Leaving for CA tomorrow

[elspethdixon]

The Mojave desert, not the coast. My birthday present for my dad is that I'm going to spend several days going through [aviation organization]'s "archives," (repeatedly described it to me as "those boxes of stuff" so I'm kind of picturing a supply closet full of cardboard boxes shoved in at random) and offer advice on how to organize them.

This could either end in me saying "buy some archival boxes and folders, and move this stuff out from under that water pipe," or in me saying, "Holy shit, call the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and tell them you have three shoeboxes full of Neil Armstrong's pilot logbooks," depending on which former organization members' stuff it is. Option #2 is a very slim possibility, but an existing one.

Comments

[lasergirl]

This sounds like a really cool adventure!! I love rummaging around in non-archived/organized things and telling people what to do with them.... let me know if you find anything awesome!!! (I love airplanes!)

[elspethdixon]

We found this book of newspaper clippings someone had given to the society that were all from the early 1900s and nineteen-teens, about early aviation. Seriously, I opened it up and right there on the first page was "Curtiss makes flight from Albany for $10,000 prize" and "Father of Flying Octave Chanute Recovers from Illness at Home."

They didn't even know they had it. (Luckily, it was in a building in the high desert, so nothing was moldy or mildewed)

The other cool thing were the boxes of stuff from the society's yearly symposiums, which went like this: menu from the 1962 symposium banquet, hotel reservations from 1962, parking validation tickets from the hotel, letters telling people their symposium papers were rejected, copies of all the papers that weren't rejected, little surveys collected from attendees about what hotel to hold the symposium at next year, a letter from the director of NASA nominating John Glenn for a test pilot award for orbiting the earth.