by Rick Corlett
Archivist, Kearny High Historical Archive Collection
May 2018
Around four years ago Kearny found itself in a facilities crunch. The district had removed the bungalows down by the gym to make room for the new football stadium. This resulted in a shift of classroom assignments. Rooms needed to be cleared out and prepared for other uses. Fortunately the school administration had set aside the small former office space to house the Kearny archives.
It was during this time that the historical collection expanded rather quickly. The videotapes and old audio-visual equipment I had stored in room 805 were moved to the new storeroom. Soon after, Lisa McCall, Kearny ASB advisor at the time, began cleaning out storage facilities that the ASB had been using for years. She brought old scrapbooks, photo albums, and other ASB memorabilia to the archive room. Jonathan Sachs, Kearny’s Athletic Director, added uniforms, trophies, photos, and old sports equipment as he cleaned out the athletic facilities. Lisa and Jonathan were great because they made sure nothing was lost. They saved a lot of Kearny history.
With donations from alumni and their families, along with items collected by past and current Kearny staff, the archives were beginning to fill the room. The storeroom was becoming unwieldy. The challenge became how to organize the items in the room. In the spring of 2015, Al Demoran and Earl Sopher, along with a few other volunteers, constructed a rack to hang the uniforms and other Kearny related clothing to help solve the problem. Then they built storage shelves to hold the boxes of videotapes and other memorabilia we’d gathered. The good news was that the room became manageable.
The greater news is that the room is overflowing once again. But that’s another story.
Earl Sopher and Al Demoran constructing shelves for the Kearny Archive room, June 2015.
