Jane Millard, director of the Jefferson Public Library, holds up a reel of microfilm containing a historical Greene County newspaper. Microfilm is still the best way to preserve newspapers, but it’s not the most user friendly. Millard digitized the library’s archive of Jefferson newspapers in 2013, making them searchable online by keyword, and now looks forward to adding the county’s other papers to the site. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALDMany issues of the county’s newspapers are imperiled, like this issue of the Churdan Reporter, which was published between 1891 and 1964. Digitizing them will preserve a wealth of local history.

HISTORY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT

County libraries to put a century of newspapers online

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Bill Burkett went out as a red-blooded man.

The 28-year-old Dana native lost his life over Belgium on March 4, 1944, at the throttle of one of America’s greatest warbirds, the P-47 Thunderbolt.

Just two and a half years earlier, Burkett had earned his private pilot’s license at the Jefferson airport under the tutelage of Don Monthei, namesake of present-day Don Monthei Airfield.

When war finally came, Burkett was given the honor of becoming a fighter pilot, and was among the very first Thunderbolts to bomb Nazi territory.

Lt. Burkett wouldn’t be memorialized for another two years after his death in combat, when a service was held at the Presbyterian church in Grand Junction.

In remembering the man who had disregarded his dwindling fuel supply to jump into the fray to help American bombers under attack, the Jefferson Herald on March 21, 1946, reprinted a letter to Burkett’s parents from his commanding officer.

“May it be some solace for me to say that he went as a red-blooded man,” his commanding officer wrote, “his colors flying high and in honor with his eyes fixed forward on a great ideal. We pilots know that his blood, and indeed the blood of each of us when it happens, will not be spilled in vain.”

The Jefferson Public Library upheld a small part of that grand bargain in 2013, when it digitized its archive of Jefferson newspapers.

With that single act, the details of Burkett’s life and death were no longer confined to a spool of microfilm in a box inside a drawer accessible only during library hours. Anyone in the world, at any time, can now access the story of his sacrifice.

A plan by the Greene County Librarians Association will hopefully have the county’s other newspapers online by year’s end.

The resulting site — to be christened the Greene County Community History Archive — is a long time coming for those of us who’ve gotten spoiled by the ease with which it’s now possible to explore 152 years of newspapers without leaving home (or, for that matter, without even having to get dressed).

“It’s amazing the history that are in the newspaper archives,” said Jane Millard, director of the Jefferson Public Library, who recently completed a grant application for the $21,506 project to the Greene County Community Foundation on behalf of the county’s six libraries.

The Community Foundation had made initial digitization possible with a grant in 2010 that enabled the Jefferson Public Library to put every page of (most) every Jefferson newspaper online, searchable by keyword.

The free archive is updated annually.

Back then, Millard explained, the county’s other libraries wanted to take a wait-and-see approach to digitizing their respective newspaper archives, most of which are literally crumbling.

“After they saw what a good resource it was,” she said, “they were very eager to add their newspapers.”

The Grand Junction Public Library, for one, only has bound physical copies of the Grand Junction Globe (which later became the Globe-Free Press).

Digitizing them would not only free up much-needed shelf space, it would prevent library director Diane Kafer from having to run the vacuum anytime someone starts to flip through the 70 or so oversized books of yellowing old broadsheets.

“They’re pretty brittle,” Kafer said. “I just put the pieces back in the book.”

In Churdan, Millard said, the library recently was expanded and remodeled, but no room was left for the boxes containing the Churdan Reporter, the pages of which also become more brittle with each passing year.

In addition to the existing Jefferson papers, the new archive would include the Grand Junction Globe from 1870 to 1999, the Scranton Journal from 1884 to the present, and the Churdan Reporter from 1891 to 1964. The Paton Portrait and Rippey News would be accessible as well, owing to the fact that they became sections of the Junction newspaper.

Additionally, Millard hopes to go beyond newspapers, digitizing a treasure trove of local history — everything from a whole binder full of information about the extinct community of Angus to a 1900 directory of Greene County farmers.

A Jefferson edition of the book “The Iowa Illustrated” sold for 25 cents in 1896, but now offers a priceless portrait of the town just before the turn of the century. It, too, will be digitized once funding falls into place.

