Ricki Lake has spent a good part of the last year learning to live without her family photographs. Then, in one phone call, a stranger gave some of them back. In a post that she called a happy story for the holiday season, she shared how a box of snapshots she thought was lost forever turned up at a flea market in Pasadena, California, and how a shopper tracked her down.
The creator behind @rickilake opens by saying that the craziest thing just happened and that she can hardly find the words. For anyone new to her story, she explains that she lost her house in the Palisades fire in January and lost everything inside it. Her caption says it has been almost a year since the fire, and that she had made peace with the fact that her photographs and memorabilia were gone.
The Phone Started Blowing Up
She says her phone started going off late the night before, while she was in New York. The first people to reach out were two friends, who asked whether she had seen a post. They sent her a screenshot of someone on social media trying to find a way to contact her. The post said the person had found photos at a flea market and could not believe what she was seeing. For Ricki, it was just as hard to believe, because all of her photos had been lost in the fire.
She then speaks with the woman who found them, whom she calls Patty. Ricki asks how she came to find the pictures in the first place.
A Box For Twenty Dollars
Patty tells the story with a lot of charm. She needed to get out of the house, she says, and it felt as if the universe drove her to go and get the pictures. She is an artist, and she looks through old photographs for inspiration. At the first stall she came to, she was going through a box when the seller asked whether she wanted the whole box for $15. She said she would give him $20.
When she opened the box, the first photo she saw showed Ricki with her son Milo, who is now 28. Patty says she thought she loved that woman’s face. Then she went through more of the pictures. One shows Ricki and Milo on a swing, which Ricki recognizes right away. She had a house in Connecticut for a while, she explains, and the big tree with the swing was there. Milo looks to be about a year or a year and a half old. Another picture was taken at a playground when he was less than a year old.
Ricki tells Patty that the photographs are priceless to her. They would be anyway, she says, but having lost every image in the fire, she had believed they were gone forever. She had made peace with it, but it was still a heartache and a painful thing to accept that the memories were no longer in front of her and lived only in her mind and heart.
The Letter That Gave It Away
Patty says that when she got home and looked through the photos, she suddenly felt that she knew the woman in them. Then she realized who it was. Inside the box she also found a letter. It thanked someone for all the gifts for Milo and said that some of his recent photos were enclosed. That made her think the pictures had probably come from an estate sale. She searched online, learned that Ricki’s son is named Milo, and saw that Ricki had been through the fire. Her heart was racing, she says, and she thought she might be able to make contact, a kind of small miracle.
Ricki finishes by thanking her for her generosity and for making the effort to find her. Getting something back that she thought was lost forever, she says, makes her very happy. She says we all need good news these days, and that the story leaves her with a beautiful feeling about the human race. Her closing line: good things happen to good people.
How Photos Travel
The mystery of how a box of personal pictures ended up in a booth at a flea market is one that Ricki does not claim to answer in the video, and neither can we. What the letter does suggest is that these were pictures she had sent to someone else years before. Photographs are given as gifts, mailed in envelopes and tucked into cards. When their recipients pass away or move, boxes of snapshots can be sold or donated with everything else in the house, and it is not unusual for old family photos to turn up in antique malls, estate sales and flea markets.
This is why the story resonates. Most of the photos in those boxes will never find their way back to the people in them. Here, a stranger recognized a face and took the trouble to find the person.
If You Find Someone Else’s Photos
Patty’s approach offers a good model.
Look for clues. A letter, a name on the back of a photograph, a postmark or a return address can help identify the family.
Use a search carefully. She searched for the name of the child mentioned in the letter and found a match. If there is no well known name, local historical societies and genealogy groups often help reunite photographs with relatives.
Be generous. A person who has lost a home or a loved one may value those images more than anyone else could.
Keep them safe in the meantime. Handle them with clean, dry hands and store them away from damp and heat.
Protecting Your Own Photographs
Her experience is also a reminder for the rest of us. The Northeast Document Conservation Center, in its leaflet on caring for photographs, has several practical suggestions.
Keep photographs in a cool, dry place. It recommends an interior room or closet, off the floor, and warns against attics, which are too hot, and basements, which are too damp.
Give each photo its own enclosure made of archival paper or inert plastic, and avoid rubber bands, paper clips, staples, tape and self stick album pages.
Label photographs on the back, along the edge, with an ordinary pencil, so that names and dates travel with the picture.
Make copies. The leaflet suggests giving people copies instead of the originals, and a scan stored in another place protects against loss from fire, flood or simple misplacing. Share digital copies with relatives, so that no single house holds the only version.
Write on the back who is in the picture. If you want your family to be able to recognize their story, it is the simplest gift you can give them.
A Happy Ending
In the end, this is a story about a stranger’s kindness and a mother’s joy at seeing her son as a baby again. For Ricki Lake, who lost so much, a box of pictures purchased for twenty dollars brought something back that money could not replace. And for the rest of us, it is a good reminder to label our photos, make copies and share them while we can.
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