I just struck ephemera gold!

On the afternoon of my mother Betty’s yahrzeit, a day spent reflecting on the fact that her passing now spanned the entirety of my childhood, I learned something about Mom’s own childhood that I never knew before.

The woman I knew as a worry-wart had, as a teenager, been voted “Most Cheerful” by her 1940 graduating class at Brooklyn’s PS 141.

I would not have ever gleaned this insight about my then 14-year-old mother, Betty Joseph, but for a decades-old, saved autograph book.

In an act of perfect synchronicity on this special day, the daughter of Mom’s life-long childhood friend sent me relics of their shared childhood that were new to me.

That afternoon, sitting in my cluttered message box, was a key to the past, in what I think of as ephemera gold. Photographed pages from the 1940 autograph book of Betty’s best friend, Florette, kept by her daughter Hope.

Mom and Florette were chums from Montgomery Street, who played potsy on the streets and rode to elementary school together riding in the rumble seat of the Dodge driven by Mom’s family chauffeur.

The rectangular autograph book with the gorgeous blue and orange leather cover commemorating the N.Y. World’s Fair 1940 was already familiar to me.

I had Betty’s copy.

Graduation autograph books are now as antiquated as a rotary phone. Why write when you can text? Autograph books were once an end-of-school tradition, a rite of passage before entering high school.

My own book from 1967 had not changed much from my mother’s generation, but for its very plain blue cover imprinted with the name of my school, unlike  Mom’s with its iconic symbols of the World’s Fair – The Trylon and Perisphere embodying its theme, “Building the World of Tomorrow.”

As a child I had been fascinated with what lay inside the pristine zippered book that my mother kept in a special cardboard box stored in the breakfront in the foyer of our suburban home. The pale pastel pages were filled with poems, silly ditties, and well-wishes written in distinctive Waterman’s ink. Penned by classmates in elegant script,  they would move together to attend Erasmus, the storied high school in Brooklyn. Over the decades, I read and re read the hopeful messages for the future, the future that I was now living in.

But what I discovered in Florette’s book was news to me.

Written in perfect Palmer Penmanship were words that both made me smile and took me by surprise.

To see in print that my mother, Betty Joseph, was voted  “Most Cheerful” in her 1940 Brooklyn elementary school graduating class was heartwarming. To receive this never seen before images from the autograph book of her best friend Florette Shapiro, 86 years later, was magical.

How my mother would kvell knowing her lifelong best friend’s daughter, Hope, shared them with me.

To be honest, The Most Cheerful honor took me by surprise. My mother had so many wonderful, stellar characteristics, but cheery would not be the first to come to mind.

But here in her pal’s autograph album was hard evidence of another reality. A distinction I never knew young Betty held. Perhaps the optimism and the sunshine of promise that the New York World’s Fair and The World of Tomorrow offered was infectious.

By the time I knew my mother, some of that sunny optimism had gotten clouded over, and a patina of sadness seemed to lurk behind her big blue eyes.

Dimmed first from the premature death of her beloved father, a primal and unexpected loss that she never quite recovered from, and later a husband who would betray her profoundly, it silently chipped away at that once most cheerful young girl.

But how it makes me smile to know there was a time her cheerful spirit was so strong, she was honored for it by her clasmates.

And I have a document to prove it.