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GREENFIELD, Ind. (AP) — Hancock County residents can remotely take a stroll down memory lane, browsing through more than 120 old high school yearbooks that have recently been scanned and put online.
Yearbooks from 1910 to 1963 are like a digital time capsule, capturing the hopeful young faces from 10 Hancock County high schools in a history preservation project of the Hancock County Public Library.
For folks like Henry and Kay Richey, the ability to take a brief step back in time is worthwhile.
After all, the Richeys - sweethearts from Greenfield High School Class of 1959 - have plenty of fond memories of the places and the faces of their past.
"The town was a lot smaller and everybody knew everybody," Henry Richey told the Daily Reporter (http://bit.ly/14QYozi ), recalling days he'd run around with his football cronies. "When it was dinner time, I'd just stick my feet under their table, you know."
The online yearbooks - found through the library's genealogy and local history link - have been digitally preserved for over a year, but they've been online just over a month now.
It was a free project that took some time and legwork from local librarians and school officials.
The library sent hundreds of yearbooks to Oklahoma Correctional Industries, a correctional facility that puts inmates to work to provide job skills training. The inmates digitized the images free of charge; even the shipping for the project was free.
Librarians saw the importance of preserving history - especially since some of the yearbooks in the local history room get defaced or pictures are even cut out. There were some gaps in the public library's collection, so high school librarians have also been pulling a few copies off their shelves for the project.
The Richeys - who have a stack of their own yearbooks at home - say the preservation project is fine by them, especially if it'll keep the library's collection from being defaced. Still, Henry said he loves to get his hands on the hard copies and pore over the memories.
From lunch at The High restaurant to an after-school soda at Thomas Drug Store, the memories take them back to simpler times.
"There really wasn't any bullying as such when we were in high school - everyone was friends with everyone else," said Kay, who was welcomed to the school her junior year when she moved to town. Her father, Harold Smith, was the high school principal.
"The only way I could get out of school was marrying her," Henry joked. The couple married in 1962.
But the pages of team photos and homecoming queens can't include all of the memories. Henry recalls placing eggs on top of lockers and doorways to watch them splat as friends and teachers walked by. (One friend "ratted" them out, he said, and the troublemakers received a three-day suspension.)
Jim "Jumbo" Shelby, who was senior class president in 1959, remembers being well-behaved most of the time - except maybe that one time he and his buddies picked up an outhouse from the countryside and placed it on the high school's front lawn.
"We were classmates for many, many years and got to know each other really well," said Shelby, now a member of the Hancock County Council. "We just kind of grew up together."
The camaraderie of days gone by is obvious by clicking through the online pages. Marie George of the Greenfield High School Class of 1930 was the only senior who did not have her hair cut in a fashionable bob. Her classmates assured that even though the Marie wore long curls, "bright and lively, she's modern as can be."
And then there's bashful Carl Brand, Greenfield High School Class of 1910. His peers wrote: "Efforts are being made to make him more friendly with the girls."
Beside the genealogical significance of the yearbooks, there are also plenty of community tidbits. The back pages of most of the books are filled with historic advertisements, featuring addresses and photographs of prominent local businesses at the time.
And the pages are filled with pop culture tidbits of the times. The 1944 yearbook tells of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby being all the rage: "The girls who aren't 'swooning for Sinatra' are 'begging for Bing.'"
While the online yearbooks only go to 1963, books all the way through the 1990s have been scanned and loaded onto discs for the library. The library will continue to keep the hard copies on hand, but whether books beyond 1963 will be put online is still uncertain.
Jesse Keljo, adult services manager, said there are copyright issues from the mid-1960s that might prevent books from being posted online.
"That's what we have to figure out next - how we can proceed," Keljo said.
Still, high school libraries also have digital copies of the yearbooks, Keljo said, since they helped out with the project.
Keljo said the digitized yearbooks are helpful for anybody to access from anywhere - especially for those who live out of state now. And if something were to happen to the library's collection of yearbooks, Keljo said it's good to have the digital files as a backup.
It's impossible to tell how many people are looking at the books online, but longtime residents and newcomers alike can enjoy perusing the community through the eyes of high school students, said reference librarian Paul McNeil.
"One of the biggest things is nostalgia," McNeil said. "It satisfies that need to go back in time a little bit."
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Information from: (Greenfield) Daily Reporter, http://www.greenfieldreporter.com
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