Description
There are scrapbooks, and then there are little time machines. This one was kept by Berta Abrams during her final two years at Central High School near Marlow, Oklahoma, in 1926–1928, and nearly a century later it still feels remarkably immediate. Across roughly sixty leaves Abrams assembled more than 100 original photographs together with handwritten notes, school memorabilia, letters, Valentines, pressed flowers, printed ephemera and whatever other small things seemed important enough at seventeen or eighteen years old not to throw away.
Central High had been established only a few years earlier, in 1922, between Marlow and Lawton to serve students from rural communities too small to maintain their own high schools. Abrams’ album consequently records something considerably broader than one girl’s senior year. It is an intimate vernacular history of teenage life on the southern Oklahoma plains during the 1920s: classmates posing in fields and outside the school, basketball players, teachers, girlfriends, family members, cars, excursions and gatherings, all interspersed with names, dates, jokes, sentiments and affectionate inscriptions.
The photographs are particularly good because they remain embedded in their original context. Abrams identifies people, records places and dates, writes directly around the images and sometimes turns an entire page into a collage. One group photograph is identified “C.A.H.S. 1923 and 24”; elsewhere there are photographs of school groups and young women posing together in open Oklahoma country. These aren’t anonymous snapshots that became separated from their history—they still have their names attached.
And some of the smallest things may be the most affecting. A page of elaborate paper Valentines survives beside handwritten messages from friends. Pressed flowers remain taped to another page, including one dated April 25, 1927. A tiny portrait sits underneath a classmate’s inscription asking Berta to “remember me as a Junior in ’27.” There are graduation materials, scraps of printed paper and the accumulation of ordinary objects that rarely survive because nobody at the time imagined anyone ninety-nine years later would care about them.
That is precisely what makes an album like this so compelling. It preserves the everyday history that yearbooks and official records usually leave out—friendship, flirtation, handwriting, private jokes, clothes, hairstyles, school athletics and the faces of people standing in Oklahoma fields on days that otherwise would have disappeared completely.
A wonderfully dense, deeply personal piece of 1920s American vernacular history—and the sort of archive that rewards opening it again and again.
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