Opening Reception Speaker:  Barbara Gill Salerno

Barbara Gill Salerno was born in Turlock and attended Hawthorne Elementary School.  She and her mother later moved to Atwater where Barbara attended Mitchell Senior Elementary.  Barbara graduated from Atwater High School in 1964. Every weekend Barbara would visit her grandparents, Clara and Lawerence Arnold, on their Fruitland Ave. ranch. Barbara climbed on tractors with her cousins and cut peaches in the summer. At holidays, her Uncle Paul told old-time Arnold stories at the dinner table. She remembers Grandma Clara pulling a blue ceramic bowl down from her cupboard, saying, “This is for you, Barbara.”  She walked with Pop in the field as he snapped his suspenders and said, “I’m half a century old today.”  He picked up his shovel and started weeding.   Their generation worked the land every day for little money.  Their moto was “Waste not, want not.”

In 2007, Barbara and her sisters cleaned out their mother’s house.  Barbara found a shoebox of very old photos and cannisters of movie film.  She digitized the photos and transferred the film to DVD, and later used the photos for her mother's journal, "Celebration of Life."

At that time, Barbara was teaching third grade and took her students to the Modesto McHenry Museum every year.  Her students engaged with the objects on display but didn’t see examples of  the daily life of the region's early farmers.   It was then she decided that she needed to tell the story of her grandparents as pioneers through their own stories and objects of daily life.