[Scrapbook and Photograph Album of the Youth-Dearborn Association for Retarded Children]

[Dearborn, Michigan], 1971. Good. 11 5/8" x 9" commercially produced faux leather photograph album containing 70 leaves with 49 photographs, 32 items of ephemera, and news clippings, taped or pasted in. Most photos measure 5¼" x 3¼" or 8" x 10". Album good: lacking backstrip and moderately worn and soiled. Internally very good with moderate edge wear to one item, some items loose, and some offsetting from newspaper clippings.

This is a scrapbook documenting the first three years of the Youth Group of the Dearborn Association for Retarded Children (YDARC), which formed in 1969. The Dearborn Association for Retarded Children (DARC) was formally established in 1954, following a 1950 incident in which seven children were dismissed from the Dearborn Public Schools Special Program. According to the Arc Dearborn website, after the incident several local families came together to create services and programs for their intellectually disabled loved ones.

The scrapbook contains newspaper clippings, photographs, and printed ephemera concerning conferences, activities and efforts of the high school- and college-aged youth group. There are mimeographed handwritten minutes of the first YDARC meeting of July 1969, as well as a brief handwritten history as to how the group formed. The album also contains newsletters of statewide and national organizations including the organizing manual for the national entity.

The youth group took part in the annual statewide conferences from 1969 to 1971 (as well as the national convention in Minneapolis in 1970), and the scrapbook contains programs and agendas, bits of souvenir ephemera, and clippings of media coverage of the events, along with photographs. Several photographs (and a few pieces of ephemera) document car washes, bake sales, and a Christmas program organized by the YDARC. There are also several photographs portraying the group's bus, parade float, and participants marching in Memorial Day parades in 1970 and 1971.

The first president of Youth-DARC was Daniel Paletko, a student at Henry Ford Community College who also served as the president of Youth-MARC. One week after he graduated from the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 1974, Paletko became a member of the Dearborn Heights City Council. He served as Mayor of Dearborn Heights from 2004 to 2020. The group's first vice president, Kathi Sleziak, served as secretary of Youth-MARC and majored in special education at Marygrove College. She went on to a lifetime of service with the Dominican Sisters in Grand Rapids.

A lovely album showcasing the dedication of Michigan's youth to helping children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. None of the printed materials were found in OCLC.