February of 1963. They were recently found under the seat of a rusted-out, rodent-infested 1959 Chevrolet Bel-Air that was purchased at auction by an Indiana man named Dean Sparks.

Sparks was intrigued by the letter, which had been written by a young woman to her sweetheart. The last line, underlined, said, "Let's get married."

After a bit of internet research, Sparks was able to connect with a Kansas man named Wade Waterbury — the son of the woman who'd written the letter. She and her beau had indeed gotten married, just a few months after the letter had been written. In fact, they eloped in that ’59 Bel-Air that Parks eventually purchased. Unfortunately, both of them are now deceased, but Parks sent the letter to Waterbury, who was excited and somewhat emotional to receive this unexpected family keepsake.

It's a great story. You can read more about it here, and there's some additional info in these two video reports (there's some footage that's used in both of them, but they both have a few unique bits that are worth seeing):

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

It's shaping up as a fertile period for African American artifacts being found in unlikely places. Earlier this week I wrote about Marvin Gaye's passport being found in an old LP that had been purchased for 50 cents. Now it turns out that an Arizona graphic designer named Mary Scanlon has made a similarly momentous find: Last spring she was at a Phoenix-area Goodwill shop and spotted a pile of 35 old reel-to-reel tapes. One of the tape boxes was labeled "Martin Luther King, Tempe" (see above), and the others had the name "Lincoln Ragsdale." Scanlon bought the whole pile for $3.

Scanlon eventually contacted an archivist at Arizona State University, who told her that King had given a speech there in June of 1964 but that no recordings of it were known to exist. Sure enough, the tape Scanlon found at the Goodwill included King's ASU speech, as well as a shorter speech he gave the day before at a Phoenix church. You can stream some of the audio here, and there's some additional information here.

Any King-related find is important, of course. But as the AP noted in its coverage of this story, it's particularly interesting to know more about King's experiences in Arizona, a state that has not been kind to his legacy:

In 1987, then-Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday. The fallout, which included losing a bid to host the Super Bowl, damaged Arizona's image. In 1992, an initiative to restore Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona was approved, making it the first state with a voter-approved King holiday.

More recently, the ASU chapter of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity had its recognition permanently revoked [in January] after several members attended a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party that was deemed distasteful. The party allegedly perpetuated racist stereotypes with offensive costumes.

As for the tapes, they had belonged to Lincoln Ragsdale, a Phoenix civil rights leader who was one of the original Tuskegee airmen during World War II and died in 1995. Most of the other tapes were recordings of his 1960s radio show, which was focused on his civil rights work at the time. It's not clear when the were donated to the Goodwill shop or how long they had been sitting there before Mary Scanlon found them.

Three bucks for a unique piece of history — not bad.

The passport you see above belonged to Marvin Gaye. Yes, that Marvin Gaye. It was found in an old LP that was recently purchased for 50 cents at a Detroit estate sale. It's not clear how or why Gaye's passport ended up in an old LP at someone else's house, but it's the score of a lifetime, the kind we all dream about finding at yard sales or flea markets.

Here, check out the full scoop in this short clip from a recent installment of PBS's Antqiues Roadshow program:

It's a little frustrating that the guy says the LP had been owned by "a Motown musician [who] had passed" and mentions that the musician had worked with Gaye, but he doesn't identify who the musician was. I realize this was probably out of respect for the deceased's family's privacy, but it still seems like a big piece of the story to leave out.

I was intrigued to hear the appraiser mention that passports represent a big collecting niche. I hadn't been aware of that, although it's not surprising once you take a second to think about it. So I went to eBay and searched on "expired passport" and "vintage passport" — pretty fascinating-looking stuff, right? As the Antiques Roadshow appraiser mentioned, the particularly appealing thing about a passport is that it tells you where its owner traveled, so you can construct a bit of a narrative. Seems very Permanent Record. I might need pick up a few of those and see where they lead.

Heather McCabe runs a great website called Two Buckaroo, which is a running celebration of our most inconspicuous piece of currency: the $2 bill. The site primarily documents her experiences as she spends $2 bills and chronicles the reactions she gets — sometimes amused, sometimes annoyed, always interesting — from cashiers, bartenders, checkout clerks, and so on. But sometimes she'll also run posts under the heading "Twos in the News," rounding up recent news items relating to $2 bills. And one such news item that she recently found, although it dates back to last summer, is right in Permanent Record's wheelhouse.

