ECHS History in the Making,
One Frame at a Time

When the old El Cerrito High School was scheduled to be demolished in 2005, the ECHS Archiving Project was formed to rescue any and all historical objects for a museum created to be in the new high school.

“For a good year we searched, found and stored all kinds of things and cataloged them every Saturday for over a year in the high school basement,” said Joann Steck-Bayat, who helped start the ECHS Archive Project and is now the museum curator. Once all things were sorted through and catalogued, they were taken to a storage locker in Point Richmond. Members of the project also visited other schools’ museums to get ideas about how they wanted their museum to look - or not look.

“Over the next four years, the items were taken in boxes to Kathleen Glenn’s framing shop for her to do her magic to them,” Steck-Bayat said. “One thing we didn’t want was a mishmash of framed items; we wanted our displays to have clean lines and be similar in how they looked. Kathleen made our vision come to reality.”

A thin black frame and black matting set of this collection of dance cards from the 1940s and '50s. High school girls used dance cards like these to choose their partners at ECHS dances. Photos by Jon Bashor

Glenn, whose daughter attended ECHS, chose thin black frames all of the same texture and width, and with the same color matting.

“We gave her things that to us seemed to be unframeable, such as dance cards from the 1940s through the ’60s and club pins,” Steck-Bayat said. “Over the course of four years, Kathleen framed all our items.

“Once the museum was ready for us to install our artifacts, the framed items came out of storage and were put on display,” she continued. “Perfection!”

Since then, the Archive Project has received more items and Glenn has framed them all, including portraits of every school principal from the 1940s to now. Those portraits are on display in the main office.

“We wanted to keep it ‘local’ for this business, but we did shop around for competitive pricing,” Steck-Bayat said. “We found our best deal was with our local, talented El Cerrito framer.”

                                                --Jon Bashor

Glenn used a thicker black frame on this memorial to two students killed in the Korean War, giving it a more somber look.

Glenn created a lattice display to make these pins and awards stand out individually.

Once hidden between a desk and a wall, ECHS’s first-year football schedule is now prominently displayed with other sports memorabilia.