When it happens, it's usually because someone has decided to clean out a closet or an attic, or maybe a loved one has passed and the job of clearing out personal effects falls to kin.
There, back in corner, is a box layered with dust. It's been undisturbed for years, so why was it worth keeping?
What’s the point?
A donated archive of KATV news footage is a treasure for fans of Arkansas history.
In our wildest dreams, opening the box reveals a pile of cash (preferably not Confederate bills) or an old painting that turns out to be an original Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper or Roy Lichtenstein rather than seven dogs around a table playing poker.
The reality usually doesn't involve the discovery of riches, but something personal or meaningful. Often, the perhaps forgotten box reveals or reminds about something significant from yesteryear, an item that helps transport us to the past and how those times felt.
That's what 26,000-plus hours of film and videotape from the KATV archives, now in possession of the Barbara and David Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in Fayetteville, feels like -- a gift from a shared Arkansas past.
In recent days, the Pryor Center posted the first digital conversions from that collection, online snippets of news coverage totalling about 20 hours. For those of us who grew up in Arkansas, the videos are like hopping into Dr. Who's TARDIS and ending up transported to an Arkansas of another time.
The center is in the business of preserving stories about the experiences of Arkansans and others affected by the state. The many interviews posted online since the center's founding in 1999 are a gift to the state. How many of us have realized much too late that we should have recorded conversations with grandparents or great aunts and uncles? The Pryor Center recognizes the value of hearing about the Arkansas experience directly from those who live it.
The KATV collection is so much more, an invaluable treasure trove of news coverage from the Little Rock-based TV station, which first began broadcasting in the early 1950s. Jim Pitcock, a now legendary figure in Arkansas' TV news coverage, recognized in the 1970s the station wasn't just covering daily news stories. It was also creating a vault filled with footage of the state's history. In a business built on immediacy, the news director's insights as to the historical value of what his reporters and photographers were doing were inspired. In too many news organizations, history gets thrown into a dumpster when space is required for something viewed as more important.
Pitcock not only kept the state's history, but ensured it was cataloged.
The station donated the archives to the Pryor Center, which is restoring old filmed segments and converting them to digital and doing similar work with thousands of hours of video, categorizing contents in a searchable fashion that makes it accessible. The Pryor Center is making this incredible collection available to everyone on its website, http://pryorcenter.uark.edu.
We watched some of the 20 hours posted online so far, and became entranced. It took only seconds for it to trigger memories of events, political figures and even some of the reporters who were household names once upon a time in Arkansas. There was John Hudgens, a reporter we'd forgotten but whose voice and face from the '70s were immediately familiar. A young Steve Barnes, now familiar as the host of AETN's "Arkansas Week" program, stands in front of the Faulkner County Courthouse reporting on a grand jury investigation. A long-haired Ray Tucker reports on a firefighter strike in Pine Bluff.
Those of us who watched KATV back in the '70s are immediately transported to when the reporters wrapped their standups with "reporting for NewsScene 7." That marketing device, a detail of the past still deposited deep in the recesses of our minds, takes us back 40-plus years.
There's then-Gov. David Pryor explaining concerns of Arkansans about Indochina refugees housed at Fort Chaffee. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller talks at a Rotary Club meeting. University of Arkansas students march across campus with a "Give peace a chance" poster in 1970, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and Fayetteville police march some to the city jail after what appears to be a sit-in on the streets of the downtown square. Segregationist "Justice Jim" Johnson criticizes an Arkansas Gazette editorial as he presses an effort to recall J. William Fulbright of Fayetteville from the U.S. Senate.
"It's indescribably thrilling to watch those historical characters brought to life," University of Arkansas political science professor Janine Parry explained to reporter Bill Bowden the other day. "It felt like a time machine."
But it's not all politics.
Sportscaster Bud Campbell interviews UA football coach Frank Broyles about the upcoming 1968 season in a Razorback Stadium much smaller than today's behemoth.
Grass is the new thing at Razorback Stadium this year, but the KATV archive shows footage of Astroturf being installed at Razorback Stadium and Little Rock's War Memorial Stadium in the late 1960s.
Watching these pieces of history is like watching an Arkansas version of YouTube -- so easy to get drawn in; so hard to press the stop button.
The scenes can inspire nostalgia, but the lasting value will be preservation of the images and interviews in a way that's accessible to researchers and the public. According to the Pryor Center, the important work of preservation is made possible by gifts from Tyson Foods, the Tyson Family Foundation and Barbara Tyson. It's an investment that ensures the past informs the present.
Binge-watching shows on Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services is all the rage these days. For lovers of Arkansas history, the Pryor Center's KATV collection is serious binge-worthy material.
Commentary on 08/24/2019