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Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009

Sun-Star archive brings new life to old photos

It was 2004.

The Sun-Star's maintenance crew had been doing some spring cleaning. Jesse Chenault, the newspaper's chief copy editor, was heading home for the night when he spotted a box full of familiar envelopes sitting near the building's back doors.

They'd been tossed among piles of yellowed papers and trash, destined for a Dumpster outside.

"I immediately recognized the envelopes as four-by-five negative holders," Chenault recently recalled. "I'm a curious person, so I picked up the box and I started looking through it."

When he realized what he'd found, he was stunned that it'd all come so close to being lost forever.

"I thought, 'What a treasure trove!'" he said.

Inside Chenault's box were hundreds of envelopes filled with photo negatives. He'd rescued thousands of images captured by Sun-Star photographers in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Many have never been published.

There was a shot of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy making a whistle-stop in Merced on Sept. 9, 1960, two months before his historic win over Richard Nixon. There was another of Nixon visiting outside the Tioga Hotel. Another showed construction crews building Highway 99.

Still others captured factory workers in horn-rimmed glasses sorting almonds in 1962. Airmen dedicating new planes at Castle Air Force Base in 1958.

Another taken in the mid-1950s, of an elderly couple posing straight-faced outside their home in Hornitos, reminded Chenault of the famous painting, "American Gothic."

"I couldn't stop looking at them," said Chenault, who started at the Sun-Star in 1994 as a photographer. "I just thought they were such a find -- such an important record of Merced's history."

He took the box home and began cleaning and repairing the negatives. Some had been stapled together. Other were stained and scratched. "I was horrified that no one had taken better care of them," he said.

Five years later, Chenault has begun digitizing the images and posting them online in a gallery on the Sun-Star's Web site.

It's an effort he started last month in spare hours at home using an Epson flatbed photo scanner that blasts light through the negatives, then records the images they hold.

Chenault said he'd have begun doing it sooner if he'd had the tools.

"That kind of scanner used to be really expensive, but they're pretty affordable now," he explained. "I've been wanting to get them published for people to see for a long time. I like doing it. I love photography, and I love looking at them."

Herb Wood of the Merced County Historical Society, who hasn't seen the collection, said photos of Merced from the 1940s through '60s aren't necessarily rare. But they're not too common either, he said.

"We have some, but not too many," Wood said. "I'd be very interested to see them."

It's no secret in the Sun-Star's newsroom that the paper's efforts to archive photographs over the years have been scattered at best. Most images captured after 2006 are maintained in a digital archive, but finding earlier photos usually proves tough.

Chenault said he believes the negatives he found could be the only ones saved from those decades. They're also probably the oldest the newspaper has, he said.

So far he's posted 18 of them online. He estimates he has at least 2,000 more to sort through and said he plans to add a few new ones each week until he's posted all that are worthy of publication.

"Most of them aren't of real historical significance, but they're all very charming," he said. "So many of them have kids in them. It makes you wonder where those people are now."

To see the photos, go to www.mercedsnapshots.com/fromthearchive.

Reporter Corinne Reilly can be reached at (209)385-2477 or creilly@mercedsun-star.com.