Huey: A long lost purse and what was discovered when it was found
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If the facing on the wall beside the lockers at Hoover High School hadn’t gotten damaged, you would’ve never heard of Patti Rumfola.
This is for all the people who never heard of this young girl who was brought back to life in 2019 by the internet and became more famous after her death than most people who are living, although the most inconsequential thing she did in her high school career was to misplace her purse.
In the halls of North Canton Middle School wedged between the locker and the wall lay a completely unintentional time capsule filled with artifacts from the 1950s, and was begging to be revived. A small red purse lost by a female student in 1957 that had been nestled between the lockers and the wall for 62 years, was uncovered via a happy accident.
A student at what is now North Canton Middle School had backed into the facing beside his locker and dislodged a piece of pressboard that covered the space between the row of lockers and the concrete block wall. When the school custodian came to examine it, he observed the purse squished in between the tiny space beside the lockers.
Had the boy not been roughhousing and backed into that covering, the purse might’ve remained there until the Rapture and that purse would’ve ridden on into the Eve of Destruction. The custodian took the purse to the school office where the principal rummaged through it and uncovered what had been hidden for decades.
The purse went missing on a typical afternoon at Hoover High in Ohio, and decades later when that school custodian started the repairs next to what just happened to be Patti’s locker back during the Eisenhower administration, when a little red bag with a heavy layer of dust revealed itself, just lying there between the locker and the wall, including a green wallet that contained an ID card with her name scribbled on it.
Through the power of social media, the school tracked down the children of that young girl, leading to a 1950s flashback for her progeny who cried and smiled at the same time because of this unexpected revelation, a snapshot of a moment long ago. Everything a 15 year old girl would need back in 1957 was mashed down into that red leather purse.
Five siblings sifted through a moment in history that was their mother’s purse, contents that were lost long before anyone had ever heard of The Beatles or John Kennedy, and the Super Bowl was not even a thought. The year was 1957, and the number one song was “All Shook Up” by a rising star named Elvis Presley.
Patti’s kids had given permission for the school to publicly share any and all contents of the purse, items of a teenage girl that were brought back to life from long ago since the young lass had graduated in 1960 when the building was still Hoover High. She liked peppermint gum, wore pastel pink lipstick, and had a friend named Bonnie who signed the back of her school picture with: Never forget the wonderful times we had.
An Evening in Paris compact was one thing they pulled out that still retained a slight perfume smell alongside tubes of different colored lipstick. And having been forced to the bottom of that red purse they uncovered a 62 year old stick of peppermint gum, her favorite, completing an itemized show-and-tell about the life of a 1950s teenage girl.
There were old ticket stubs and a library card, while posterity supplied more pictures of a girl who had five kids of which they now have new remembrances connecting them to their mother. There were old coins in her purse, and each of them took one as commemoration of the woman whom they described as: The best mother who ever lived.
Although Patti never recovered her purse, she was immortalized simply because she misplaced it OR as some surmised, there was mischief that day from a wannabe boyfriend, but we’ll never know. That boy was killed in Vietnam and his body was never found.
That purse introduced North Canton to a young girl who graced the halls of Hoover High in an era long ago and by sheer luck she lives on well beyond her time in those hallowed halls, if only in spirit. Patti passed away in 2013.
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