Scraps of time
Lodi store celebrating 20 years of making memories
In a digital age when cameras take and store photographs and Shutterfly books and digital slideshows are the fashion, it makes the 20th anniversary of Taren Turner’s Lodi shop, Memories for the Making, that much more remarkable.
“I think it’s because it was one of the first ones here in the area, maybe not the first, but one of the first,” Turner said of the longevity of the store that specializes in paper products for scrapbooking and card making. “I don’t need the monetary gratification from it. I think if you needed to make a living from it, it could be very tough. You could still do it, but you’d have to be the only person. You couldn’t hire help. It’s more a hobby for me, even though it’s a store. It’s my place to come.”
It was her place to go before it was her place.
Alison Wong had opened the store on Lockeford Street in 1998 and Turner was a marketer for Central State Credit Union who shopped at Memories for the Making.
A neighbor had introduced scrapbooking to Turner at a time when her creative outlet was tole painting.
"I just loved it,” Turner said. “With tole painting you can only paint so many things, have so many things in your house. Colors change, styles change, but scrapbooking goes on forever. It’s taking family history and putting it in books.”
Many credit a family in Salt Lake City with starting the scrapbooking craze that took off in the late 1980s.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a Utah family introduced its scrapbooks — family histories with photos and stories in plastic sheet protectors in loose-leaf finders — in 1980 at the World Conference of Records. The family wrote a how-to book and opened a scrapbooking store that was popular with fellow genealogy-minded Mormons, the Times reported. The industry, it said, took off in 1987 when Rhonda Anderson of St. Cloud, Minnesota, co-founded Creative Memories, a company that turned scrapbooking into an art form with creative, colorful backgrounds and stickers and trinkets that embellished the pages.
Turner, the mother of two grown children, got on board the scrapbooking train in the mid-’90s.
“I never did take pictures that much of my children when they were growing up,” Turner said. “I thought they were a waste. They wound up in an album or a box you pulled out once a year on a rainy day and looked at. I found out if you put them in a book you could look at them. I realized I had lost a lot of years I didn’t have pictures of. Thank God Granny had her Brownie Hawkeye camera and she had taken pictures.”
She chronicled her children’s lives, trips and accomplishments and a typical day in her life, starting with a picture of a coffee pot with the clock reading 5 a.m.
“Just things you wanted to remember about your life, whatever that might be,” Turner said.
One day at Wong’s, the owner asked her if she was getting ready to retire.
“In three years, 27 days and six minutes, maybe,” Turner laughed.
Wong asked Turner to run the store. That was in October. On Nov. 1, Turner was the new owner. That was 11 years ago. “Thank goodness I didn’t have time to think about it or I would have talked myself out of it. It’s been the best thing ever,” Turner said.
There have been some lean times, but she’s been able to keep the store open, has three part-time employees and she just signed a three-year lease.
Turner, 72, works in the store four days a week and her Sundays remain her scrapbooking day, which she does at home.
She’s tried to work on her own projects at the shop, especially during the popular three-day crops, when scrapbookers sign up for one of the 23 6-foot tables that are available, bring all their supplies and are free to work on projects until midnight on Friday and Saturday and from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. But she gets too caught up in visiting with people.
The sessions — named for the practice of cropping photos to fit — are so popular that they’ve gone from once a year to every month, with the final sessions of 2018 almost completely booked.
Turner loves the crops, the beautiful paper products she sells, the card classes that are offered and the scrapbooking kits she puts together, but mostly, she loves her customers.
“We’ve almost become family,” Turner said. “Everyone who’s new who comes in is welcomed. We’re like Cheers without the alcohol.” Or an annoying know-it-all like Cliff. Another Cliff, Record photographer Clifford Oto, inspired Turner with one of his columns, crystallizing what it is about scrapbooking that is so appealing to her.
“Clifford wrote about a photo someone sent him of him and his mom dancing, and how much better it was to have it to touch it. It feels like being there,” Turner said. “I find that all the time. If I’m upset with one of my children, I go to their baby book, to look at that, to touch the pictures. It puts you back there in a way a picture on a phone can’t do. To be able to hold that in your hand, it’s a priceless feeling.”
Cameras get lost. Computers sometimes crash and take everything with them. New technology is forever changing the way we look at images, from still photos to moving images. VHS tape anyone?
Photos, though, and scrapbooks are never going to change or be distorted by time, and never — shall we dare say it? — go out of style.