Generations on the shelves

MARYSVILLE — Theirs are the faces of hope.

The hairstyles and clothing may change, but the photos hold similar images of futures yet unfulfilled, lives waiting to unfold.

For 15 years, Marysville bookstore owner Darilee Bednar has looked at the faces contained in her enormous collection of yearbooks and wondered how the generations of youths had weathered the changes into adulthood. She's read through countless scribbled sentiments and tried to envision whether the hopes ultimately became reality.

"Well, I guess we finally made it. This year sure did go fast."

"It's been a pretty good year, except for McMaster and his lousy geometry class."

"I want you to know how much I think of you. Ever since my sophomore year, I've thought of you as the sweetest girl in school. I wish you all the best of luck in the future."

Too often, however, Bednar has found the lives contained in her yearbooks were cut short on some distant battlefield.

Bednar has collected nearly 5,700 high-school, college and military yearbooks in her used-book store, the 3rd St. Book Exchange, 1615 Third St. She has yearbooks dating to the mid-1800s, some from the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Canada, Panama and other countries.

"I started collecting yearbooks because I could, and no one else was," said Bednar, 56. "Where else can you see old, long-gone family members in their teens?

"I bought my first thousand basically by myself, almost every single one from a thrift store."

Now Bednar has a buyer who scouts out the books that are so much an American rite of passage.

And a surprising resource.

Bednar's collection has been used by genealogists, by adoptees looking for birth parents and by the state Department of Licensing, which has sometimes sent people over for picture identification.

"In order to get a driver's license, we need to piece together identification from an applicant," said Mark Varadian, a department spokesman.

"Sometimes it's hard for kids who don't have a driver's license, so we need something that attaches their name with their face. It could be a high-school ID card, or it could be a yearbook photo."

Michele Heiderer, an intermediary in adoption cases, has used some of Bednar's yearbooks to help find birth parents and adopted children.

"She has one of the biggest collections in the country, and that woman has the biggest heart," said Heiderer, of Arlington.

Bednar has given duplicates to historical libraries and sold some locally and online.

"When I first started out I bought anything and everything," she noted. "I think I still have eight copies of the 1922 (University of Washington) Tyee."

Some of the yearbooks bear the imprint of history.

The Shanghai American School Columbian yearbook of 1939, published during the Japanese occupation, has a forward by the principal that makes note of the "turmoil that has accompanied the outbreak of war in the Far East."

The 1896 Duluth, Minn., high-school yearbook is filled with memorials to students who died when scarlet fever raced through the school.

Bednar's collection has spawned a new project.

For the past year, she has used the yearbooks to match photos with names on the Washington, D.C., Vietnam Veterans Memorial in an independent online project she calls Faces From the Wall.

Her database lists 1,144 names. For each name, she includes a hometown, school, service number and cause of death. The names include those of 631 servicemen from Washington state who lost their lives in the Vietnam War — 90 from Snohomish County alone. About 200 are posted with their yearbook photos.

Bednar said she does it "to commemorate the boys."

Sometimes, while inputting data into her computer, she can't help but get angry at the lives cut short, the young men who grew up but never grew old. Such as Robert Armitage, a classmate to whom Bednar has co-dedicated the Faces From the Wall project.

"He went to Everett High School; he graduated in 1965," she said.

"He was in the Boys Club. And Bobby would never speak to me in high school because he was in Boys Club, and I didn't speak to him 'cause I was in band."

The 19-year-old Marine was killed in action in South Vietnam on Feb. 4, 1967. He'd been in Vietnam only a week.

"He was out on his first recon," said Bednar, referring to a reconnaissance patrol.

"I didn't lose anybody close to me in Vietnam, but I'm one of a zillion people who have adopted a soldier whose name is on the wall. When we go to a wall, we look at Bobby's name. When we carry a flag to the wall, we leave it with Bobby's name. ... Bobby has been our family's soldier."

Bednar put a quote from a Civil War memorial at Arlington National Cemetery on her Web site to sum up her mission:

"Not for place or for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as they understood it."

"That's how I feel about these guys," she said.

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com