Contemplating the future, off-campus apartment, April 1968

Oh, the level of dorkiness here seems almost toxic. This is a photo of me (photographer unknown) in April 1968, in the living room of the apartment on Vernon Street in Brookline that I shared senior year with classmates Mike Reavey, Richard Sullivan, and John McCarthy. This photo is also history.

It’s history not because of me, certainly. The photo, however, captures elements of life in 1968. Much of what is in the photo is familiar to us. We lived it. But think what it would look like to an historian in 2068, or 2168. Historians might well look at my clothes, my hair (“longish”), the glasses, the books on the table, the phone, lamp (classic!), upholstery, beer cans . . . the Aubrey Beardsley print on the wall. :)

Your kids might find things like this of interest . . . for a little while. But what happens then? If you’re interested in people in the future getting to know a little about “real” life of young people in 1968, then the place to put “stuff” from that time is in the University Archives. Archives will preserve your memorabilia, your “stuff,” essentially forever. Well, for a really long time anyway. The material will be available to researchers and, maybe, to your great-great-great-grandchildren if they know it’s there.

Look at the information on our Memorabilia page. You can see what Archives is interested in, and there is a link to a contact form online to provide more information. You’ll see that Archives is interested in more than photos. But they’re not interested in digital files. They want the real thing, the photos themselves, the items themselves. Photo albums, just as you had put them together at the time, for example, are prized, as are personal diaries, letters, etc.

In the meantime, though, email digital photos so I can put them on the Memorabilia page. You can also send photos of things — papers, bluebooks, tickets, whatever — you find from our BC days. Archives is not interested in clothing items, but I would welcome pictures of BC items from the time.

Here are a couple of other examples of unpublished personal photos with our classmates in them. The first is another off-campus apartment scene, with that familiar staple — pasta.

Classmates and others at dinner, off-campus apartment, November 1967

And this is of our now fellow classmates at Newton College of the Sacred Heart.

Newton College football, fall 1967

Go up into that attic or down into the basement, dig out the boxes of “stuff,” and look for things that show your history. We made history back then, now we can share some of it with posterity.