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Thursday, October 29, 2009

1945: HARRY PODMORE'S CHAMBERSBURG

Many years ago, an elderly gentleman down in Rancocas offered to sell me some vintage material on Trenton. He had a very large collection of trade cards, post cards, and other paper memorabilia, which was what I was searching for. I told him that I was mainly interested in old Trenton area scrapbooks. He reached into a drawer and produced two old raggedy scrapbooks and wanted to know if I was interested in purchasing them. I opened up one of them and there it was: "TRENTON IN BYGONE DAYS!" Opening the other, I found that it was also a Bygone Days collection identified as "No. 2."I trembled with excitement and asked him for the price. Knowing he had a history buff's treasure, he said he wouldn't let it go for any less than $100. That was about $90 dollars more than I had at my disposal in my very limited teen age bank account, so I had to forgo the privilege of traveling back to Hamilton with those two rare scrapbooks. Every page in those scrapbooks had taken on a "corrugated" physical shape, due to the shrinkage of the paper and the glue that held the articles. All of which brings me to the graphic above. The original was in two long vertical columns. With Photoshop software, I enhanced the image, then cut, copy, and pasted the article into four columns. The final touch was to add the source and date, producing a pristine digital version of one of Trenton's finest historians.

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