I finished inventory on my third box, and now I've got two more boxes to go through. After that, I'll go through actually accessioning the collection.

I found a packet of photos that ranged from 1957 to 1982, as well as a photo album from 2005. This was a very wide-ranging box in terms of the years.

One really cool thing I found was a very old newspaper from Saturday, August 1st, 1987. It was pretty crazy- the paper was actually in really good shape considering that it was twenty-six years old. One of the front-page stories was about Ronald Reagan getting surgery from skin cancer- I don' really remember Ronald Reagan as president, but I know '87 had the whole Iran-Contra affair going on. On the back of the paper were a bunch of advertisements for VCR's, ranging from 300 dollars to 500 dollars. Crazy to think how expensive that was back then- nowadays you can get a DVD player for 59 bucks, which would be 30 bucks in 1987 money. The advertisements also listed a "Big Screen TV"- at 26 inches. LOL.

Another really interesting item I found was a 1989 police statement investigating a fire incident at the State Theater. (The State Theater was located on what is now the 1996-built Galleria Mini-Mall, anchored by Grotto's Pizza.) It had been built in 1929 and put on the National Historic building list in 1983, but had closed down by the late 1980's. Here's a photo of the theater I found from 1981:

Here's what's there now:

Gotta love progress, right? Anyway, according to the police statement I read, four men in their early 20's snuck into the closed theater while being very intoxicated. The guy giving the statement said that they wanted to visit the theater, because it held sentimental value for him since he worked there before it closed. At some point, the theater caught on fire, and the statement was basically the guy saying that they did not intentionally set the theater on fire. The statement basically indicated that there was no way to salvage what was left of the theater, which makes sense, since seven years later there'd be a mini-mall on the site.

It was really interesting learning about the history of a site I've gone to many, many times in my life. I cannot tell you how many times I've parked at the parking lot behind this mini-mall, or gone to Grotto's Pizza/Kildare's when I went to UD.