Seth Poppel is the guy you call if you need access to a famous (or infamous) person’s high-school yearbook, stat. In September, it took Poppel and his son Jared only a few hours to locate Ryan Wesley Routh’s—Routh is the alleged foiled golf-course assassin of Donald Trump—and sell his adolescent portrait to the Daily Mail for about a hundred bucks. Of course, they also have a copy of Trump’s yearbook, in which a candid bears the honorific “Ladies’ Man.” The first floor of Poppel’s house, in Seattle, is home to some eighteen thousand yearbooks; he and his wife, Danine, advertise their holdings as “the original and largest library of high school yearbooks of the stars.”
Perusing it, you can learn a lot. Katie Couric and Blake Lively were cheerleaders, sure—but so were Laurie Anderson and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (the latter a “twirler”). David Letterman was a hall monitor. Patti Smith was voted “Class Clown,” Rosie O’Donnell “Most School Spirited,” Newt Gingrich “Most Intellectual,” and Leonardo DiCaprio “Most Bizarre.” When Monica Lewinsky was in the news, the Poppels realized that they already owned a copy of her yearbook, from Beverly Hills High—who knew she overlapped with both Angelina Jolie and Erik Menendez?
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During a recent phone call, Poppel said that he’s often asked if he worries about break-ins. “But nobody would ever be able to walk in here and pick out anything specifically valuable,” he said. “Unless you think that Barbara Walters’s high-school yearbook is worth a lot of money—which it’s not.” A few volumes are, though; the Poppels paid more than twenty-five thousand dollars for a 1924 Jean Harlow yearbook, signed “Harlean Carpenter” (her given name). Poppel believes that they have the only extant copy of Harry Truman’s yearbook. He has Marlon Brando’s personal copy of his yearbook (salvaged from a dumpster), as well as Sharon Stone’s (purchased from a couple she babysat for, after she left it at their house). The collection includes one that it seems a teen-aged Madonna inscribed to her biology teacher: “Mr. Bissell, You have got to be about the foxiest science teacher I ever met . . . I’ll never forget the time you told the class how many sperm cells there are in 1 ejaculation . . . P.S. Keep those poems.”
“I started when I was three years old, in Brooklyn, collecting bottle caps,” Poppel explained, of his acquisitive streak. “I had a big pail, and I would go around and scoop out all the caps from the soda machines, and I would arrange them by brand, by flavor. At one time, I probably had about two hundred and fifty different bottle caps.” Baseball cards came next.
It was at a baseball-card show, in 1978, that he stumbled upon a copy of Mickey Mantle’s yearbook. “There were only forty-one seniors in his class, a tiny high school in Commerce, Oklahoma,” he said. He was shocked to see that Mantle was one of the yearbook’s editors but wasn’t voted “Best Athlete” (he was deemed “Most Popular”). “I thought that was a lot more insightful and interesting than his used jockstrap, or a baseball bat,” Poppel recalled.
He and Danine placed ads in local pennysavers to track down the yearbooks of other ballplayers he idolized—e.g., “Willing to pay $100 for a 1952 Fargo, North Dakota High School yearbook” (Roger Maris). When they had twenty-five specimens, a neighbor in Merrick, Long Island, who was a sportswriter, published a piece in Newsday, which listed their phone number. Calls about all sorts of yearbooks poured in. Poppel went on local radio shows to solicit specific volumes. Now he largely relies on the Internet and a fleet of antique-store “pickers” who send him lists of their findings.
By the late eighties, the Poppels had about eight hundred yearbooks in their living room. They sold images to Memories magazine for a “before they were stars” feature and helped book celebrities’ former prom dates on “I remember them when” TV segments. In 1990, the entrepreneur Keith Barish invited Poppel to lunch with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis and struck a deal with him. Barish was opening a chain of restaurants (Planet Hollywood), and he wanted the paper placemats to feature celebrities’ yearbook photos. “We figure that we generated, at one time, between twenty-five and fifty million dollars’ worth of impressions a year,” Poppel said. In 1995, when he was fifty-one, he retired from his day job, running a chain of optical stores.“All of a sudden, People magazine would call us, the New York Times would call us,” he said. Jared, a former “Jeopardy!” champion, left a consulting gig and joined the family business.
The Poppels still keep tabs on up-and-comers whose yearbooks might be worth finding. “We’ve been doing a big thing on Internet influencers lately,” Poppel, who is eighty, said. But, before he puts in the effort to go and get a celebrity’s yearbook, he assesses “whether their name will be known five years from now.” He listed that week’s haul: yearbooks featuring the porn star Georgina Spelvin, the accused murderer Brad Simpson, the W.N.B.A. champ Kelsey Plum, and a handful of new Trump Cabinet appointees.
Back in 1961, at Mepham High, in Bellmore, Long Island, Poppel edited the school paper. Mepham’s most famous alumni, he said, included a weatherman named Storm Field. “I would say that I have a photographic memory,” he noted, “except as I get older the film begins to get a little foggier.” ♦
#Madonnas #Yearbook
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