"When I was a kid, the Register and Tribune had an enormous photo library, in a room perhaps 80ft x 60ft, where I would often pass an agreeable half hour if I had to wait for my mom. There must have been half a million pictures in there, maybe more. You could look in any drawer of any filing cabinet and find real interest and excitement from the city's past - five-alarm fires, train derailments, a lady balancing beer glasses on her bosom, parents standing on ladders at hospital windows taking to their polio-stricken children. The library was the complete visual history of Des Moines in the twentieth century.
Recently, I returned to the R&T looking for illustrations for this book, and discovered to my astonishment that the picture library today occupies a small room at the back of the building, and that nearly all the old pictures were thrown out some years ago.
"They needed the space" the present librarian told me, with a slightly apologetic look. I found this a little hard to take in.
"They didn't give them to the state historical society?" I asked. She shook her head.
"Or the city library? Or a university?"
She shook her head twice more.
"They were recycled for the silver in the paper" she told me.
So now, not only are the places gone, but there is no record of them either."
I feel a lump in my throat just writing this, but the pattern must have been repeated in many libraries worldwide.
Has anyone else come across this kind of wanton cultural vandalism?
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Photo Libraries (loss of)
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