Column: The H-T archive auction gives buyers a chance to preserve history
The first thing that hit you was the smell — a combination of ink, parchment and stale air — aged to perfection. The Herald-Times staff called it “the morgue,” but it was not a place of death. It was a final resting place for history, and the room reeked of it.
It was located in the bowels of the H-T building, harbored in a windowless, musty room where volumes of newspapers were pressed into heavy binders and stored on sturdy wooden and metal shelves. Those shelves had to be sturdy in order to support the immense weight of hundreds of volumes going as far back as the early 1900s. I’m guessing the thicker binders weighed up to 20 pounds.
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The older ones were larger and heavier because newspapers were printed on broadsheet back then. A page of broadsheet is roughly 24-by-30 inches, much larger than today’s newspaper pages that are closer to tabloid size.
Under a dim light was a rickety wooden desk where you could spread out the binders, which, when opened, covered the entire desktop. You opened them with caution because it didn’t take much to convert a 100-year-old page into confetti. To preserve them, the room was supposedly temperature controlled, which meant you could see your breath in the winter months.
Access to the room was carefully monitored by the newspaper librarians, who were the keepers of the key. They wouldn’t just hand it over without a proper request — making it all the more a privilege and a treat to spend time with those treasures of the past, especially the volumes from the early 20th century.
One piece I enjoyed researching involved the legendary Jim Thorpe, who served as an assistant football coach at Indiana University for one year, 1915. While reading about Thorpe’s feats in the 1912 Olympics, I came across the screaming headlines of the Titanic disaster. I was entranced for hours, but it was easy to lose yourself there.
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An assignment which took me further back involved one of IU’s first African American athletes. A vintage photo came across the sports desk showing this young black man posing with three white men, the members of the 1904 Hoosier track team that won a medal at the 1904 St. Louis Relays. I was intrigued and couldn’t wait to get to the morgue to find out the name of this mystery man. Pouring through those binders, and later some microfilm, I learned that his name was George William Thompson, and that he went on to become a Civil Rights leader in Akron, Ohio, during the 1920s and ‘30s. I actually ended up making a trip to Akron to determine the extent of his activism, which was widely celebrated.
I also spent several afternoons researching stories about Bloomington High School’s 1919 basketball team, which became the city’s first state champion. Catching my eye then was page after page devoted to stories of a nation trying to rebound from World War I.
To my relief I just read that these volumes will have new homes. With the H-T building no longer occupied, the binders were crumbling into dust in that abandoned room. In a recent column H-T editor Jill Bond reported the binders will be auctioned off, with the proceeds going to a good cause, the Local News Fund at the Community Foundation of Bloomington/Monroe County. For those who are lucky enough to secure one, consider the history preserved within those pages. Treat those binders with respect. History deserves that.
Lynn Houser was an H-T sportswriter from 1984-2012. He is now living in Delray Beach, Florida.
The Herald-Times archive auction begins Friday at https://edsindian.hibid.com/auctions. Proceeds will support the Local News Fund at the Community Foundation of Bloomington/Monroe County.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist shares fond memories of research in Herald-Times morgue
