By Doug Humes
Photos courtesy of Marple Historical Society
By virtue of being involved in the local historical societies, I get emails from various history groups on matters of interest to local history groups. In 2016 or so, I received one such piece of “junk mail.” This “junk” perfectly illustrates the saying that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. The mailing was from the Pennsylvania State Museum Commission. The Pennsylvania State Library owns a book scanner, a high-tech machine that will hold a book in place so you can get a clean scan of the page.
If you are familiar with Google Books, it’s likely the same type of machine they’ve been using for years when they go into a library and scan every book that’s no longer protected by copyright, to make them searchable and available to the entire world through their Google Books site. The email I received let me know that the scanner would be made available to community groups who may want to use it for a particular project.
I had just the project in mind! Through working with one of the Marple Newtown High School (MNHS) history teachers on the project to create the 100-year timelines that now grace the halls of the high school, I knew that they had a virtually complete set of the MNHS yearbooks, going back to about 1927. Years before, I had heard about another local high school that threw out the old yearbooks because they did not have the space to continue to store them. Such madness! Not everyone values their history. I reached out to the MNHS teacher, Mike Karpyn, and told him about the scanner. Mike cares about history, and he happened to have a cheap source of labor at his disposal: his students! He jumped on the opportunity, and by January of 2017, he and his students were working on the project. You can see the results: All of the yearbooks and some other materials are posted here: https://archive.org/details/marplenewtownhighschool
That’s a pretty easy site to navigate, and it opens up the history of all of those books to anyone curious about the stories that they tell. Once scanned, these materials will hopefully live forever, and will continue to tell their stories to future generations. Thank you to Mike and to all the others who worked to make this happen.
For more on the history of Marple, visit the Marple Historical Society website and Facebook page, and join the Society to stay updated on coming events: www.MarpleHistoricalSociety.org. No activities are currently scheduled. We hope to have an announcement soon about resuming open houses at the Massey House. Check on Facebook or at the website for more details.
