Like any right-minded individual, I rejoiced in the return of baseball to the Nation’s Capital in 2005 and have certainly reveled in the Washington Nationals’ fabulous 2014 season. Exciting as it has been (the post All-Star Game surge, Jordan Zimmermann’s no-hitter on the last day of the season, the eager anticipation of post-season glory), I never imagined that a perfectly timed film find–the only footage yet discovered of the Washington Senators’ 1924 World Series victory–would be the icing on an already delicious cake.
It started with Lynanne Schweighofer, a Moving Image Preservation Specialist at the Packard Campus. Lynanne’s mother had been named executor of the estate left by an elderly neighbor who passed away last year in a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. While preparing the neighbor’s house for sale, Lynanne’s father found eight cans of film in the rafters of the detached and not climate-controlled garage, a space we archivists would not normally recommend for long term storage of motion picture film…especially since these reels were labeled as nitrate film stock.
Now, nitrate film is flammable, creates its own oxygen when it burns, and we have 124 individual vaults at the Packard Campus, each at 39° F / 30% RH, to store the nearly 140 million feet of nitrate we have in our collection. Once it starts to deteriorate, the degradation proceeds rather rapidly and given the temperature fluctuations to which these reels had been subjected for years, we weren’t optimistic about their condition.
So, we contacted Liz Coffey at t