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One page from a Start High School yearbook from 1977 that was found in an antique store in Wichita, Kansas. The man who purchased the yearbook sent scans of the book to The Blade.
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Wandering memories: Start yearbook turns up at Kansas swap meet

Wandering memories: Start yearbook turns up at Kansas swap meet

Joseph Turner and long-time girlfriend Kristy Chang stumbled across a 1970s Roy C. Start High School yearbook for sale while aimlessly roaming in a swap meet antique store in Wichita, Kan.

Now they’re trying to find the class of 1977 yearbook’s rightful owner after it somehow landed at Paramount Marketplace — 904 miles from Toledo.

For only $2, Mr. Turner said, he purchased the yearbook because he was intrigued by the remarks scribbled inside the front and back covers. Struggling to decipher the vintage cursive, Mr. Turner found joy reading the remarks written by former classmates to the yearbook’s then-owner, believed to be Virginia “Gin” Tanner.

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Friendly remarks, similar to the one signed by Denise Gearhart, class of 1980, specifically hit home for him as he reflected on his own high school experience.

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“To a real sweet chick I’ve known since seventh grade, it’s would’ve been really nice if you could have kept the buttons. We’ve been good friends for quite a while and I hope we continue. Love Denise Gearhart ‘80,’” Ms. Gearhart wrote.

“At first, I was sort like of ‘I wonder what these people are saying’ just out of curiosity and then it dawned on me that maybe someone lost it or maybe it was stolen from them or someone sold it,” Mr. Turner said. “Who knows what the story is, you know? And obviously there’s the part that perhaps the person died and maybe that’s how it’s at a second-hand store.”

For the couple, the yearbook represents full-circle encounters, as both Mr. Turner and Ms. Chang are alumni of the same high school. Ms. Chang, 42, said she and Mr. Turner rarely crossed paths during adolescence but indeed signed one another’s yearbooks.

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“We’ve been together for 10 years. I graduated in 1996 and Joe was a year ahead. We weren’t close friends in high school, but it was still cool to find that we wrote in each other’s yearbook when we reconnected in 2009,” she said.

Growing up in Southern California, Mr. Turner said, his parents struggled with substance abuse and threw away all of the childhood mementos belonging to his brother and him. With not much of his own childhood to nostalgize over, Mr. Turner said, he purchased what appeared to be the abandoned memory of 1977 freshman Virginia Tanner, with the hopes to return the memento to its rightful owner.

“I think what also attracted me to this yearbook is that it represents a time in all of our lives where we all have this degree of unlimited potential,” he said. “The world is our oyster. What do we become? Which of us makes it out alive and sees that potential, and who didn’t make it, so to speak?”

First Published October 7, 2019, 11:00 a.m.

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One page from a Start High School yearbook from 1977 that was found in an antique store in Wichita, Kansas. The man who purchased the yearbook sent scans of the book to The Blade.
One page from a Start High School yearbook from 1977 that was found in an antique store in Wichita, Kansas. The man who purchased the yearbook sent scans of the book to The Blade.  (HANDOUT)
One page from a Start High School yearbook from 1977 that was found in an antique store in Wichita, Kansas.
Start High School yearbook that was found in an antique store in Wichita, Kansas. The man who purchased the yearbook sent scans of the book to The Blade.  (HANDOUT NOT BLADE PHOTO)
One page from a Start High School yearbook from 1977 that was found in an antique store in Wichita, Kansas. The man who purchased the yearbook sent scans of the book to The Blade.
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