Collection Development Suggestion: Americana

Link to October 9 New York Times article, "Farm Boy's Photos Tell Long-Ago Stories of an Iowa Town.

Excerpts:
As a teenager in the late 1930s, Everett W. Kuntz, the farm boy everybody called Scoop because he always seemed to have a camera slung around his neck, walked around his hometown snapping pictures of everyday life. He did not have the money to have the shots printed, and eventually, as he went off to college and later settled in Minneapolis, he forgot he even had them. Some 60 years later, as he lay dying of cancer, he remembered.

The University of Iowa Press has just published the pictures in a slim volume, “Sunday Afternoon on the Porch: Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942.”

Ridgeway, like a lot of little farm towns in the isolated corners of America, looks a bit more faded today than it was in the old pictures, which seemed to capture some confident smiles and jaunty steps, men in fedoras and women in bonnets.

It was a town of about 300 people in those days, and it has not grown a bit. Ridgeway High School has been closed since the 1950s. The Bank of Winneshiek County is shuttered, its windows covered with plywood.