Here's the deal: Thirty-some years ago, a Milwaukee woman named Nona Diamond acquired a 1928 $2 bill (see above), which she squirreled away in a safe deposit box. Last summer Diamond's daughter saw the bill for the first time and noticed that it was inscribed with the words "USS Chicago," "1941," and three signatures, one of which was legible — "Jesse Linam." She Googled the name and tracked down Mr. Linam, who was still alive at the age of 93. He had served on the USS Chicago during World War II, along with the other men whose signatures appear on the bill. He asked if he could have the bill back, and the Diamonds happily sent it to him.

Tracking currency as it moves in and out of people's lives is not a new phenomenon, of course. You may have seen $1 bills (or occasionally other denominations) stamped by people participating in the "Where's George?" project, which was founded in 1998 and uses serial numbers to track bills as they circulate around the nation (click to enlarge):

I've asked Heather — the $2 bill enthusiast — if she's considered something similar to "Where's George?" specifically for $2 bills, but she says she's not interested in tracking where the notes circulate. She's more interested in people's reactions to them and the stories that get told along the way. (For those who are interested in tracking $2 bills, some of them show up on "Where's George?")

Personally, I've never participated in "Where's George?" (it seems like a dangerously deep rabbit hole for someone as obsessive as I am), but I've always loved the idea of it. Pundits have been predicting a cashless society for decades now, but I'm hoping currency and coins stick around. They are, essentially, artifacts that we all get to share.

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.)

The current issue of the Southern-themed magazine The Oxford American has an excellent article about Charlie Rich, the great pianist and singer who's best known for his 1973 hit "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" (and who also recorded a ton of less schlocky, underappreciated music). The article begins with its author, Joe Hagan, explaining that he'd recently come across over 40 fan letters that had been sent to Rich in the 1970s, and it ends with Hagan's subsequent attempts to track down the letter-writers.

The letters, several of which are excerpted in the article, are amazing. Here's a snippet from one of them (Hagan left all the misspellings and grammatical errors intact and I've done likewise):

Dear Charlie,

The first thing I want to say is: I hope to god this letter gets to you. From the first time I ever heard your record, “The Most Beautiful Girl,” I thought it was the prettiest song I ever heard. ... I see your picture in magazines + your a very nice looking man. Your my favorite country + western singer. You have a beautiful voice + I love to hear you sing. I used to cry when I heard “The Most Beautiful Girl” (T.M.B.G). ... I guess that song just got to me.

Well, to tell you about my self. I’m 15 years old, blonde hair, past the shoulders, green eyes + I weigh about 128 to 130 pounds. I’m about 5’4 feet tall. People tell me I look the age of 19. It’s really a compliment to me. ... I start school in a few days, in which I’ll be in the 11th grade. I’m fixing to get married to a 21-year-old guy named Donald McGowan. I love him very much + my mother thinks I don’t know what love is, but I’ve tried to tell her I do know what it is. ...

We’ve had a lot of family problems involving my boyfriend Donald. My mother told me if something didn’t work out between us + we couldn’t get married, she said not to ever come back to her house again. [My father is not living. He died when I was 14 years old (drinking problems).]

And then there's the girl who told Rich that she'd had a dream in which he performed on a floating platform in a pond. She jumped into the pond to swim toward him, after which they both swam back to shore and the following scene unfolded:

We went into the [apartment] and you dried off and put your other clothes on and we sat down at the kitchen room table and you said what do you want to talk about + I said well nothing I needed an excuse to get up close to you and you started laughing and I said what’s so funny and you said well for a while I thought you were going to say something nice like I love you or your really tuff looking, cause girls come up to me and say that all the time . ... then you said come over here and sit on my knee. I came over and you came real close and I thought you were going to kiss me and I said please do and you did kiss me and it sure was something.

Wow. How could you not try to track down the person who'd written that?

