In 1969, at Cal State Long Beach, a shy basketball player from Oxnard caught the attention of an outgoing cheerleader.
David McLucas was walking down the hill to basketball practice when Sharon Scott called out to him — not once, but twice. When he finally turned around and asked,
"You talking to me?" neither could have imagined that decades later, they'd be preserving African American history together, one artifact at a time.
"I was the aggressor," Sharon laughs, remembering their first encounter. David, towering at 6'8" and fresh from the farming town of Oxnard, wasn't used to city life or assertive women.
"I came straight out of the country, basically," he recalls. "We worked in the fields, and it was all church. I went to church almost seven days a week."
The two quickly became friends. Sharon took him under her wing, teaching him to dance at the frat house and bringing him home to meet her parents on Hill Street — the same street name David lived on back in Oxnard.
"There you go, Sharon," her mother Autrilla quipped. "You're always bringing strays home."
But a romantic relationship wasn't meant to be — not yet, anyway. Both went on to marry other people and build careers. Sharon became a successful advertising executive at the Press-Telegram and L.A. Times. David was employed at Northrop Grumman, working on everything from the Stealth bomber to the F-18 fighter.
Then, after spending well over a decade apart, fate intervened. David, divorced and back at his parents' house, received a phone call. It was Sharon, who was also divorced and now the mother of a twelve year old daughter. They began dating, and within months, they were married.
"Sharon wasn't gonna let me get away again," David says with a smile.
From Collectors to Curators
Their journey to founding Forgotten Images began quietly, almost accidentally.
David had an extensive vinyl collection of over 2,000 albums, including rare treasures like Marvin Gaye's first album and the Butcher cover of the Beatles' Yesterday and Today album, worth well into five figures. Sharon had her own collection of Black Americana — the books, the pictures, the painful and powerful pieces of history that most people never saw.
"People would come over to our house and go, 'What is that?'" David remembers. "So we ended up doing tours in our house."
Teachers and educators started asking if they could bring the collection to their schools and churches. "That's kind of like how it started, and it just grew from there."
Bringing the Past into Today
Today, Forgotten Images comprises over 20,000 items spanning from the 1600s to the present day, organized into 40 themed vignettes.
They've spent over $500,000 of their own money, traveling all throughout the South — Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma — to amass their collection.
"I won't just buy any trinkets," Sharon insists. "There's a lot of impulse buying," David admits, "but with a lot of things, you have to buy it when you see it."
The work has transformed them both. David, once terrified of public speaking, now guides audiences through exhibitions with emotional depth and historical accuracy.
"I wasn't a public speaker at all," he says. "I had to get rid of that shyness and just speak truth." His friend Bird helped him find his voice in those early days, but now David has become what he calls "an oral storyteller."
"I was just the guy who wanted somebody to see my stuff," David explains. Sharon, meanwhile, brought her newspaper and advertising expertise to transform their hobby into a mission-driven organization dedicated to educating people of all ages.
Their traveling exhibit has been featured everywhere from elementary schools to colleges, from the Aquarium of the Pacific to the Queen Mary. A Smithsonian representative who evaluated their collection wrote a letter of recommendation, calling it the finest exhibit she'd ever seen. The curators were stunned to find that what the Smithsonian had as copies, the McLucases owned as originals.
A Message for the Future
As elders, the McLucases are thinking about legacy now.
They have few family members to pass the collection to, and they're considering selling duplicates. "We need to travel. We need to enjoy the time we have left," Sharon says.
But their mission remains urgent.
"Our exhibit is more relevant than it ever has been before," she adds.
David still gets emotional when giving tours, even after all these years. "I have to keep myself straight," he admits. But that emotional authenticity is part of what makes their exhibits so powerful. Visitors don't just see history — they feel it. "After it's over, they come up and say, 'I was never taught this in schools, and I'm so glad to really know the truth.'"
What began as a chance meeting between a shy basketball player and an outgoing cheerleader became a marriage built on shared purpose. David and Sharon didn't just find each other again — they found their calling. And through Forgotten Images, they're ensuring that the stories of those who came before them will never be forgotten.
"Our exhibit is more relevant than it ever has been before."
—Sharon McLucas