North Carolina State University Athletics
Moving a heavy load from Reynolds (6/5/09)
6/5/2009 12:00:00 AM | Pack Athletics
Editor's note: This is the fourth in a series of summer-long blogs about reorganizing the NC State athletics history found in the basement and closets of Reynolds Coliseum.
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. Besides the sheer enormity of the task to clean out and reorganize the archives and memorabilia hidden in Reynolds Coliseum, the most daunting part of this summer project was the thought of relocating everything to a new (though temporary) location.
There were 34 filing cabinets filled full of files, pictures, newspaper clippings the entire history of NC State athletics, really that needed to be removed from its dusty, dirty, un-air-conditioned home to a climate-controlled location. That’s easier said than done, considering that each filing cabinet was practically bulging with hundreds of pounds of information, all of which is completely irreplaceable.
But kudos to Reynolds maintenance supervisor David Bowles and the facilities crew that did all the heavy lifting to get everything moved Thursday morning. Kelly Edmunds, Brad Bowles, Matt Holliday and Billy Ray Dunn met David at 8 a.m. and began loading everything on to a rental truck.
Thankfully, the truck had a lift on the back, which saved everyone a lot of effort.
We transported everything over to a room in Vaughn Towers that we are borrowing for the time being from the ticket office and the marketing department. We have until the start of football season to get as much done as we can. Now I understand when football coach Tom O’Brien says Sept. 3 doesn’t seem so far away.
The good thing is that our interns, Blake Scher and Donald Bowens, no longer have to work in the worst conditions imaginable.
They can throw away the dust masks and enjoy the glory of climate control, as they systematically catalogue every file we have on hand.
We left “The Cage” empty, though there is still some tidying up we can do down there, like sweeping all the chunks of dirt, dust and asbestos into one big pile instead of having it spread all over the place.
There were also a couple of other important developments this week. On Tuesday, I went to the home of former associate athletics director Frank Weedon, the person most responsible for saving all the things we are now plowing through. Frank is an invaluable resource in this project, because he can identify just about everyone that we don’t know.
Though his health has not been good over the last year, Frank is looking forward to helping us as much as possible. It’s a good opportunity for him to recall some of the people and events that he experienced since he joined the athletics department as the sports information director in 1960.
“I always wanted to do something with these things, but there was never any money to do it,” Weedon said. “A lot of times, people just wanted to throw things away, when a new coach came in or a new administrator. But I knew one day it would be important for us to have around.”
It’s not like we have a big budget now. So far the whole project has been self-financed, but that only includes some cleaning supplies and a half-dozen medical co-pays (hey, at least I am breathing again). The greatest value has been the manpower provided by the interns and various members of the athletics department.
Frank still has some of the most precious items line drawings, photos, signed items that he has personally taken care of throughout the years. But he is excited about returning them to the larger collection for exhibit, should we be able in the future to create a place to permanently house them.
He showed me some wonderful stuff that I had never seen before, like an autographed, framed picture of Hall of Fame basketball coach Everett Case. In all the years I’ve been around NC State, I had never seen something signed by Case.
On Wednesday, marketing director Chris Alston and I met with Todd Kosmerick and Cate Putirskis from the NC State Libraries Special Collections Research Center, which is a vast resource of campus history. Years ago, the athletics department sent many of its old files and such to Special Collections. That was long before most of the current athletics staff was here, so we really didn’t know what was over there.
For the last year or so, their staff has been working on organizing the more than 400 (acid-free) storage boxes full of programs, personnel files, photos, 16mm movies of football and basketball game and other paper items for permanent preservation.
The most interesting thing I saw during our visit? One of the scorebooks from the 1974 NCAA Championship season, which includes the two ACC Tournament games and all four NCAA Tournament games. (The three scorebooks from 1983 are still in the files we just relocated.)
They have football and basketball programs going back to the 1920s, and media guides for all sports going back to the 1940s. It’s all valuable research information, stored, organized, preserved and, most importantly, protected. That’s what we want to do with all the stuff we just pulled out of Reynolds.
But we are a long way from being there just yet.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
