Column: Volunteers discover Monroe County's past while prepping for sale

In August I spent the better part of three weeks going through a portion of the nearly 1,000 unique books that are now for sale through an online auction by Estate & Downsizing Specialists. Each book from the H-T's archive contains one copy per day of The Herald-Telephone or The Herald-Times newspaper over a specific time period, ranging from two weeks to three months.

Nearly all of the books hail from mid-1950 through 2013. Four are older, from the H-T's ancestor papers, with the oldest from 1925.

A wonderful group of volunteers helped me note the biggest stories included in each volume we managed to peruse — books you can now purchase to benefit a Local News Fund at the Community Foundation of Bloomington-Monroe County. Due to the necessary workday timing of the research efforts, most of the book summaries were created by retired folks like me, and we had a wonderful time wandering back through Bloomington's history, often reliving events that we had personally witnessed or at least had heard about over the years.

We didn't have the manpower to look through every volume, but what we found is fascinating stuff.

The early books offered the most surprises for me, with the writing style reflecting the sensibilities of a more structured and patriarchal society, and the advertisements showing a time when a dollar went a lot further in buying groceries, a home or a car.

Reading through the books, you see Bloomington's Joshua Bell grow from a violin prodigy who also was a competitive 12-and-under tennis player to a world-renowned musician who is also a member of the Indiana University music school faculty. Meanwhile Hoosier rocker Johnny Cougar progressively sheds his stage name and leather jacket while building a body of work that put John Mellencamp in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

Start exploring: What made news in Monroe County, 1925-1959

Many other top musicians and entertainers who lived in or came through Bloomington were captured in a photo, interview or concert review, from Elvis to Bob Dylan to Leonard Bernstein. Other stories and photos recall when Hollywood came to Bloomington in 1978 to film "Breaking Away."

IU talks by luminaries in many fields are noted in these pages. The Dalai Lama visited the local Tibetan Cultural Center and his IU-professor brother six times over the course of the book collection.

The book collection also contains hundreds of stories showing the long, drawn-out battles the community endured over the best way to clean up PCB contamination, the best route, if any, for the extension of I-69, and the best way to keep drinking water flowing to the ever-growing community.

In 1999, Bloomington came together to stand up against hate in the wake of a white supremacist shooting IU graduate student Won-Joon Yoon to death on a city sidewalk, and we linked hands again in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The March books containing coverage of the Hoosiers' 1953, 1976, 1981 and 1987 NCAA men's basketball championships unfortunately are missing from the collection, along with the books containing coverage of the 1984 Olympics.

But there are tons of other sports stories about Bloomington and IU-related standouts in athletics and coaching making their marks — Olympic swim coach Doc Counsilman and his biggest star, Mark Spitz, Olympic skater Jill Watson and Olympic rower Missy Schwen, a wealth of other IU-linked Olympic stars in swimming, diving, track and field, the Bloomington High School/Bloomington South football teams that won 60 straight games, the 1997 Bloomington North team that won the last one-class boys' basketball state title, and much, much more. Many of those stories were written by nationally recognized H-T sports editor Bob Hammel, including in-person coverage from several Summer Olympic sites.

A 'newsy' decade: What made news in Monroe County, 1960-1969

The elections of mayors and governors and presidents are preserved in these pages, including a Bloomington visit by president-to-be Barack Obama. So. too. are the nation's wars, from a few books during World War II through the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars, not to mention the Cold War and the War on Terrorism.

Then there are the entries of a more personal interest — wedding descriptions, obituaries, high school graduation honor lists, 4-H fair results. These bread-and-butter news items were often the main reason local residents subscribed to the paper — to read about themselves, their family members and their friends.

I hope you'll find a book or two you want to buy from this giant collection, and you'll spend some time immersing yourself in our past. It's an experience worth the time, and your purchase funds will help ensure today's news is well documented for readers of local news publications and websites now and in the future.

The online auction is now live and closes at 7 p.m. Sept. 13. Find it at https://edsindian.hibid.com. Books can be picked up in person 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15, or otherwise arranged.

Learn more about the Local News Fund at https://cfbmc.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create/fund?funit_id=2122.

Janice Rickert served as an editor at The Herald-Times for nearly 42 years. She has been instrumental to making the archive sale happen.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Column: Herald-Times archive documents important history