Historic Hood River

Notes

Every couple of decades an ambitious person attempts to organize the museum’s photography collection.  I think this is from the 1970s, when someone took 35mm slide images of what appear to be selected key images from the collection.  While these 35mm slides are not a very good archive by today’s standards, in some cases they capture an image which appears to have disappeared from our collection.  After reviewing some 25,000 images currently in our collection, I’m moderately confident this is one of the lost images.  It’s possible it was “borrowed” from the collection in an era when access was not tightly controlled, or it could be hiding somewhere else in the museum, perhaps as part of a collection with other non-photographic objects. We’ve even gotten new donations which include images which bear markings indicating they were previously in the museum’s collection.

We’ve made significant strides in recent years by limiting access to the physical collection while offering easy virtual access.  After an image is scanned, placed in an archival sleeve and boxed on the archive shelf, it’s very rare for me (or anyone else) to touch it again.  The digital image is as good or better for most research purposes.  But the original “analog” image is always preserved because it may outlive the digital one, or a future archivist may be able to tease more information out of it with a better scan.   The last time I dug up a print from our archives was because I wanted to read some pencil text from it.  Faded pencil is sometimes easier to read if you alter the angle of lighting, and sometimes the paper is slightly embossed which isn’t captured in the scan.

Unfortunately without examining the original negative or print I don’t have any further information other than what you see here:  A group of men in Parkdale baseball uniforms.

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