Millard recalls the days when people using the library’s microfilm would spend “hours and hours and hours” on it, and still not find what they wanted.

“Research is done differently now,” she said. “You want it at your fingertips. It’s nice this new method of preservation is available.”

It also gives the entire world access to our local, yet shared, history.

Users of the Jefferson newspaper archive — accessible via the Jefferson Public Library’s website — have hailed from 10 states and 14 countries in just the past six months. Ten users were in China. One was in Ethiopia.

“Why’s somebody in Thailand looking at our paper? It kind of blows your mind,” Millard said. “As librarians trained in research work, we don’t ask why.

“But we sure are curious.”

I personally had never heard the name Bill Burkett until last week, when, out of curiosity myself, I wanted to see if anybody locally had flown the iconic P-47 Thunderbolt during World War II. By simply typing “Thunderbolt” into the search box, I had my answer in seconds.

The addition of Grand Junction’s newspaper to the search results promises to shine an even brighter light on who this 1933 graduate of Dana High School was.

As a Greene County kid myself, it’s inspiring to learn about the role of local people in history — people who traveled some of the same roads, walked past some of the same houses and played in some of the same parks as me.

It’s fascinating to learn that the one and only Buffalo Bill Cody once brought his Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World show to Jefferson. The date was Sept. 19, 1899, and admission was 50 cents ($1 for a reserved seat). The first of two shows that day drew a paying crowd of 12,000 people.

“Neighborhood after neighborhood was practically deserted,” reported the Souvenir, one of nearly a dozen newspapers Jefferson has had since 1859, when the Jefferson Star began publishing. (Alas, several of them, including the Star, are missing from the digital archives for the simple reason that they vanished like the buffalo.)

There are scores of stories just waiting to be found of red-blooded men of war and people of note who, against all odds, found themselves in our neck of the woods thanks to the railroad or the Lincoln Highway.

You’re never more than a few clicks away from learning about the night in 1949 that a masked professional wrestler calling himself the Golden Terror went up against an opponent named Ginger, a bear, at the Woltz Sale Pavilion (what eventually became Bowling Greene, which eventually burned down). The Jefferson Bee duly reported beforehand that Ginger was, at present, undefeated.

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan started making inroads into Greene County, and it’s shocking to read the degree to which they were treated like just another local service club. Lions with hoods.

The Bee’s Bristol Twp. report of Oct. 15, 1924, contained the following nugget of society news:

“Mrs. Frank Bortz, Dean and Doris, Mrs. Frank Greiner, Marjorie and Leslie, Mrs. Cliff West, Zona and Ralph, also Mrs. Mont Cairns, Earl and Merl, were all guests at the Mrs. Ralph Kinsman home Wednesday evening while their husbands attended the Klan meeting in Churdan.”

Well, now, so much for that secret, “mystic order” thing.

“There are a lot of things in the newspaper you won’t find anywhere else,” said Terry Clark, assistant director/children’s librarian at the Jefferson library who enjoys using the archives to research family history.

The digitization is done by Cedar Rapids-based Advantage Archives, which maintains that microfilming is still the best way to preserve newspapers long term. After all, silver halide 35mm film has a life expectancy of give or take 500 years.

However, the company’s online search platform — which is done by digitizing microfilm — may negate the need for libraries to even have microfilm readers.

“People ask if we’ll replace the microfilm machine (when it dies),” Millard said. “Probably not.”

The technology offers an almost-immediate return on research.

Before agreeing last decade to digitize the Jefferson newspapers, Millard admittedly wanted to play around with it herself. 

Her family hails originally from the Storm Lake area, so she accessed the digital archive of Storm Lake newspapers. Millard’s father, a World War II veteran, died when she was 29, leaving her with precious little information about his wartime service.

“I always thought there was time to get those stories,” she said.

Using the digital archive, she was easily able to piece together the basics of her dad’s war story.

“When you don’t have a lot that means a lot,” Millard said. “I was sold, on a personal level.”

And, if I can get personal myself, allow me to put in a plug for the local newspaper, which is still recording our collective history.

How do I put this?

I guarantee you there’s never going to be a Community History Archive of Facebook Posts.

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Jefferson Bee & Herald
Address: 200 N. Wilson St.
Jefferson, IA 50129

Phone:(515) 386-4161