I’ve dragged out of storage the last remaining records of my youth, with the intention of dealing with them once and for all. There were once half a dozen boxes of this stuff; now it’s down to one plastic storage bin. I figure there must be a reason why these things have survived forty years of weeding and moving.
I haven’t touched every piece of paper in the box, but these are some of the things I found:
* My grade school report cards.
* High school stuff: newspaper clippings, commencement invitation card, commencement program.
* The scripts of the radio show I DJ’d in college, playing two hours of Mozart in the evening once a week from January 1967 to April 1968.
* Material from my foreign study in Mainz, Germany, in spring 1969 — my passport, my student ID from the university there, my diary, and complete notes for, and draft of, the paper (in German) on the history of the Mainz city theater that I was working on and never completed.
* My Selective Service correspondence, including my lottery notification (I drew 310, which meant I didn’t have to go). We’re talking Vietnam here — this was the lottery of December 1, 1969.
* Diary and expense records from my almost six months in Vienna in 1972.
There’s fodder for a lot of blogging there.
I had seen most of this stuff in previous forays, but here’s one thing I had either overlooked or forgotten. It’s hard to imagine why I saved this — there is an envelope containing receipts from my first year of teaching school in Vermont, 1969-1970. Helpfully, I recorded my monthly food expenses on the envelope, and here they are:
September: $38.40
October: $40.10
November: $26.59
December: $47.90
January: $30.63
February: $41.94
March: $54.33
April: $37.17
I’m not sure why May is missing, but it’s probably because I moved in June and didn’t bother about tying up May.
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