A screenshot of James Glacckin’s TikTok account, @genx_stories_colorado, shows students at an Arapahoe High School dance, among other high school scenes, from 1993.
A 54-year-old guy in Kansas City might have video footage of your Gen X high school heyday.
James Glacckin has shared more than 100 posts through his TikTok account @genx_stories_colorado featuring vintage photos and videos of Front Range high school memories from Arvada’s Pomona High School to Lakewood’s Alameda International High School to Greeley Central High School and Denver’s East High School.
The videos, primarily from the 1980s and ’90s, boast teens with big hair and shoulder pads putting their school typewriters to use, dancing at prom and celebrating after the big game.
Glacckin has collected vintage yearbooks and videos for nearly 20 years. TikTok provided the platform to make digestible clips of his best finds — set to the sounds of The Cure and The Replacements and, occasionally, Glacckin’s own narration.
To Glacckin’s delight, the videos have been making the rounds. People have been finding themselves, their partners and former classmates captured in their glory days and started reconnecting in the comment sections of the posts.
“I really get a big smile out of that, and I think people like looking back,” Glacckin said. “There’s always that rose-colored view we have of the past and this is presenting that particular rosy view.”
The death of two of Glacckin’s childhood friends — one in 2009 and one in 2016 — made him realize he had hardly any photo or video evidence of the fun of their youth together. Glacckin graduated from Regis Jesuit High School in 1988 but spent so much time with his friends at Pomona High School that people assumed he was a student there.
Glacckin thought of long-forgotten yearbooks collecting dust in garages and attics and felt a duty to collect as many as he could to share the treasures within once more.
He scoured estate sales, Reddit pages and eBay for vintage yearbooks from Denver and surrounding suburbs.
Video, he thought, would be even better. He started buying VHS home-movie and yearbook tapes from locals on the internet, often not knowing what was on them.
He connected with an old high school friend, Jennifer Vito, who he deemed the unofficial historian of Arvada’s class of ’89 at Pomona High School. Vito was safekeeping VHS tapes full of high school memories for decades, carting them around the world as she traveled and lived internationally. She shared her stash with Glacckin, who cut up the footage and posted it on TikTok hoping to find his old classmates and peers.
Erica Haghiri was making dinner in her Milliken home last month when her husband hollered in excitement from the other room.
Haghiri hurried over to see him holding up his phone with a TikTok video from Glacckin’s account displaying yearbook photos of 80s cheerleaders from different high schools in the area. Haghiri was an Alameda International High School graduate, class of 1990.
“There I was in the video,” Haghiri said. “It was my senior homecoming. It was just my favorite picture from high school that was right there on the screen. It was so fun. It just made my night.”
The Haghiri’s reached out to Glacckin, thanking him for posting the video and stirring up their reminiscence.
Now, they’re dedicated viewers who tune in to all of Glacckin’s creations for a blast from the past.
“It brought me back,” Haghiri said. “Sometimes I think ‘Oh, I don’t remember a whole lot’ but all it takes is one little thing to trigger a string of memories. Even other people’s pictures make you start remembering things that were similar for you so that’s really cool.”
Once Glacckin’s videos started getting noticed, his audience wanted more. He started posting old news broadcasts and radio features from the time, too.
The more people who watched, the more he got inquiries from viewers willing to send digitized yearbook and video materials to add to his collection.
A growing collection was key. Viewers wanted footage from their high school, which sometimes wasn’t based even in Colorado.
Technically, neither was Glacckin. He moved to Kansas in 1997 for law school, but he couldn’t shake the sentimentality he had for the place he grew up.
Glacckin hadn’t intended on expanding his hobby outside of Colorado, but sometimes people wanted to trade for tapes so he’d accept footage from other states.
He watches all the footage and uses the video editing program CapCut to splice it up into one-minute clips he sets to music of the era.
Some of the most bizarre footage he’s come across? Homemade music videos, he said.
At the moment, Glacckin is facing demand for footage from Lakewood’s Bear Creek High School. (Anyone with old videos of Bear Creek fun from the 80s or 90s can connect with Glacckin through email at storiesfromgenx@gmail.com)
Because Glacckin is using found footage, he isn’t monetizing his TikTok account in keeping with the fair use doctrine that affords people the right to use copyrighted material without permission under certain circumstances.
Amid the taffeta dresses and mullets, Glacckin’s comments section are filled with hundreds of folks finding themselves and their friends in the videos and gleefully reconnecting.
“There are people who haven’t seen or talked to each other in years who are talking to each other in the comments,” Glacckin said. “It’s been cool in that respect. There’s almost a time limit that at some point this stuff is going to be all gone.”
Libi Striegl, manager of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab, does her best to ensure old media doesn’t become lost — but it’s a common fate, she said.
“It’s material stuff, made out of physical things and those things deteriorate over time,” Striegl said of old media. “Old tapes start to warp. They just don’t function anymore. There are lots of ways old media can get ruined.”
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The Media Archaeology Lab is one of the largest collections of functionally obsolete technology in the world, Striegl said. The public can come out and tinker with technology spanning 12 decades including phonograph players, historic personal computers and obscure gaming consoles.
Striegl encouraged people to think about how they’re storing and preserving their old media. Digitizing and preserving important material on physical hard drives is great, she said, because relying on cloud storage could prove disastrous if it were to go away.
There are businesses that convert old tapes to digital files, but if someone is wondering if a tape is worth converting but doesn’t have a VHS player, Striegl said they can come to the Media Archaeology Lab to see what they’ve got.
People who drop into the Media Archaeology Lab often seek a nostalgia high, Striegl said. Evidence of youthful shenanigans isn’t as easily accessible from past decades as it is today with social media platforms making memories so easily shareable.
“Unless your video got picked up by “American’s Funniest Home Videos,” you probably weren’t going to share it outside your close family friends,” Striegl said. “The ability to bring in stuff people haven’t looked at for probably decades is pretty cool for folks to be able to access it again.”
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