When people hear me say that I’m searching for my past, they usually assume I’m talking about genealogy.
You know the routine.
They think I’m digging through family trees, looking for famous relatives, or trying to discover some connection to history. The funny thing is that if you go back far enough, most of us are connected anyway. Through one ancestor alone, Samuel Fuller of Mayflower fame, I’m statistically related to millions of people in this country.
That’s not what I’m looking for.
What I’m looking for is a piece of artwork.
Technically, it was the first piece of artwork I ever created that was published.
Now before somebody points to the websites, videos, articles, and everything else I’ve created over the years, there’s an important distinction. Those were self-published. I built the websites. I uploaded the videos. I pressed the button.
This was different.
Someone else made the decision.
Back when I was in school, the Republican—or possibly the Union-News, depending on exactly what year and publication name was being used at the time—held an advertising art contest involving local students and local businesses.
Students created artwork.
Businesses selected the entries they felt best represented their company.
In my case, the business was Westfield Gas & Electric.
I submitted my artwork, and Westfield Gas & Electric selected it to represent their business in a newspaper advertisement.
The prize was one hundred dollars.
Driver’s education at the time cost one hundred and five.
So technically, my first published artwork paid for all but five dollars of learning how to drive.
That’s the sort of detail that sticks with you.
What makes this important to me isn’t really the prize money.
It’s the fact that somebody outside of my family, outside of my school, and outside of myself looked at the artwork and decided it was worthy of representing their organization.
That matters.
Especially when I look back at everything that came afterward.
Over the years I’ve created websites, articles, videos, drawings, and enough other projects that I’ve lost count. Most of them exist because I decided to put them into the world.
This was different.
Someone else approved it.
Someone else published it.
That’s why I’m trying to find it.
The interesting thing is that I can probably redraw the artwork.
I remember enough about it that I could likely create a reasonable recreation from memory.
But that’s not what I’m after.
I don’t want a recreation.
I want the advertisement.
I want the newspaper page.
I want the actual artifact that proves a younger version of me entered a contest, was selected, and ended up in print.
Part of the reason I haven’t given up on finding it comes from growing up around newspapers.
My father worked as a photographer for our hometown newspaper. It wasn’t the same newspaper that ran the contest, but it exposed me to a world that most people never get to see.
Like many parents, he occasionally had to find ways to keep a kid occupied.
One of those ways involved teaching me how to operate part of the image-scaling process used before digital publishing became commonplace.
Today, if you want to resize an image, you drag a corner with a mouse.
Back then, things worked differently.
Photographs and artwork were often re-photographed and resized using dedicated equipment before moving on to the next stage of production. Those images would eventually become part of the process used to create the plates that printed the newspaper.
Looking back, that occasionally got my father into a little trouble.
Not because I couldn’t do the task.
I had already proven I could.
The issue was that children my age weren’t exactly supposed to be operating that type of equipment. Insurance companies tend to get nervous about those sorts of things regardless of whether the kid knows what he’s doing.
Which made some school newspaper tours a little amusing.
While other kids were seeing parts of the process for the first time, I was occasionally trying not to let on that some of it looked awfully familiar.
Because of those experiences, I understand that newspapers didn’t simply appear.
Every photograph, advertisement, and article went through a process.
There were originals.
There were production materials.
There were approvals.
There were proofs.
There were plates.
And eventually there was a printed newspaper.
I also remember the archive systems.
Before digital archives, and in many cases before microfiche became commonplace, newspapers maintained their own reference copies.
These weren’t little books sitting on a shelf.
They were full-sized newspaper pages bound together into massive ledger-style volumes.
And when I say massive, I mean massive.
Those books were heavy.
You’re essentially taking hundreds of newspaper pages and binding them into a single volume so that somebody could go back months or years later and find a story, an advertisement, an photograph, or a public notice.
I’ve seen those books.
I’ve handled those books.
Which is one reason I know that newspapers had systems for preserving their past long before computers arrived.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t completely given up on finding this advertisement.
Most people would remember it and move on.
I spent enough time around newspapers growing up to understand that memories like this often leave traces behind.
At one point this wasn’t just a drawing.
It was an entry.
It was a selected piece of artwork.
It was an approved advertisement.
It was production material.
It was a newspaper page.
And somewhere along the way, it became a memory.
Now I’m trying to see if the record still exists.
I’ve reached out to the newspaper.
I’ve spoken with family.
I’ve taken suggestions from my niece, who happens to be a librarian and therefore has a much better understanding of where old records like to hide.
Maybe it’s on microfilm.
Maybe it’s sitting in a library archive.
Maybe it’s buried in a storage room.
Maybe somebody clipped it out of the paper decades ago and tucked it into a scrapbook.
I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that searching for your past isn’t always about discovering where you came from.
Sometimes it’s about finding proof of something you know happened.
I know the artwork existed.
I know Westfield Gas & Electric selected it.
I know it was published.
I know the prize money helped pay for driver’s education.
Now I just need to find the advertisement itself.