Historical Society Acquisition Is A Time Capsule Into Teenage Life In The 1920s

By Nancy K. Crevier

Sarah Farrell Mannix was born in Newtown in 1899, and lived here until her death in 2000. She attended the South Central School, not far from her South Main Street home, and after Hawley School opened in 1922, she finished her schooling there, graduating in 1926.

It is the years that span her junior and senior years, and a brief time after, from approximately 1925 to 1928, that are captured in The Girl Graduate’s Memory Book recently donated to the Newtown Historical Society by family friend Susan Osborne White.

The dark green leather scrapbook, bulging with memorabilia and brief inscriptions jotted next to them, provides a peek into the life of a woman who left her mark on the town and shows, said Town Historian Dan Cruson, how remarkably similar teenagers remain through the centuries.

“Sarah was a good family friend,” said Ms White. “When she passed away, she left her South Main Street home to my mom, Betty Lou Osborne.” In cleaning out the Farrell-Mannix homestead, Ms White found the memory book.

“I thought it was cool. It was fascinating seeing a high school memory book from ‘back in the day’ in Newtown,” Ms White said. Browsing the letters, playbills, ticket stubs, and odd additions to the book, such as a confiscated cigarette and crepe paper party hats, Ms White thought that her late friend’s scrap book would be a good source of historical matter, and decided to share it with the local historical society.

“To me,” Ms White said, “it’s neat, because she was someone I knew. But to have it be used as a piece of historical reference is of greater benefit to the town [than if our family kept it to ourselves], especially in the future.”

“It’s the sort of thing no antique dealer would pick up,” agreed Mr Cruson, “as it has no monetary value. But it has tremendous historical value. It is the only book like it that the historical society has in its possession.”

Unlike the diary of teenaged Katie Bronson, kept in the 19th Century, and now secured in the vault at the town historian’s Edmond Town Hall office, Ms Mannix’s memory book is far less narrative, said Mr Cruson.

“This is just a collection of memories,” he said. “But it is a time capsule, and that’s why I value it.”

The fragile pages of the memory book spill out the special moments of the teenage Sarah “Sally” Farrell, whether it is the now-flattened red crepe party hat from her friend Louisa Nichols’s birthday party, where she had a “dandy” time, or the heartbreaking news clipping of fellow Hawley student and basketball captain Dorothy Cole, killed in a tragic sledding accident.

“Dorothy and Sarah came from different levels of Newtown society, so they were probably not close friends,” surmised Mr Cruson, “but because Sarah was so active in the girls’ basketball and athletics, she would have known Dorothy. This was most likely a very difficult thing for what would have been a small, close knit bunch of students.” Her graduating class, and most of the other early Hawley School classes, he noted, was only a dozen students.

A paper straw, tickets to her first major league baseball game — the Boston Braves — special valentines, invitations, announcements, and many, many playbills and programs that tell of her love of and involvement in the theater, expand the binding of the book.

“Working with her oral history [Newtown Remembered: An Oral History of the 20th Century, edited by Mr Cruson, Mary Maki, and Andrea Zimmermann, and published in 2002], she was more into the athletics. But this [memory book] shows much more balance to her life. For instance, theater and drama seemed to play a much larger part in her younger life than athletics did. She devoted a lot of pages to [the collection of theater memorabilia],” Mr Cruson said.

The sketchy written entries that young Sarah Farrell scribbled into the margins and next to her glue-in treasures frequently mention her “gang,” without naming names. Her peers would have included many young people whose family names have peppered Newtown for generations, though. Hawley Warner, who later owned and operated the general store located in the brick building at the corner of Glen Road in Sandy Hook Center, would have been a classmate.

Of great interest, Mr Cruson said, is the inclusion in her book of the Hawley School “Yell,” (“Chick-a-lacka, chick-a-lacka…”) the class song, and class colors of lavender and gold, not recorded anywhere else, not even in the year book.

“This scrap book showed me [Sarah’s] humanity,” Mr Cruson said, “through the sentimentality of what was saved. It showed the similarities of teenage life then and now.”

The other delight, said the town historian, in thumbing through the worn pages, is that “something like this is seen from an omniscient view. To know her history, that she herself does not know as she is writing this.

“It is a piece of the cultural history of Newtown,” he said. “We could live as rich a life without it as with it, but it adds flavor to the life of Newtown.”

The challenge for the historical society will be preserving the acid paper pages and crumbling mementos in the scrapbook, said Mr Cruson. “It’s a conservator’s nightmare,” he said, and added ruefully, “It’s called ephemera for a reason.”

In an effort to preserve an artifact that could quickly deteriorate, said Mr Cruson, he has photographed as much of the book as possible, so that a record of it will always remain, and has written an essay published in the Newtown Historical Society January-February 2012 issue of The Rooster’s Crow, copies of which are available at the town historian’s office in Edmond Town Hall.

The book can be viewed at the town historian’s office, by appointment only, by calling Mr Cruson at 203-426-6021.