JANVIER T. LEE'S Moment of recognition

Do you have newspaper clippings that extol about a relative or friend? Little pieces of ephemera filed away that you occasionally come upon?

I have several, including one about myself, well actually a drawing I did that was published in the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Most of the others are about my dad or mother. I do have one about a friend who was a singer, one of a friend dressed in a bikini for a local department store, and one of a friend winning a prize. Someday someone will find these after I've died and simply toss them. The person featured in the clipping will find that their fleeting moment of "fame" is officially over.

This fellow, Janvier T. Lee, has probably run close to the end of his shelf life. This clipping is in the Montez Lawton scrapbook. Google his name and nothing shows up. Dig a little deeper and I find that he died on March 7, 1989 at the age of 75 in Danville, California. He was born November 11, 1913 in Nebraska. Doing a small amount of math would indicate this clipping appeared in a local San Francisco Bay Area newspaper in 1946.

The store mentioned, Lucky, was a grocery store. Several years ago it went out of business. Then another company bought what was left of it, including the signage, and opened them back up.

I'm fascinated by how much ephemera I have, including photo collections, that belonged to people originally from Nebraska. How did so much ephemera end up from Nebraska in my hands. I can't think of any other state that features as prominently in my collection.