The center of Hagan's article, in between the part where he introduces the fan letters and the part where the seeks out the letter-writers, is a fairly lengthy assessment of Charlie Rich's life and career. This middle section features some wonderful writing — if you care at all about Rich's music, or about American roots music in general, you'll want to read it — but it runs over 5,000 words. If you're pressed for time or don't care much about Rich, you can get away with reading just the first and last sections, which are about the fan letters.

Only one gripe: There are no photos or scans of the letters themselves — just transcriptions. Disappointing. Aside from that, though, this is a sensational article that's right in the Permanent Record wheelhouse. Check it out here.

(My thanks to Peter Greenberg for bringing this one to my attention.)

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In 1998, a 20-something guy named Jesse Reklaw was doing some Dumpster diving on the campus of an Ivy League university that he'd rather not name when he came across a bunch discarded of Ph.D. applicant files from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Each file included a photo of the applicant, along with assorted paperwork, including feedback from university officials.

Reklaw was smitten with the photos and decided to create a zine that would show several dozen of them, each accompanied by a line of commentary taken from the applicant's file — sometimes a few sentences, sometimes as little as one or two words. You can see some examples above.

Reklaw called the resulting zine Applicant. There was only one issue, which he distributed from 1998 though 2005. The small press Microcosm then picked it up and published Applicant as a tiny book, which remains in print today.

I learned about Applicant only a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what took me so long — I love projects involving found objects, and I was very active in the zine world in the late ’90s, when Reklaw published Applicant. I'm surprised it never came across my radar until now.

Better late than never. Once I saw Applicant, I was struck by its similarities to the original Permanent Record project with the old report cards, and I loved Reklaw's simple photo/caption pairings. Individually, many of them are quite affecting; cumulatively, they tell a series of stories. It's a great project. But it also left me with a lot of questions.

Reklaw is now an artist (you can learn more about him here). Last week I contacted him and asked if he'd be willing to do a phone interview. He readily agreed. Here's how it went:

Permanent Record: How did you come across the Ph.D. applicant files?

Jesse Reklaw: It was 1998, I had just dropped out of grad school myself, and I was feeling very bitter. I didn't really have a job, and I was keeping these weird hours. I would go over to the compost and recycling bins at the school I'd been attending and dig through those to find magazines that I'd tear up and make collages out of and crazy shit like that. And I just found them all right there in the recycling bin.

PR: How many individual files were there?

JR: It was stack three to four feet high. There were well over 100 files — maybe 120. Some of the files were huge, others were incomplete.

PR: What was your original thought in terms of what you'd do with them, and how did you eventually arrive at the decision to publish them?

JR: I am mostly a 2-D artist, and I had gotten a degree in painting. I'd been doing a lot of collage work, and I was really inspired by that notion of grabbing ephemera and sticking it down on a page and then photocopying it, so maybe that's where the impulse came from. It seemed very zine-y — that whole notion of found ephemera and bringing that to light.

PR: After you acquired the files, how long did it take you to decide on the zine approach?

JR: About two weeks. I immediately started reading through them, and as I did that I saw that there was too much information to put in one giant picture or collage, so the zine format made more sense. I'd never made a zine before. Well, I'd made comics zines, but never a zine that wasn't comics-based.

PR: In Applicant, you just show the head shots and a snippet of commentary for each one. Have you ever published any of the other paperwork from the files?

JR: No. I didn't want to get sued, for one thing. I wanted to make the zine to be like a story — I'd been trained in narrative. And by juxtaposing the images and the commentary, I was able to create that. A lot of the additional commentary became very repetitive.

PR: So what did you do with all the other paperwork? Do you still have it?

JR: No. For the first 100 or 200 copies of the zine, I stapled in pages from the original application files.

PR: You mean you threw in an additional page or two as a sort of "bonus treat" in each copy of the zine?

JR: I stapled them in as endpapers. I rotated them about 30 degrees, trimmed them, and stapled them in as endpapers.

PR: How many copies of the zine did you distribute?

JR: I made about 200 with the endpapers made from the original application sheets, and then about 800 more that had facsimile endpapers, because I had run out of the original paperwork from the files. So figure about 1,000 copies over the course of seven years, and most of those were distributed by Microcosm [the same company that published the version of Applicant that's currently in print]. It was getting to be such a pain to assemble the zine and hand if off to Microcosm, and they're such a wonderful company, so I just trusted them to publish it.

