Angela Fischer, president of Sahuaro School P.A.T.S. (Parents and Teachers for Sahuaro), recently revealed that she has been secretly storing the scrapbooks at her home in Westown.
    The archives contain a variety of assorted school related memorabilia dating back to Sahuaro's first year of operation in 1960. The materials were gathered and the books constructed and maintained without fail until the practice was finally abandoned in 1984. They were then stored away and remained largely forgotten for years thereafter.
    "Several years back, the principal of the school felt that the school didn't have the room to store all these pictures and ordered them to be destroyed," said Fischer. "(Sahuaro teacher) Mrs. Heyer rescued them from the dumpsters and gave them to me for safekeeping until that principal was gone, which he now is."
    Ms. Fischer's decision to disclose the archives' whereabouts was prompted by a community wide request issued in September by the Joan De Arc Crusader for old photographs of the school and other surrounding areas, such as the old Westown Shopping Center. After contacting Crusader editor-in-chief John Bueker and discussing the matter, Fischer felt that she had found the right person to entrust with the priceless materials contained in the archives. "This poor guy's just obsessed with this stuff, you know?" remarked Fischer.
    Bueker, in conjunction with the Crusader's parent company JPB Publishing Limited, has devoted the last few months to the process of scanning and preserving the archives in a digital format, which will then be presented to the school at a future date, probably sometime in 2003. In return, the company has been given permission to use the images on its Sahuaro School nostalgic web site.
    The project has brought back a flood of memories for Bueker. "Looking at this stuff, day after day for months, has been a surprisingly emotional experience for me," said Bueker. "I mean, it's almost been like reliving those eight years of my life. Plus it's one hell of a lot of fun to find dorky old pictures of my siblings and then post them on the Internet for all the world to see."
    The Sahuaro archives were compiled beginning with the inaugural 1960-61 school year, and contain an eclectic mix of photos and other memorabilia such as PTO (and PTA) bulletins, Christmas programs, newspaper articles, birth and wedding announcements, thank you notes and old Field Day ribbons. The archives were organized into large, sturdy photo albums in 1970 that have served them well in terms of overall preservation of the material. Unfortunately, most of the documents and pictures in the archives were also long ago laminated to the pages of each book, which has presented some difficulties in scanning the material, and in some cases has actually damaged the very items that the process was meant to preserve. Nevertheless, the Sahuaro archives have successfully preserved a huge number of very rare items from a rapidly receding time in the neighborhood's past.
    "It's really rather fascinating to look through these archives and see what kinds of items were deemed worthy of inclusion, and to wonder about all the stuff that they decided not to put in there," remarked Bueker. "Some of these things are rather odd and trivial, and yet priceless. That is, of no value whatsoever."
    "Except for those of us who remember."