A few bits of good news came out of the past week. First and foremost, when my first two reels of the 1934 Birmingham News arrived at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library, I was only assessed a fee of $2. The HMCPL only charges $1 per microfilm reel for processing Inter-Library Loan requests, and apparently they were able to find the microfilm somewhere other than the state archives. And apparently that other library didn't charge anything for loaning out their films. YAY! I also found that the HMCPL allows up to 5 concurrent ILL requests, so I went ahead and requested the next 5 months of 1934. If all goes well, I hope to be mid way through 1935 by the end of July.
I made the long trek to Montgomery yesterday to get started on the Montgomery Advertiser. While I was fortunate to catch them on a weekend they were open (2nd weekend of every month, just like the Archives in Birmingham), they were also holding a genealogy seminar that morning. On the positive side, it meant for the first 4 hours I was there, things were quiet in the Research Room and there was no waiting for one of the two (TWO! Seriously, just two? The Tennessee State Archives has about ten!) microfilm scanners, but once the seminar let out, it started to get busy, so I packed it in for the long drive home.
While there, I managed to knock out 15 months worth of the Advertiser, from November 1931-January 1933. Another positive discovery was that the Montgomery Advertiser was a much smaller paper than I had anticipated, to the point where they could fit two and sometimes three months on a single reel. So my original estimate of 120 reels to cover 1931-1940 for Montgomery has been revised down to 55-60 reels. The combination of fewer reels to borrow, and the dramatically reduced fees greatly reduce my projected expenses for this project, which is a very good thing.
A couple of quick notes on what I found in the films I got through: Sam Siegel, heavyweight promoter in Birmingham, was announced in November 1931 as the new matchmaker for Montgomery Post No. 2, replacing Roy B. Strickland, who had requested to be relived of the duty due to being too busy with his own business. Naturally, big things were promised with Siegel coming in, but in the fifteen months I scanned through, he only ran a handful of shows at the end of 1931 into early 1932. Though I didn't find any big announcement, in June, arrangements had been made for Chris Jordan to begin running weekly shows at the Cramton Bowl, kicking things off in style with a main event between former world heavyweight champ Gus Sonnenberg against Jim Hesslyn (repeatedly misspelled as Kesslyn in the Advertiser) on June 8th. An estimated 1,000 fans turned out for the show.
Since I was there, I also asked them to pull their hard copy of the 1938 Huntsville Times to try to fill in more details for a show that was advertised for Wednesday, 20 April 1938. The microfilm at the HMCPL was missing that issue, and so was GenealogyBank.com. As it turns out, the Archives were also missing that issue. Tuesday the 19th jumped straight to Thursday the 21st, with no mention of no paper having been printed for the 20th. So I have to assume, they just failed to acquire that issue, and that the microfilms were probably taken from the hard copies at the Archives. As no mention was made of the show in the 21 April issue, and it was the last show announced in 1938, I'm leaning toward it having been cancelled due to poor turnout. A few days later an announcement was made that wrestling and boxing shows would be suspended "until the present political campaign is finished." Must have been a long campaign as shows were not resumed until July of 1939.
As a progress report, last week I had noticed that I'd apparently not abstracted the cards and results from the Tuscaloosa News, even though I had all the clippings collected already, so I knocked that out (thanks to the mid-week holiday), and have updated the grid on the first of these posts. While 1932 was a very busy year, with a lot of small towns being run, I suspect once Jordan expanded to Dothan, Montgomery and Mobile, that towns like Tarrant City, Bessemer and Homewood were largely abandoned. There was only so much talent to go around, so it would only have made sense for Jordan to have concentrated his efforts in the larger towns where he could stand to make a lot more money.
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