Here is Jim Pitney who graduated from Junction City High School a year after Geneva Harpole. He’s seen one wife pass, and he’s found love again. He’s raised his children and stared into the faces of his grandchildren. In the corner of the living room, a telescope has been set up to peer into the fields behind his house. He’s a birder now, and he loves the moments when he spots a bald eagle.

“I remember Geneva,” he says. “She was a beautiful girl. Friendly, outgoing, always a smile on her face.” Here he is sitting at his kitchen table staring into the past, staring at a photograph of himself as a high school senior when he was young and unafraid, and he defied gravity by slicking his hair up. Here he is trying to remember Geneva Harpole almost seven decades later. The memory has faded. Instead he remembers what it was like back then.

“My brother used to sit up and listen to wrestling matches in Eugene on the radio. We had record players with hand cranks. And Reader’s Digest. Amos and Andy was my favorite show. The world stopped for Amos and Andy. Back then, we didn’t think about racism. When I graduated from high school, we thought the world was pretty great, and they were still hanging people in Alabama,” he says.

To understand this story, you have to be willing to erase Highway 99 between Eugene and Junction City, erase the McDonald’s and the Dairy Queen and the Dari Mart. The Scandinavian Festival didn’t exist yet. This was a place where kerosene lamps still lit the kitchens of farmhouses.

Here is Isalene Harpole who graduated in 1935 and is Geneva’s cousin. She was born on the eve of one great war and lived through another. She has seen her parents grow old and pass away. .She has seen three generations of teenagers come of age, including the newest crop, growing up in a time she cannot understand with sexy advertisements and strange infidelities and everything moving so fast. And she doesn’t know why there’s a disconnect between the generations because, the thing is, when she was a teenager, she had the same dreams as they do now.

She sits in the great room of the house she has lived in for 51 years. Everything is neat and orderly. Her garden, quietly sleeping now, is waiting for spring so that it can burst to life. She holds Geneva’s scrapbook in her hands and opens the cover.

“Her husband was a logger,” Isalene says. “She was working in a restaurant and he came in and that’s how they met.”

And then she sees a graduation name card in Geneva’s scrapbook that makes her laugh. “Hubert Beck,” she says. “He was my first boyfriend.” She pauses before continuing to flip through the pages. Her hand brushes up against a dried pressed flower that wants to disintegrate at the touch. There’s so much she no longer remembers, but there is much she remembers still.

“We had a refrigerator powered by kerosene,” she says. “I remember when they strung poles along the highway, and we had someone come to wire the house. The wires came down along the walls. I remember we bought a new refrigerator, and the first thing my mother did was make ice cream,” she says.

“There was a place between Junction City and Monroe with a dancehall and an indoor swimming pool. We’d go to dances on Saturday nights, go on picnics in the park. When we’d come to Eugene, it was a big deal. There were three or four theatres and the McDonald theatre was the very nicest one.”

“We were very happy back then. We were poor, but we didn’t know it,” she says.

This was a time when The Junction City Times reported the town’s news. High school girls were in their kitchens helping their mothers can food and sew quilts. High school boys were in the fields milking cows and bailing hay. Teachers were bringing milk and potatoes to class and making soup on the wood stove for the elementary school kids.

You have to imagine renting an apartment for $15 a month, buying bread for 10 cents a loaf and gas for 16 cents a gallon.