Tuesday, September 18, 2012

a rare scrapbook


One of the special things that came through the auction house the week I was there was this old scrapbook from the 1940s. It's rare on many counts, most importantly as an example of wartime and black memorabilia. From what I could tell, it was created by a young African American man who served in the military. You can sense the author's personality in the little marginal notes he wrote, like in this first picture of his friends with nicknames like Lucky, Fats, Chick, and Birdie. On another page, he wrote that Lefty "has it all the time" and "keeps it that way." Next to the photograph of a well-dressed young woman dated April 14, 1944, there's the rather poignant "I'll wait for you." There's such a rich sense of a life in these pages, I wonder what happened to the author and where they are all now.