Part of the fun of preparing for our 120th anniversary open house last week was looking through the old copies of the Cook County News- Herald, bound in giant leather books, filled with old photos, stories, and ads. I wanted to put together a comprehensive list of who owned the paper when, in what building, and who worked at the paper. I didn’t get far, because unfortunately there is no “search” feature in our archives from years past. Talk about Unorganized Territory!
If you have a date, it’s not too difficult to locate something. Say you are looking for the name of Miss North Shore in 1965. We can pull the big binder from 1965 and look at August. Not so hard.
But if you want to know when a semi-truck carrying Fords tipped over on its way to Canada, you’re out of luck. With 52 issues in a year, and 90 years of binders to look through, it could take a very, very long time to find that particular story.
On top of having a hard time finding the specific issue a story may be in, there is the distraction factor. For my unorganized soul, the books are Pandora’s box. I open an archive from 1974 to look for some information on school policies back in those days— and there I see a birth announcement for my sister-in-law! I flip past it and there’s a photo of our Viking basketball team. Oh, oh. I need to check out the photo to see how young they look.
Attempting to get back on track, I turn a few more pages to find an announcement inviting teens to come to a meeting about establishing a teen center. And then there is a page of Cook County High School graduates. And a great fishing catch by a guy with a mullet. The ads are just as interesting—ground beef was that cheap? You could buy a washer from Walt Mianowski for how much? And so it goes.
I try to avoid our archives. If I start looking at the old books, I get sucked into history and can’t get away. Reporter Bill Neil takes on the task of finding just the right news snippets for our Down Memory Lane every week. He does a fabulous job of finding season-appropriate history or topics that oddly seem to be plucked from today’s headlines.
It was thanks to Bill that we learned that WDSE PBS-8 produced a feature on the News-Herald’s 100th anniversary. He found that news item about PBS-8’s 1991 visit to the News-Herald soon enough so that we were able to order a DVD copy of the PBS Album show. It is a delight to watch, with interviews with the publisher and editor at that time—Jack Becklund and Shawn Perich, as well as former publisher Ade Toftey and his lovely wife, Bertha, Gunflint columnist Justine Kerfoot, and long-time staffer Dick Gilbertsen.
Between interviews the camera scans across old, old, pages from the News-Herald.
I’ll bet the PBS-8 crew had a hard time finding just the pages they wanted to shoot. Of course, they may have used a “search” feature that is available, although not in-house. Every year since the Minnesota Historical Society began keeping records, they have accepted copies of all of the legal newspapers across the State of Minnesota. They are filed there, in a searchable format—perhaps not as easy as “Google,” but easier than our archives.
Now of course our paper is not only stored at the Minnesota Historical Society, it is stored digitally as well. Articles and photos from the last few years are much easier to find.
But the binders are still there, waiting in their unorganized glory to lead a reader on a treasure hunt.
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner
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