The Never-Ending Story

So, being hopelessly anal retentive, I've been working on sleeving, archiving, scanning, captioning and otherwise organizing my old film negatives – all 42 years worth of them – and I've come to the conclusion that this is a job that will never be done. It's a daunting task, and that could be one of my larger understatements. Naturally, it's not enough to simply sleeve the negatives; I also insist on properly dating the sleeves, labeling them completely (it's not just the "Coliseum," you know – it's the "Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum; Oakland, Calif."), and putting them in labeled binders in chronological order.

Mind you, I've been a professional photojournalist pretty much since college, when I spent my last two years photographing everything that moved on the campus of Ithaca College for the Cayugan yearbook. So there's a lot of negatives – hundreds of thousands of them – and a lot of events. Some of them deserve to be saved (think Game 7 of the 2002 World Series or President Ronald Reagan visiting Whippany, N.J. in October 1987), and some, well, not so much (think Rodney P. Frelinghuysen election headquarters in November 1987 or the Denville, N.J. street fair in June 1986), but I'm treating them all equally.

The floor of my office is slowly disappearing under an ever-growing sea of 1000-sheet three-ring binders, and it could be worse: there's a two-year window in there, when I was working for The (Easton, Pa.) Express, from which I have almost no film – it was filed at the time, and now is rotting in a landfill somewhere in Bucks County (or was that Berks County? I can't keep them straight). Thus, my trip to Jim Thorpe, Pa. remains woefully undocumented. That's a shame, don't ya think?

Further, this is just the sleeving and labeling portion of the program – next comes the actual scanning and captioning. Thank God for Baseball Reference.com, without which captioning all those baseball games would be impossible. I'm hoping that, by the time I turn 60, I might actually be close to finishing.

Then I can start on the color slides…