Orangetown Telegram

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(A special thanks to Tom O'Brien for pointing out this treasure.)

A Mr. Thomas Tryniski in Fulton, NY has opened a wonderful vista into our past in Pearl River.  Remember the weekly Orangetown Telegram - Pearl River Searchlight?  When there was something of interest at PRHS or anything else involving our community, you could read about it there.  Well, these newspaper pages were put on microfilm many years ago, where they sat in libraries (taking up much less shelf space than the original papers) and could be read with the aid of clunky viewing machines.  But that was pretty much it - you had to go to the microfiche.

Mr. Tryniski made it his mission to make digital scans of the microfilm for many old New York State papers, so now all this material is accessible on the web at his site

http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html 

And it's a lot of material - over 21 million pages! In the case of the Orangetown Telegram the years 1940-1963 have been scanned and  there are over a thousand pages just for the calendar year 1958.   Each page is a separate pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file.  Just browsing a few of these pages, picked at random, is fun.  Here's a page from January 1958, a supermarket ad showing what things cost back then.  But how in heck would you ever find something specific (like news about PRHS) if you didn't know where to look in the first place?

Here's Mr. Tryniski's second big contribution - the information on the microfiche has also been scanned using OCR - that's Optical Character Recognition technology.  It recognizes the patterns of individual letters and makes text out of them.  This text, now in digital form,  is searchable. This screen shot of the search dialog box shows how I looked or articles on PRHS football in 1958.

And here's one of the pages that turned up - the front page of the December 11, 1958 issue with a lead story on the Champion Football Pirates.

Searching on "Pearl River High School Graduation 1958"  produced this page, one I certainly don't remember, but there's a photo of Richie Swindells, Bob Stokstad and Dr. Hicks at the bottom of the page.

Now that you know how this works, try some searches and see what you can find.