Daily Newsletters
Account
Washington Evening Journal
111 North Marion Avenue
Washington, IA 52353
319-653-2191
Archivist works to digitize decades of Journal photos
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
WASHINGTON — Four days a week for the last several months, any visitor to the Washington Public Library’s Makerspace has likely noticed the same man in some corner of the room, either seated in front of countless physical folders, or at a computer, doctoring black and white images.
That man is Mark Keedy, a former intern at the Washington Evening Journal. A retired resident of Dyersville, Keedy stayed in a Washington apartment for the majority of every week since October, spending his days on an effort to digitally preserve thousands of photos taken by the paper’s reporters from 1957 to the late ‘70s.
After years in storage at the paper’s building on North Marion Avenue, the film negatives and their labels were nearly thrown out during renovations in 2018. But local historian Michael Zahs stepped in to take them off the publication’s hands at the last second, later sending them to the University of Iowa for preservation, which has, in turn, provided the contents to Keedy.
In late winter, Keedy finished the preliminary archival steps on the first two of 18 boxes. It’s been an exhausting endeavor, and he expects the labor of love to last for the rest of his life.
And, he says, it will be worth it.
“It’s hours and hours of sitting down there by myself, but my God is it rewarding,” Keedy said. “It’s a calling, and I really want it to be my legacy. Most of these images, I didn’t create. But I’m connected to the people both before and after me who did create them.”
Each box contains hundreds of sleeves and envelopes, all filled with a handful of photo negatives, totaling likely in the tens of thousands. Keedy started by labeling and sorting the first few boxes by date, then hunting down context for noteworthy entries.
Some sleeves were fairly easy to identify, like “Wellman Turkey Days #5” while others took months to decipher, with labels like “rodeo” for pictures of a car-centric event billed as a “road-io.” Others were misdated, lacked names or context for the photos’ subjects, or were illegibly labeled in shorthand known only to their creators, like a collection that appeared to read, “PLA Harvesting,” but turned out to be a “pea harvesting.”
“That’s a big part of the project, gathering metadata,” Keedy said. “What the photo was, who shot it, we’ll know when it was published, what key words go with it.”
Once organized, the archivist looked through each envelope, picked photos for digital preservation, and copied them with the makerspace’s high-definition digital scanner on contact sheets. The photos with the best quality, or more interesting context, are then pulled later for high-resolution digitization, and cataloged alongside their original captions, verified with existing archives of the paper’s old articles.
Originally taken on film, the decades-old stills have higher resolutions than most modern digital cameras, although their visible quality was limited at publication by the technology used to display them. But with a Mac serving as the digital equivalent of a darkroom, Keedy can record the pictures in their full quality, and see details cropped out of newspaper copies.
“When we do these high-resolution scans, you zoom in so far you begin seeing the individual grains that make up the image, that’s how detailed it is,” Keedy said. “The advantage we have today is that we can electronically tweak the contrast, the exposure values, the highlights, the shadows, we can make a print that is as near-perfect as it can be, because the process of developing this film was kind of slipshod … many times, they were just making an educated guess, and it shows.”
Archive rich with historic insights
The photos capture a wide variety of goings-on in Washington.
Many are slice-of-life shots: summer reading programs at the library, downtown parades, school science fairs, farm work. Others are more monumental, like a groundbreaking photo shoot as construction began at Mid-Prairie High School.
And some are remarkable only in retrospect. Keedy uncovered a handful of pictures by Dallas Kinney in 1964, just six years before the journalist would win a Pulitzer Prize for his photo story in the Palm Beach Post. Another sleeve of photos labeled simply “12 year-old golfer” in 1957 was traced back to a story on Judy Torluemke, a child prodigy in the sport who married and became Judy Rankin, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame and winner of the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Golf Association.
“The Judy Torluemke photo has to be one of the most remarkable finds, because no one I’ve talked to about it has any recollection of her having lived here in town,” Keedy said. “I’ve got a feeling there are some people who lost track of her, perhaps when she got married … that’s been fascinating.”
That’s not to say the others aren’t fascinating as well.
Keedy said the most routine images offered an insightful glimpse into Washington’s past.
“Some of the most interesting takeaways have not so much to do with the images themselves, but what the images and their captions say about society at that time,” he said, citing the changes in naming conventions for women, or glimpses at recognizable store fronts, sidewalk conditions around downtown or the sense of humor expressed in comical photos at Ridiculous Days.
Archivist plans to build database
Ultimately, Keedy’s goal is to build a public-facing database of photos from the Journal’s past, accessible to anyone and searchable by date, keywords and captions, hosted by the University of Iowa, online archive site Fortepan, and at WPL itself.
He hopes it will get easier to gather context for his photos as the story continues, as community members see the photos, and stop by the library to offer their own anecdotes about the people and events depicted, especially for photos that were taken by the paper but not published in it.
“My work on Wellman Turkey Days is complete, I’ve got more material than ever ran in the newspaper, and unfortunately, I can’t identify this kid,” Keedy said, referencing one unprinted photo. “I’m sure notes were taken, but the photographer’s notes are long gone. However, if somebody, at some point, looks through what we saved from Wellman Turkey Days. And they might go, ‘Huh, I wonder if I know this kid.’”
It’s work that Keedy is uniquely cut out for, as a former reporter at the local paper with lots of the knowledge needed to contextualize its old photos, and with enough time on his hands to do the job in his retirement.
And on a personal level, Keedy said his goal was to leave a legacy in a town that shaped his life.
“I did a lot of things in my lifetime, none of them meant so much to me as being a poorly paid summer intern at The Journal,” he said. “I’m not Bill Gates, I’m not Warren Buffett, I’m not going to be leaving millions of dollars. This is something that I can leave to the community that gave me a chance to become who I am.”
Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com
