Names of students from a century ago discovered in old cabinet

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

For years, no one suspected that an old cabinet sitting in the machine shop at Charles City High School had a story to tell.

Charles City industrial tech, vocational ag and FFA teacher Jim Lundberg recently discovered that story.

Lundberg, who has been teaching in Charles City for more than 35 years, wanted to refinish the doors on the cabinet as a woodworking class project for student Dylan Meyer, a senior. Meyer’s task would be to strip the paint off the doors and replace them, and the cabinet would then be used for teachers in CCHS’s new STEM room.

When Lundberg was looking over the cabinet, he discovered a little Charles City history.

“I was taking a little closer look at it, and I saw that it had these little name tags in here, and I thought, ‘wow,” said Lundberg, who then looked up some of the names on old transcripts and class lists. “These were all people who went to school here in the early 1920s, almost 100 years ago.”

Many of the 20 or so names in the cabinet are faded with age or otherwise illegible, but Lundberg was able to read several of them.

“They’re all right around the same time period,” he said. “Maybe someone will see one of those names and recognize it was their grandma or something.”

Lundberg initially thought the names were perhaps from some type of business ed class, but further investigation has led him to believe otherwise.

“I think the cupboard was from a Home Economics (Family and Consumer Science) class, because they’re all females and they were all enrolled in that same class,” Lundberg said. “Many of their parents were immigrants from Russia, Germany and Ireland.”

Some of the names Lundberg has been able to identify include Genevieve Summers, CCHS class of 1926, born July 5, 1907; Bertha Goldstein, class of 1926, born June 18, 1908; Thelma Lessin, class of 1923, born Oct. 24, 1904; Marguerite Burnett, class of 1926, born March 8, 1907; Doris Wright, class of 1922, born March 21, 1904; Marian Schmidt, class of 1926, born Oct. 29, 1907; Helen Horn, class of 1922, born Dec. 18, 1908.

Their names and others have lasted on the cabinet for nearly a century, and the cabinet itself has been through a lot.

Lundberg explained that in the early part of the 20th century, much of the furniture and other school supplies were government surplus items, and there is a U.S. Department of Agriculture label on the cabinet, so Lundberg believes that’s where the piece initially came from.

Lundberg also said that it looked as though the cabinet had been attached to a wall at one time. He mentioned that after the 1968 tornado hit Charles City and destroyed some old school buildings, a handful of teachers went into those wrecked buildings with hammers, crowbars and other tools — though they weren’t supposed to — and salvaged many items, bringing them to the other schools. Lundberg suspects that the cabinet may have been one of the items salvaged.

So the cabinet was saved, and the names were saved with it, to be discovered by Lundberg 52 years later.

“It’s really a neat thing, I love finding things like this,” Lundberg said. “I don’t know how interesting stories like this are to everyone else, but it’s interesting to me. It’s a little Charles City history.”