Posts filed under 'Remember When'
May 12th, 2009
Web readers love Our Remember When historical photo galleries. We garner thousands of page views on them. Today’s on August Bargren is no exception. Bargren was a former Rockford police chief who was promoted in 1894 to the top job after only four years as a patrol officer. The anniversary of Bargren’s death is Saturday and it’s National Police Week so it seemed fitting to offer this look back. (Don’t forget to click on the link to our Remember When page which features more than 30 past galleries.)
April 15th, 2009
Our Remember When series won Multimedia Project of the Year in the Best of GateHouse 2008 contest. We’ve published historical pictures and newspaper front pages on people like Janet Lynn and Lynn Martin and events like the snow storm of 1979 and the 1945 polio epidemic.
The Register Star also had two individual finalists: Emily Tropp for Sports Writer of the Year and Billy Kulpa for Designer of the Year.
Billy Kulpa and Emily Tropp
This week, GateHouse will release the champions, runners-up and finalists for Newspaper of the Year and the best newspaper sections of the year.
November 22nd, 2008
On Nov. 22, 1963, 45 years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I wasn’t alive then. But my mother was 6 years old when the media reported three bullets had hit our president and killed him. She remembers her parents glued in front of the TV that evening. Her mother saved all the front pages of the newspapers from that week, and now I have them.
We marked the anniversary of Kennedy’s death with an online package that included a historic gallery of photos and front pages, archive stories and video of with area residents recalling where they were that day. You’ll also find a link to other historical packages we’ve put together.
By the way, the photo above was published in the Rockford Register-Republic on Oct. 26, 1960. Kennedy was in Rockford for a Democratic presidential rally at the Coronado Theatre. He’s heading west on East State Street. You can see the News Tower in the background.
October 1st, 2008
Back in the olden days, newspaper libraries were called morgues. Not sure why. Maybe because of journalists’ dark sense of humor. More likely because of the columns of drawers filled with clippings and photos. These days (since 1997 here), files are stored electronically.
Most readers don’t even realize that a newspaper library exists, but the library’s work is becoming more and more visible. At rrstar.com, we’ve run a popular “Remember When” series of old photographs, whether they chronicled a “presidential” visit or the local impact on the polio epidemic.
In addition to photos, the Rockford Register Star library houses millions of clippings from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s. And the microfilm collection dates back to the 1840s.
Our librarians handle a number of tasks: assisting the newsroom with research, pulling historical material, archiving and more.
The digital text archive has been fed to NewsBank since 1999 and can be searched and viewed here.
The photos that appear in print are loaded to the Web for sale and can be purchased/viewed here through MyCapture.
Thanks, head librarian Eleanora Smith, for letting us shine light on your work.
July 24th, 2008
Andy Brown, assistant online news editor, came up with an idea to mark the 25th anniversary of George Brett’s infamous pine tar incident.
He put together this online package and is encouraging you to share your memories and thoughts. I’m 30, and I don’t remember this at all. But I enjoyed catching up … 25 years after the fact.
Check out some of our other “Remember When” packages, too.
May 1st, 2008
We published a new “Remember When” gallery today on rrstar.com. This time, check out pictures, newspaper pages and articles from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s visit to the Rock River Valley in October 1974.
We’ve gotten a lot of positive response from readers since launching these galleries. Next up is Richard Nixon’s visit here.
RRSTAR.COM FILE PHOTO
Then-president Lyndon B. Johnson tried to excite a crowd of 35,000 area residents but only drew “polite applause.” Johnson’s visit drew more people than Kennedy or Nixon’s, but the Johnson crowd “lacked the zeal and enthusiasm of Nixon and Kennedy partisans,” wrote a Rockford Morning Star reporter in 1964.
April 1st, 2008
We love history. And we found that many of you do, too, after we published several photos of former President John F. Kennedy’s visits here before he became president.
We debuted that gallery, our first in our “Remember When” series, two weeks ago. Online now at rrstar.com is the second “Remember When” photo gallery. We’ve packaged them together here.
The new gallery features former President Gerald Ford and includes pictures and newspaper pages from his Rockford-area stops in 1976, 1977 and 1980.
The idea for the “Remember When” series came from Register Star librarians. They wanted to share historic photos that once appeared on the pages of Rockford newspapers. Because this is an election year, we’ve started with photos of presidents who have visited the Rock River Valley.
