Merced Mysteries & Minutiae: Submitted long ago, mystery photos go unclaimed

Have you ever been to the Sun-Star office?

Behind the front counter, fewer than 40 employees occupy the cubicles in a concrete building that’s about 35,000 square feet. In the editorial department, we sit in desks surrounded by stacks of notes of reporters past. Old notebooks, reference books, copies of emails, reporters’ notebooks and legal pads are filled with the beginning details that turned into the stories in our archives.

All that old stuff also makes for a lot of dust.

And, if you haven’t heard, we may have to move to a new lair soon. The Merced Police Department has received the green light from the City Council to pursue buying this property to create a new police headquarters.

My first thought when I read the news: What’s going to happen to all this stuff?

So recently, another coworker and I started cleaning off all the cluttered desks no longer in use. While doing so, we stumbled across a box full of mysteries.

It was a box of photos – photos that, at one point or another, were submitted to the Sun-Star for some reason, maybe for a news story or for an ad.

As soon as I saw them, I knew some of the photos must be treasured by someone out there.

Many of them had ad numbers on them, but the numbers were for a system our staff hasn’t used since the turn of the century. My guess is those photos were submitted either for obituaries, a celebration announcement or a memorial ad. Many were black-and-white photos of men in uniform. One was of a woman in uniform.

Some of the photos had names and numbers written on them. I was able to piece together just a bit from them.

One photo pictured Sarah Gaestel and Dallas Young posing on the track after being named Merced High’s homecoming king and queen in 2012.

The teacher who submitted the photo, Charlotte Todd, told me Young was a special-needs student. “It was a true altruistic thing,” she said. “The students chose him for all the right reasons.”

She submitted the photo hoping it would make it into the community section of the newspaper, but it was never published.

Another photo depicted a man in the Air Force, wearing his camouflage uniform and pointing to an ornately decorated truck with a familiar word – Merced. The serviceman is Richard Maddox.

When I called the number on the back of the photo, his mother-in-law knew the photo as I described it to her. She said he came across the truck while he was on tour in Afghanistan.

Another photo is a color snapshot of an older couple dancing and broadly smiling, maybe laughing. It’s very touching. It made me wonder if they were celebrating an anniversary. How many years? What song were they dancing to? Maybe they didn’t need music to break out in dance.

Another black-and-white photo shows a couple on their wedding day.

And yet another one, probably more recent, is a sepia portrait of a young, bearded man wearing overalls and a beanie cap with rolling foothills in the background. It would make for a super trendy Instagram photo.

This box of photos has been untouched for who knows how long.

If one of these photos belongs to you, I invite you to come claim it. I’d love to hear the story behind it.

If you’ve ever submitted a photo here and didn’t get it back, feel free to come look through this box.

On another note: Last week I wrote about a survey to find out which story readers enjoyed most in 2016. You have a week left to respond. Feel free to call me or email me your submission as well.

This story was originally published December 25, 2016 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Merced Mysteries & Minutiae: Submitted long ago, mystery photos go unclaimed."