Work.

Student Conservation Association work is serious business...

So with all the fun adventuring to do here, it would be very easy for the internship I’m doing to be sort of incidental. But that really couldn’t be further from the truth. The Yosemite museum archives hired five SCA interns, myself included, to complete a couple of specific projects. So for the most part, half my day is spent scanning newspaper clippings about the park from the 1920’s and 30’s, which are really fun to read, and the other half is spent “processing” an shit-ton of paper material we received from the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, which was a hospitality provider for the park for ages.

Processing consists of removing staples from paperwork and rehousing it in archival folders and boxes. As you can probably guess this is not the world’s most interesting work, but we pretty much just put on our ipods and power through it. Occasionally the monotony is broken up by funny or crazy things we find while processing, such as the letter I found this week from a park employee, authorizing the deduction of $50 from his pay (this was 1968) for damage he did to park property “while intoxicated.” This included a door ripped completely off the hinges, a broken stair, and a smashed window. Apparently things used to get pretty wild here…

In addition to the everyday stuff we have special side projects we’ve signed up for. I signed on to help out with the Yosemite Oral History Project. The project is pretty new, but basically the archivists have started doing filmed oral history interviews with people who have had long-term connections with the park. The ones they’ve completed are really cool, and they recently sent out a press release about it, so we’ve been flooded with calls telling us about folks we should include. I’m really excited about helping out with this – I love the idea of oral history as a way to document lives and historical events, and can’t wait to see what crazy stories we hear.