Scrapbooks

Making scrapbooks became a tradition in my family as I grew up. My mother, my sister, and I all were avid “scrapbookers”. What I would do was go through old magazines lying around the house and cut out interesting pictures and paste them in. Once, when I was a little kid and didn’t know better, I got hold of an old Playboy magazine and cut out some of their comic drawings and pasted them in. And then proudly showed off my scrapbook to my mother. She said, “Billy, where did you get these drawings?” After telling her, she didn’t reproach me, but did make it clear that THAT magazine was off-limits to me!

Although my interest in scrapbooks waned after childhood, my mother continued the hobby. A few years ago, she gave us a scrapbook that she had put together, and I have to say that this was a great personal gift that was very inexpensive but which contained a lot of expression and communication in it. Kind of like a blog!

When I was taking American History at my local community college in the mid-1970s, I had as my instructor an elderly, very opinionated (favoring the political left) man who conducted his class in an unorthodox manner. We had a rather standard textbook that we would study and be tested on. And my teacher would let any student ask about anything they read or see him during his office hours. But the class time itself was dominated by the teacher sitting behind his desk, on top of which was an enormous scrapbook, full of newspaper and magazine clippings that he had inserted within over his many years of interest in history. The topics were not mainstream textbook topics; they were the kind that someone (like me) might have chosen to write blog articles about! But they all dealt with the topic of American history and had a bearing on the period in that history being discussed. And although this teacher’s demeanor was that of stubborn rigidity regarding his own views and angry intolerance regarding others’ dissenting views, his unusual “scrapbook” approach to teaching left his class as an indelible experience in my college education.

I’ve been discovering lately that I often come across an interesting article or editorial letter in my local newspaper and then lose it a few days later when I want to refer to it. I may find that a story may be developing in the news that I’m interested in but which I don’t feel is complete enough for me to write about. Also, it’s sometimes very important to be able to trace the history of how a news story is reported, not just the story itself. Saving piles of newspaper doesn’t cut it, but clipping articles of interest does. So I’m starting my own scrapbook, patterned after that unforgettable, cranky old history instructor’s scrapbook. And the first things to do will be to buy a nice (but cheap) empty scrapbook and then go back through my old newspapers and magazines (that I haven’t thrown away yet) and start snipping and gluing (very selectively)!

I miss my mother greatly. She died of complications arising from lung cancer in 2002. I take after her in many, many ways. She was someone whom I know for a fact that I would have regarded as a very sweet, intelligent woman, even if she weren’t my dear, sweet, intelligent mother. And her use of scrapbooks is something that both inspires me and brings back good memories.

So interest in scrapbooking can be seen in kindly people (like my mother) and in cantankerous people (like my American history teacher). Or it can be seen in someone afflicted with an unstable mixture of the kindly and cantankerous (like me). I’m sure that my scrapbook will be quite different from those of others. I do think I’ll stay away from certain magazines and drawings, though (lesson learned from childhood)!