PR: And how many copies of the Microcosm edition have there been?

JR: They're on their third printing of 3,000 copies.

PR: Is the Microcosm edition more or less identical to the zine version? Like, in terms of trim size, content, and so on?

JR: Yeah. The cover is a little different, and I insisted on the Microcosm version having a real spine [i.e., with the title, author, and publisher all listed], which the hand-made zine didn't have. And it doesn't have the endpapers. But otherwise it's the same.

PR: With 10,000 copies in circulation, have you ever heard from any of the people whose faces are shown in Applicant, or maybe from someone who recognized one of them?

JR: Yeah, the latter. One woman, who went to the school where I found the files and is now a neuroscientist, one of her professors from when she got her degree is shown in the book.

PR: So did she contact you and say, "Hey, I know this guy!" or what?

JR: You know, it's funny, I knew her through a different project where I draw people's dreams as comic strips, and she was one of the people whose dreams I drew, and then she got a copy of Applicant and recognized the guy.

PR: Wow, that's an amazing coincidence! Did either she or you notify the guy?

JR: No way. No way.

PR: So you asked her not to.

JR: Yeah.

PR: Why?

JR: I just don't want to get sued. There are a lot of famous cases, like when Andy Warhol took what he thought were these random photos of Italian men and put them up in a gallery with adjectives underneath them. But they were real people — you can't just use someone's likeness without asking them.

PR: It's interesting that the files included photos in the first place.

JR: Yeah, that was required back then, just to show them that you could comb your hair or something. And then some of the comments in the files refer to their physical appearance.

PR: Yeah, it seems like it would be better if it were a blind process.

JR: Which is how it is now.

PR: You don't list the names of the people whose head shots are shown, but I assume you know their names, or at least you did at one time. When you found the files, Google and other online search tools didn't yet exist, but now it would be fairly easy for you to find what had happened to these people. Have you done that?

JR: I haven't done that either. Part of it, again, is the legal risk. I might be tempted to contact one of them, and that would be stalking.

PR: Really? One could call it just research, or even curiosity.

JR [laughing]: Yeah, "research." That's what I'm gonna tell the police the next time I'm camped out outside somebody's window.

PR: Well, that would be stalking, but it's not illegal to Google someone's name. But if you don't want to go there, for whatever reason, of course that's totally fine.

JR: Yeah, it just seemed like that wasn't part of the art project.

PR: Have you ever created an online version of Applicant?

JR: No, but I've had plenty of people offer.

PR: Why haven't you done it?

JR: At this point I feel like this project has fulfilled my artistic interests. Also, from a design standpoint, I think it works better as a book than as a website. And if I put it online, I think people will stop getting the book.

PR: Have you ever done anything else with the files or the photos aside from publishing them? Like, have you ever done a gallery exhibit or something like that?

JR: No. I sort of had a manic phase last summer where I was getting rid of all my things, so I was selling them at the Portland Zine Symposium for 10¢ each.

PR: Oh wow, that was my next question, whether you still had the original files.

JR: Well, the application paperwork from the files was recycled into the endpapers. All I had saved were the photos. That's what I was selling for 10¢. I still have some that I saved for myself. I can send you one or two if you want.

PR: No, you don't have to do that. So you had removed the photos from the files, because they had been stapled in or something like that, right?

JR: Yeah. Right from the start, I loved the photos. That's what I was always more interested in.

PR: What size are they? Like, are they little passport-size photos?

JR: Yes, totally. And they're all black-and-white.

PR: In your preface, and also in our discussion here, you've addressed the question of whether it's ethical or even legal to publish this content. How hard did you wrestle with that, and can you describe your thought process?

JR: It did concern me, and I asked a lot of family members and friends, most of whom advised me not to do it.

PR: From a legal standpoint or an ethical standpoint?

JR: Legal. No one cared about the ethics. No way. I was more concerned about the ethics. Like, is it fair to run this guy's photo and say he's best defined by the words "Rather tense"? That's a call I had to make.

PR: Yeah, it's hard to distill something down to a single sentence or phrase. So you had to do a lot of editing.

