Building a Book on Alabama Pro Wrestling History (Part 2)

Source: WBRC.com

     I finished gathering clippings from Gadsden this weekend, so I now have 1933-40 to cover Gadsden, and the shows from neighboring Attalla in 1939-40.  Joe Gunther started running shows in Gadsden again with a special Independence Day show, but either he only ran sporadically after that, or the newspaper just stopped giving the shows regular coverage.  Possibly due to a frequent postponements due to weather, because shows were being run mainly in the Amphitheater, Jordan, and later Gunther, just put Gadsden on a lower priority.  A lot of shows were rained out over 1938-39, even some shows scheduled for the City Auditorium.  Possibly that is why they began running shows in Attalla.

     Unfortunately, I was wrong about the library at Samford.  I paid them a visit a couple of months ago and found that, while their catalog system still lists a lot of the newspapers I need (for Birmingham, Montgomery & Mobile), their actual microfilm holdings had suffered a really bad case of vinegar syndrome, and they lost a large percentage of what I needed.  When speaking with a librarian at the Birmingham Archives, they said hey'd had the same problem a few years ago, but that Birmingham had replaced everything they lost.  Apparently Samford lacked the budget to do the same.

Birmingham Archives

     As a result, I will have to keep making trips to Birmingham, and possibly to Montgomery.  I'm working out the relative costs of utilizing the inter-library loan system to just have the reels I need sent up to Huntsville and/or Decatur.  The issue there is the Alabama Department of Archives & History charges $15 per reel, with a limit of only two reels per loan.  So $30 a pop (plus probably a couple of dollars to the local library) for two reels, which for B'ham and Montgomery means roughly two months of newspaper.  And so far, that process seems to be slow.  I put my application in for the first two months of the 1934 Birmingham News a week ago and haven't heard anything yet.

     So, doing some basic math, I need roughly 10 years of newspapers from three major Alabama cities.  If each reel is only a month, that's something like 360 reels of microfilm.  At $15 a pop, that would run me $5,400, not including any local fees the library will charge for their effort.   Now I can get through anywhere from 8-12 reels of microfilm in a day, if I'm at the library all day.  Maybe more, I've only had one complete day so far.  Each trip to Birmingham costs me around $50, (estimating $30 for gas & $20 for food). And since I've already got 1932-33 covered, that leaves me with another 8 years to cover, which means roughly $400.
   
     I really don't think I can work any faster there because Birmingham uses the the ST ViewScan III, which is decent enough hardware, but the ViewScan software is buggy as hell and crashes constantly.  That issue, combined with the annoying library patron kiosk software intended to keep users locked into a restricted sandbox, for security purposes.  However, none of the librarians seem to know how it works!  If they had the admin password, they could at least launch the Task Manager and kill the ViewScan software so it could be relaunched without having to terminate and re-start my session, over and over.  Every other library I've visited (that has a microfilm scanner) has the e-Image Data ScanPro series of machine, which works so much better, doesn't crash (except maybe once per day), and doesn't have the annoying security software locking down their machines.  On those, I can get a lot more work done, a lot more quickly.

Alabama Department of Archives & History

    For Montgomery, I've got an extra 2 hours, round-trip, so call it $60 per trip to accommodate the extra gas.  Having not used their scanners before, I don' t know what models they have.  I need to email them and ask.  If they have the ViewScans, I'm screwed.  But if, by some miracle, they have the ScanPros (like the Tennessee State Archives have), I can probably get through 12-14 reels in a day.  Also, Montgomery has the entire newspaper archive for the state of Alabama, so I can knock out Montgomery, Mobile and Dothan, all at the same place.  The Dothan Eagle was only a weekly paper, so probably not more than 3-4 reels per year, so upwards of 48 reels (probably less), plus the estimated 120 for Mobile and 120 for Montgomery, and that's 288 reels to get through.  At 14 reels per trip, that's roughly 20 trips, at $60 each for $1,200 expenses.  So actually going there saves me roughly $3,800 over the inter-library loan route, though it does add a lot of wear & tear on my car with all that driving.

    Now I understand, so clearly, why Scott Teal says there's not really any money in publishing books on wrestling history.