TV Collectors and Historians: your help is needed!

[Dave S]

The David Sarnoff Library and Museum suffered a tremendous amount of flood damage this past week. A large amount of original historic material related to television history has been damaged and requires immediate remediation. The library operates on a shoestring budget and could use help.

Please check out this page on the David Sarnoff Library's website for complete information.

The library / museum is a separate nonprofit entity and is NOT funded by Sarnoff Corporation. Sarnoff is going to help out with the effort, but the cost of saving the waterlogged documents is going to be way more than the nonprofit's annual operating budget.

If you're like me, you're being hit up from all sides for donations for this or that worthy cause, and life is expensive enough as it is, but please consider a flood relief donation, a membership in the Friends of the Library or just send a buck via PayPal to help out. I've sent in a donation; I hope folks here can too. This is where a lot of what we all care about all started and it was a frightening thing to see all these irreplacible historic documents potentially lost forever. They will be saved: they don't yet know exactly how they're going to cover the substantial cost, but the recovery work had to be started immediately in order to prevent mold from destroying things.

Thanks for whatever you can do!

Dave Sica
for Alex Magoun, Director of the David Sarnoff Library



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[Dave S]

Alex Magoun sends his thanks to all those, many apparently from here, who sent in a contribution. He asked me to post a note and assures me that he'll be sending out formal "thank yous" after he puts away his hip boots.

If you view TV news clip that's linked from the Library's website, you can pretty much hear his voice breaking as he described watching 10 years worth of work and dozens of cubic feet of original historic documents literally almost wash away.

Many of you know Alex from his presentations at Early Television Conventions. His style is an interesting mix of scholarly research and a wry sense of humor. Obviously judging by the "flood" of support he's received, he's made a lot of friends.

Despite the heartening amount of response, the Library still has tens of thousands of dollars worth of recovery expense to cover. Alex says please don't be shy about merely adopting a box or a folder, or even just PayPal-ing over a couple of bucks if that's what works for you.

So for Alex and the David Sarnoff Library: "Thank You."