JR: Yeah. Mostly I went through the three pages of the application written by the student and the three pages written by their referee, and I used a highlighter to mark everything that kinda shocked me. And then I read through them again and sorted them by political theme and took the phrases that best represented each student. I took some of my personal favorites, took the ones that made me laugh, and then tried to tell a story.

PR: And now, years later, how do you feel about the ethical aspect of it? Are you comfortable with the decisions you made?

JR: Yeah, totally. If anything, I think maybe I was being too sensitive then.

PR: Did this whole experience make you feel better about dropping out of grad school?

JR: Oh, yeah, a big part of publishing this, and what kind of kicked me over the line in terms of doing it, was that I decided, "This is my master's thesis." Like, here's what I had to say about grad school.

PR: Once I started writing about the report cards, people started contacting me and saying, "Oh, if you're into old report cards, you'll probably like these old documents I have." And they'd start sending me all sorts of old stuff. Has that happened with you?

JR: Only once. A friend had moved into an old house that had been owned by a literal mad scientist — the guy's last name was Dement, I'm not kidding! He did a lot of work with X-rays for the U.S. government, but he was also an inventor. And in their basement they had, like, piles of X-rays of people's faces and skeletons and stuff, all of which was very striking. And then there were 20 or 30 journals about all his experiments, with crude drawings of all these machines he'd designed. If I'd had two months to spare, I would have made a zine about that.

PR: What would you say you've learned from this project?

JR: To just go with a feeling. I was so mad about grad school, and then suddenly this was in my lap, and it all clicked. Like, you'd think someone who'd just dropped out of school would go looking for a job, but instead of I spent the whole summer tearing through this four-foot pile of other people's lives, and it was a great experience.

Applicant always seems like a singular object. It's a bit impenetrable — I don't know how to do it again. I don't quite know why it was successful. I know I'll never find this kind of treasure trove again. You know, it's not like I did anything — I wasn't the author, I'm just the editor.

————————

Big thanks to Jesse for sharing his thoughts. If you want to purchase a copy of Applicant, it's available from Microcosm and from Amazon.

I've written before about ledgers. Today, as you can see above, we have a new one to look at, and it's a doozy. It comes our way from PermaRec reader Russell Ries Jr., who recently sent me the following note:

I was recently hanging out at my friend Rich's house when I saw something on his wall that I'd never noticed before. It was a gold record commemorative certificate that had been given to Rich's grandfather [for all the photos that follow, you can click to enlarge]:

Turns out Rich's grandfather, Byron Bach, had been a longtime cello player in Nashville and did a bunch of studio work around town. He worked a whole lot with Johnny Cash, whom he referred to as John.

Despite knowing Rich for years, I'd never heard anything about his grandfather. After we talked about him for a minute, Rich said, "Would you like to see his ledger that he kept?" Obviously, I said yes. The ledger showed all the studio sessions he worked on, and the names inside blew me away: Elvis, "John Cash," Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Price Loretta Lynn, Clint Eastwood, George Jones, June Carter Cash, etc.

For each entry it has the date; the names of the record company, studio, and artist; how much he was paid; how much he withheld for taxes; how much he made after taxes; and so on.

I took a bunch of photos. Rich said you're more than welcome to use them and write about them.

Man, what a trove of music history! Judging from Russell's photos, the ledger mostly covers the 1970s — not a bad time for Nashville. Here are the rest of the pics Russell sent me. The last one shows his friend Rich holding his grandfather's ledger. Enjoy!

The wooden case you see above was recently found in the trash by someone on Reddit. It's large — 29" by 38" — and had all sorts of goodies inside, including hand-drawn maps, bizarre depictions of extraterrestrial visitations, and technical drawings (for all of the images below, you can click to enlarge):

There's more — a lot more. And it was all found in a box that was left in the trash! Amazing. You can get the full scoop here.

In other PermaRec-ish news:

• A Civil War general's Medal of Honor was found inside a book at a church fundraising sale. Further info here.

• A Canadian man has found a message in a bottle dating back to 1906, but he refuses to open the bottle.

That's all for now. Sorry for the lengthy break between posts — it's good to be back. More soon.

(Big thanks to Adam Brodsky and James Poisso for their contributions.)