When I was first told of the idea to look through The Item’s archives from the years of World War II at the Lynn Public Library, I was excited. I had been tasked to help someone from Swampscott find connections to their family’s past. I have always liked learning about history, but then I started to get nervous.
What if we can’t find what this person is looking for? And how do I even use a microfilm scanner?
I am 22 years old, all I know about looking through newspaper archives is from the movies and the movies make it seem so much easier than it actually is. These movie characters will walk into a library, pick up one roll of microfilm and find the article they are looking for in minutes. For my colleague Spenser Hasak (also known as The Item’s creative director, newsroom manager and photographer) and me, it took us two hours to find what we were looking for.
We were hopeful in the beginning, thinking “maybe the article we are looking for will be on the first roll.” It wasn’t.
The person we were helping only had a brief idea of what we were looking for so we couldn’t afford to skip over anything. The parameters we had were: top of the fold on the front page, picture of a marine, a name, and the fact that he was from Lynn.
By the end we looked through 6 rolls of microfilm totaling to about 200 editions of The Daily Evening Item.
We started our research at 12 p.m. The first scanner we tried to use was not cooperating with us which we really couldn’t afford because we were on a time crunch, deadline for articles is at 5 p.m. so our designers have time to get the paper to the printers. We knew we couldn’t really stay past 3 p.m. I had to write and Spenser had to edit the photos.
Thankfully a woman working in the library knew how to use the machines and showed us how to operate them. After figuring out how to thread the film through the lens we got to looking.
Even though I was required to take a history of journalism class in college, I was still amazed by the papers from 80 years ago. We looked through editions from 1942, 1943 and 1944 and ads for fur coats and cigarettes flooded the pages. Today, real estate and bank ads are the most common for The Item.
An ad that really caught mine and Spenser’s attention was one calling for people to donate any scrap metal they might have for the military to use for supply production. Did you know one trash can lid equaled 30 hand grenades back in the 1940s?
At that time, the war waging in Europe was being heavily covered. We saw many articles about men from the area dying, going missing or performing heroic actions across the ocean.
But what I was most shocked to see was the coverage of the “Rosie the Riveter ” type women who went to work during the war. There were a lot of articles about these women taking on the jobs the men once occupied in Lynn and the surrounding areas.
A lot of times during our search we found ourselves stopping to read headlines and the beginning of some articles. The people walking by or sitting near us were probably questioning why these two people were saying “wow” every few minutes.
As the clock was nearing 2:10, we were on Wednesday, October 18, 1944. I was manning the scanner, briefly stopping on each front page. I almost missed it. I would have missed it if Spenser wasn’t also looking.
I was about to start scrolling to the next edition when he whisper-yelled the last name of the man we were looking for from a caption under a picture.
That was it, we had found what we were looking for and I got to call the person we were helping to tell them that.
This whole experience has made me value my job as a news reporter even more. Helping someone from the community I report in find an article to preserve their families history was rewarding to say the least. It goes without saying that we wouldn’t have been able to find the article without the resources the Lynn Public Library has.
Someday 80 years from now maybe another news reporter who is just starting their career will be searching for something I wrote for The Item.
