Pictures of their youth

By MARALINE KUBIK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
BOARDMAN -- Ruth Stauffer and Judy Graziano sat shoulder-to-shoulder at one end of a tiny table, marveling at the smiling faces of family members that peered up at them from the brittle black pages of a photo album neither woman had ever seen before.
Graziano's mother, Margaret Jean Stauffer, was there, along with her folks and four younger siblings.
Margaret's brother, Jim, was about 17 in the 1937 photo, and so handsome, Ruth sighed.
She hadn't even met Jim, her late husband, until many years later. But Ruth remembers Emma Jo, his youngest sister, from that time. "I went to school with her. She was a year ahead of me," Ruth said.
Emma Jo died from ovarian cancer immediately after graduating from high school, so Graziano never knew her aunt. "It was nice to see her in the picture," Graziano said. "It was nice to see a family picture of all of them." Only the child who died as an infant wasn't there, she noted.
Graziano's mother was the oldest of six children born to Jennie and Ralph Stauffer of Scottdale, Pa., and she was sent to live with her aunt when the second child was born, Graziano said. "So she didn't know her brothers and sisters very well."
After Graziano's father died, she and her mother moved from Pennsylvania to the Youngstown area. "I was only 4 1/2," she said. "My mother taught kindergarten at West Elementary School."
Graziano later taught first grade at Stadium Drive Elementary School in Boardman and lived with her mother in a big house on Sexton Street in Struthers before moving to Boardman in 1983.
Photos left behind
In 1991, Margaret sold her house and moved in with her daughter, leaving behind many nostalgic mementos: Family photos, pictures of children she supervised at a playground, postcards from a family vacation and some of the children's books she'd read to her daughter.
"When she sold her house, she just threw everything out," Graziano said.
Stauffer died last year, and the void she left has been especially empty for her daughter, who had precious few family photos or mementos from her childhood.
Much of what her mother had saved was ruined when rain water flooded Stauffer's basement last summer.
"That made getting these even more special," Graziano said, referring to the photographs and postcards spread across her table.
A Campbell man found the items in his basement. Graziano speculated that they wound up there sometime after her mother sold her house. A neighbor helped her move, Graziano explained, and may have had those things. When he moved, they ended up there.
The man who found the old photos believed they'd belonged to a woman who taught school in Lowellville, so he delivered them to the Lowellville Village Hall and asked that they be returned.
A village secretary, Rose Stefano, asked everyone who came in, but no one recognized Margaret or any of the others identified in the pictures.
In the right hands
After reading about the lost items in The Vindicator, a New Middletown woman and cousin of the Stauffer family, phoned Graziano, who immediately called Stefano.
As soon as she laid eyes on the old photo album, Graziano knew they'd belonged to her mother.
"This is how she did my baby album, with the black pages and white ink," she said. "It must have been quite the thing, to use white ink."
She also recognized the scrapbook of postcards. "These are from a trip to Niagara Falls when I was about 8 years old," Graziano said.
She and her mother and grandmother made the trip. "It wasn't too long after that my grandmother died."
A storybook, "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat," published in 1944, an A-B-C book from 1940, and a movie program from "Cleopatra," starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, were also among the items returned.
Graziano said she plans to have a duplicate set of the photos made for her Aunt Ruth, and has already sent a handful to Dolly Keltz of New Middletown.
Farm
Some of the photo's in Stauffer's album were of Keltz's children taken at their New Middletown farm.
"Margaret Jean was my husband's cousin. We were all young together," Keltz said, obviously excited about the photos Graziano sent her the day after she retrieved the album.
Keltz's son, John Allen, was 2 years old when the pictures were taken. In one, he's seated on the family tractor. In another, he's atop a spotted horse.
"My little daughter, Virginia was 3 and Jim, we called him Billy, was just a year old," Keltz said. "He's the little blond curly headed guy."
Virginia, John Allen and James William were the first of Keltz's 12 children.
Keltz, who is 90, said she remembers the day, in September 1938 that the pictures were taken. Margaret and the aunt who reared her were visiting.
After so many years, Keltz said, it was thrilling to find out about the pictures and see images of her children from so long ago.
"You never know what you are going to find in the paper," Graziano said, still surprised at the find she made.
kubik@vindy.com