For many years, I’ve had a standing lunch appointment on the first Tuesday of each month with my former classmates. There is a core group of five women from the Cook County Class of ’75 that meet, although the invitation is open to all of our high school friends. When a classmate is home visiting, we try to get them to join us so we can get caught up on one another’s lives. We also talk a lot about our shared history— our summer adventures, our part-time jobs, the teachers we harassed, and the silly or dangerous things that we did as kids.
Over the years we’ve met at a variety of places, enjoying sushi on the deck at Dockside or pizza at Sven & Ole’s or a hearty soup at Blue Water Café. But recently we changed our routine a little bit.
We’ve started meeting at a somewhat unusual lunch spot—the Cook County Historical Society Museum on Broadway. We bring our own lunches and Museum Director Pat Zankman puts on a pot of coffee—and we spend our lunch hour perusing old photos.
Pat extended an invitation to community members several months ago asking for help identifying people in the museum photo files. She has put quite a few on the internet for folks to review and has had some success. You can check them out yourself by going to www.boreal.org. Click on “Cook County History” on the left. Then click on “View and help identify new pictures.”
But there are only a handful of photos on-line—there are boxes and boxes of old photographs at the museum that need identification. Many of them are from the Cook
County News-Herald
photo files. Some are from community or school groups—but all have been tucked away without recording who, what, where and when. Pat would love to see more people come and help identify the unidentified.
So our lunch group decided to spend an afternoon seeing if we knew any of the mystery people. It turns out we did. And it turned out that it is a lot of fun finding folks we know. And it is also very rewarding knowing that we are helping to avoid confusion in the future.
Not that we know everyone we should. Pat and the other museum folks found pictures that should be from our “era”—elementary school, Brownies, Vacation Bible School, sporting events, and Fisherman’s Picnic parades dating from the 60s forward.
Our memories are put to the test. Often the people in the pictures from our “era” are oh-so-familiar, but the names will not come to mind. Then we pass the photo around, sharing clues. “Remember, she was in the grade behind us,” or “He lived in the house by the church,” or “She was our 4-H leader…”
Usually one of us comes up with the name and that triggers more memories.
I’m not sure how long we’ll keep brown bagging it at the museum. We may get tired of taxing our brains trying to remember the name of the kid who sat next to us in second grade or who was homecoming queen in 70-something. But for now we are having a great time helping preserve memories from our era!
History never looks like history
when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner
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