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High School Selling Memories
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Leftover Riverbank High yearbooks reaching back many decades were up for grabs at reduced prices on Saturday.

Yearbook students and staff staged a parking lot sale of donated items ranging from clothes to books to tools, kitchenware and physical fitness apparatus to raise funds for the yearbook program.

They included a collection of old yearbooks that failed to sell at the time of their publication.

"Believe it or not, that's me as a junior in 1973," said teacher and this year's yearbook advisor Pete Perkins, indicating a photograph of a fresh-faced youth.

Some customers on Saturday were delighted to get a second chance at acquiring a yearbook that chronicled themselves or a relative.

"When I was growing up, my family was too poor to buy a yearbook. Now I can afford it," one woman told Perkins, in buying three books from former years.

Another woman also bought three old yearbooks, one for her son and two for each of her grandsons.

"I believe the years were 1983, 2004 and 2007," Perkins said of the purchase.

Price has always put the yearbook out of reach for some families. Climbing from year to year, the cost rose to $85 last year but has been cut back to $60 for 2011.

That didn't come, however, without long negotiations with the printer who wanted the price set higher. There was a point where it seemed there would be no yearbook for 2011, officials said.

The yearbook staff is still running short on funds, added Perkins. That's why they held the parking lot sale.

"Our cameras are bad. We need a color printer. We need an ink jet," he said.

The staff still has a total of more than 230 old yearbooks and will continue to try to sell them at $30 each. Interested persons can contact Perkins at the school for more information or to purchase a yearbook from years gone by.