After three months of collecting items, Lori Oglesbee stepped back to look at the finished cases and saw something that brought tears to her eyes. She saw memories of a lost story, and all of the feelings trapped inside.

Since mid-October, yearbook adviser Ms. Lori Oglesbee has been working on the timeline display cases found in the main hall. She researched and fit together the fragments of the school’s history.

“Well I started with everything I knew we already had. There is a closet that’s always been around, and I was afraid all of the stuff in this closet was gone,” Ms. Oglesbee said. “Then I found the key, and what was back there was unbelievable. We were so lucky all of this stuff hadn’t been thrown away.”

The closet was only one of the many places that items came from.

“On the very day, the last school day before open house, Joe Cable brings me a 1923 trophy for the basketball team and says ‘Hey this was in the trainer room, could you use this?’ and I was like, where has this been?” Ms. Oglesbee said. “And then a teacher I talked to years ago came back for this, and she brought me a white bag with blue and gold ribbon. And inside was this 1913 yearbook that I have never seen until Sunday.”

Some of the items were not far from her heart, mementos from her 17-year tenure at MHS can be found inside the cases.

“There is a scrapbook in there of kids I took to New York, and the reason we chose that page was because Jimmy Fallon is in one of the pictures with us,” Ms. Oglesbee said. “I thought ‘How cool would it be if there was a picture of our McKinney kids with Jimmy Fallon?’”

Over the course of sifting through hundreds of artifacts, one kindred spirit stood out to Mrs. Oglesbee.

“My favorite item in all of those cases is anything to do with Mary Jerome Straughan,” Ms. Oglesbee said. “I think part of it is that her things were so scattered. At one time, they had all been sent to the school. Different people had ended up with different pieces of it. Her scrapbook is just enjoyable to look. I even know all of the graduation gifts she got. I feel a kindred spirit with her because I have a book just like that, too, and I have a list of everything I got for graduation and if I had sent the thank you note.”

 Despite the flow of memories coming in, one case was still hard to fill.

“The Doty case was hard because these people were in a segregated school, by the very nature of a segregated school they didn’t have as much as everybody else. They didn’t have the cameras and all that and so it was hard to get some of that stuff, but now I’ve hit someone who can really help me and she is Dorothy Shaw she went to both McKinney High and Doty,” Ms. Oglesbee said. “I just want people to feel people and the voices that came ahead of them, and know this is a great tradition we have. “

Ms. Oglesbee didn’t work alone. Art teacher Mrs. Amada Hughes and broadcasting teacher Mrs. Alyssa Boehringer were just as devoted to the cases as Ms. Oglesbee, putting in time over Christmas break and working long hours to ensure the case’s completion.

“I was lucky enough to be friends with Mrs. Oglesbee and she had this vision of what she might want this to look like,” Mrs. Boehringer said. “My job was to really go in there and arrange the things in those cases to help her tell the story. ”

Mrs. Boehringer, an MHS alumi, added her own high school memories to the cases.

“I went to my mom`s house and went into the attic where I had all of my crap in this old trunk,” Mrs. Boehringer said. “I pulled it out, and it was all nasty and it smelled like mothballs. I had all of this weird stuff in there that I used to like, and I pulled it out and I was like I don`t know why I thought this was special, but apparently I did.”

However, Mrs. Boehringer wasn’t the only alumni that saw her own story in the cases. Colonel Glenn Coleman, Class of 1960, and a guest at the Mane Event, relived his 1960 high school experiences through the items in the cases.

“When I saw Colonel Coleman, he stood back and he’s got his eyes shaded with his hand, gazing up at the trophy case to look at the football team he played on that went to the state final game,” Ms. Oglesbee said. “And just savoring the moment, of every photo in the case, he loved it. I asked ‘Did you find a memory?’ and he said ‘Oh, man, yeah, I found a lot.’”

125 years of high school memories, according to Ms. Oglesbee, leads to hundreds of touched souls and a lifetime of pride and gloating.

“Nobody else in this town can claim this type of tradition, and the type of feeling it creates,” Ms. Oglesbee said. “If we were to put Boyd and North in them, they would only go in the last case. We are five cases of history ahead of them. From 1889 to 2001 they have nothing.”

by Jacob Frazier