In 1939, just before graduating from high school in the small town of Ridgeway in northeast Iowa, Everett Kuntz spent his entire savings of $12.50 on a 35mm Argus AF camera. He made a camera case from a worn-out boot, scraps from a tin can, and a clasp from his mother's purse. For the next several years, he clicked the shutter of his trusty Argus all around the quiet town.

People got so used to it that they became relaxed around the camera, and even began to count on him saying, “Where is Everett? We need a picture.” Everett never had the money to print his photographs. More than two thousand negatives stayed in a box while he married, raised a family, and worked as an electrical engineer in the Twin Cities.

When he became ill with cancer sixty years later, he opened his time capsule and printed the images from his youth. He died in 2003, having brought his childhood town back to life just as he was leaving it. Everett's son promised to put these pictures together in a book.

A sense of peace radiates from these images. Ridgeway's hardworking citizens are modest and trusting and luminous in their graceful harmony and their unguarded affection for each other.

Visiting the town in 2006 as he was writing the text to accompany these photographs, Jim Heynen crafted vignettes that perfectly complement these rediscovered images by blending fact and fiction to give context and voice to Ridgeway's citizens.

Jim Heynen has published widely as a writer of poems, novels, nonfiction, and short fiction. His stories about “the boys” have been featured often on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." The most recent collection of these stories, The Boys' House, was named Editors' Choice for Best Books of 2001 by the Bloomsbury Review, Newsday, and Booklist. He wrote the text for Harker's Barns: Visions of an American Icon, with photos by Michael Harker (Iowa, 2003).