(Photographs and Text, Copyright (c) 2015 Cynthia Shenette) A couple of weeks ago my family and I had a late breakfast at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Sturbridge, MA. My son had a soccer game in Brimfield, so we figured we'd stop to eat on our way home. After our meals were getting ready to leave, and I noticed a framed diploma on the wall.
The name on the diploma was for a James Lea who graduated from Warren High School in Warren, Ohio on 7 June 1928. How did James Lea's diploma end up on a wall in a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Massachusetts, some 550 plus miles and 87 years later?
I did a quick search, and according to Ancestry.com a James D. Lea was born on 27 or 28 October 1910 in Warren, Trumbull County, Ohio and died on 2 July 2002 in Columbiana, Mahoning County, Ohio. A James Lea is listed as part of the 1926 sophomore class in a yearbook photo from the Warren G. Harding High School in Warren, Ohio. The diploma is signed by H. B. Turner, Superintendent of Schools, J.W. Davis, Principal, as well as R. G. Ingersoll, H. S. McKibben, Lynn B. Dana, and A.L. Button, of the Board of Education.
If you knew James Lea I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to know how his diploma ended up as wall decor in a Cracker Barrel in Sturbridge, MA. Or as radio broadcaster Paul Harvey use to say, I want to know "the rest of the story."
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