We held our second Preserve Your Personal Story event on May 2, 2017 at the West Toledo Branch, in collaboration with the  Eleanor Kahle Senior Center. It was the first of four digitization events that we will be hosting in collaboration with area senior centers this year, all in an effort to capture local memories to add to our Digital Collections of Northwest Ohio. We hoped that our second event would result in historical information about West Toledo, that we could share, and… it did! We digitized some materials for people’s personal photo collections, including items such as family and vacation photos, but we also digitized materials that show historical events and buildings from West Toledo.

We received several items related to the history of the Elenaor Kahle Senior Center. Ones such photo is below. It features several prominent members of the Toledo community, including Carty Finkbeiner, Marcy Kaptur, and Eleanor Kahle herself.

We also received historical photos of the West Toledo Senior Center, photos of events that took place at the Senior Center, an article about the senior center’s name change, and the proclamation from the Office of the Mayor for “Eleanor Kahle Senior Center Dedication Day.”

In addition to these wonderful items, historical photos of Sinclair’s, a local business, were also brought to the event. While this gas station is no longer in business, the site was converted into an automotive repair and towing service that goes by the same name today. These photos not only show the gas station, but also aerial shots of West Toledo like the one below.

Pictured above: Birdseye view of Hillcrest and Jackson, Woodlawn Cemetery in the lower right corner

We also learned about a historical event that greatly impacted Toledo at our event, thanks to another customer donation. In 1968, a helicopter crashed at Disneyland in LA. Of the 23 people killed in the crash, nine were from Ohio, two of which were from Toledo. This crash greatly impacted the area, and was so traumatizing, it led to many Toledoans abstaining for flying. It also resulted in the end of the helicopter tours at Disneyland. We were able to digitize several newspaper clippings from all over the country that covered the “Disneyland Disaster” so that a customer would have a digital back-up, as the newspaper clippings are starting to fall apart.

Stay tuned to the Digital Collections of Northwest Ohio  to see some of these items added to our online collections. As always, if you have materials that you believe would be good additions, please contact us at digitization@toledolibrary.org.

Stay tuned to our events page for information on our upcoming Preserve Your Personal Story events including our July 12, 2017 program, “Preserve Your Memories: Sylvania.”