Vast collection creates Gunter-Daarstad archive

SANDPOINT — There will be no ribbon cutting, no velvet rope to hold back all but the most notable of dignitaries and no expansion necessary to house the latest archive to be added to the collections at the Bonner County Historical Society Museum.

To the contrary, this vast repository of local history takes up only the tiniest bit of physical space — residing, as it does, in the digital domain — and is wide open for public viewing.

Last week, the museum had just finished moving a few terabytes of photo files and documents into its system to create what is being called the Bob Gunter/Erik Daarstad Historical Archive. Before the move, that collection was stored on hard drives owned by Bob Gunter, whose passion for history found its voice and its venue on the pages of the Bonner County Daily Bee.

And when he died some 15 months ago, those hard drives fell to me and my three siblings — Robert Jr., Karen and Dawn — to preserve and protect. It was with serious trepidation that I delivered the drives to museum executive director Olivia Luther at the beginning of this summer. And it was with a wave a relief that I got her call saying the transfer of materials was both successful and complete.

Since dad was a PC expert who looked down on Mac users like myself as cheaters who had chosen an easy, drag-and-drop shortcut to computing, I literally had nightmares about plugging one if his drives into my laptop only to see an error message pop up that read: “System Incompatibility — Reformatting Hard Drive.”

There I would be, stabbing futilely at the escape key in wide-eyed terror while my father’s historical opus magnum, compiled over more two decades, disappeared in seconds.

Thankfully, it never came to that. Instead, the museum now has a powerfully appended storehouse of images and oral histories.

“My guess is that there are around 3,000 photos,” Luther said. “And there’s also all of his notes, works in progress and complete articles.”

According to Bonner County Daily Bee publisher David Keyes, the new collection could hold almost as many articles as it does photos. For years, Dad knocked out an average of at least three pieces each week between his popular columns, “Do You Remember” “What’s That?” “Tell Me a Story” “Who Am I?” and “Sittin’ Here Thinkin’.”

On Saturdays, the paper ran so many of his articles that fans gave it the nickname, the “Daily Bob.”

A large part of the new archive can be directly attributed to his personal friendship and professional relationship with Academy Award-winning cinematographer Erik Daarstad.

“The first time I met Bob was in 2000,” said Daarstad, who was then in the planning stages with the Sandpoint Centennial Commission and the museum board for what would become the Sandpoint Centennial movie. “He told me he was doing a series of oral history interviews and I said, ‘How about doing this together?’”

Never mind that the pair subsequently developed a reputation as the dynamic duo of political pot-stirring and tag team muckraking, they also clicked as interlocutor and lensman during the film project. The fruits of this collaboration were the assembled memories of some of Bonner County’s most colorful characters.

“A lot of them are gone now,” Daarstad said, noting that many of the people interviewed were in their 80s and 90s when the filming took place. “All totaled, we probably have about 90 hours of film that cover interviews with about a hundred people.”

Daarstad has placed all of that footage, along with the interview transcripts, into the archive that now bears his name.

As a side note, it should be mentioned that Dad’s contribution to the collection might not have been as robust had he not had an earlier falling out with the local museum. Both he and Daarstad never revealed the nature of the fracas, but something about it spurred my father on to try and out-museum the museum itself. He went about doing that by gleefully collecting, scanning and archiving historical photos he knew the museum did not have in its files.

From there, he carefully guarded those images, while putting the word out that he was always in the market for more “ol’ pitchers” to use in his columns. In the market, that is, as long as they were shared with him and him alone.

Before long, it became like Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence — his minions did all the work, while dad sat back and scanned the images they drummed up from family photo albums, attics and antique trunks.

“He used to call me up and say, ‘You wouldn’t believe how many pictures I just got from so-and-so!’” Daarstad said. “That would always get him so excited.”

The photos could not only walk you down just about any downtown street in Bonner County, they could also let you pop inside to stand at the counter and meet the proprietor. His Daily Bee articles further fleshed out the experience by interviewing the offspring of those individuals, who could describe how creepy it was to sneak down the basement stairs in the mercantile or how fun it was to take a ride on the hand-operated freight elevator in the hardware store.

Burying the hatchet by turning this historical collection over to the new museum administration makes it available to the public for the first time.

“It complements our archives very well,” said Luther. “The photos will be added into our catalog system, which is searchable by patrons. We also received funding from the Community Assistance League for three monitors that will be used to present running slide shows in the museum. That’s another way the public will see these images.

“It’s going to be easy for us, because these photos are already digital and pretty well organized by folder,” she added. “That saves us a lot of time.”

The museum is also in the process of creating an oral history listening station, which should be in place by next year and will include sections of the interviews conducted by the Gunter-Daarstad team.

“It’s nice to know that all of this will be seen and utilized,” the Oscar-winning cinematographer said.

Luther, who never met my father and was unaware of the past history of friction, might end up being more familiar with the man than many of the people who knew him when he was alive.

“As I’ve been weeding through and organizing his written material, it has been fun to get a feel for his thought process and who he was,” she said. “My impression is that he was definitely curious — there’s a serious depth to his notes.”

Depth being the key word here. As she unearths folder after folder of information from the hard drives, Luther keeps finding new storehouses of photos and articles stored inside each one. Like an archaeologist on a very rich dig, every new layer adds to the mystery, and, in many cases, the confusion of sorting through his files.

In the end, with his hatchet buried for him and his treasured collection now in the hands of the museum, dad seems to have found a way to get the last laugh.

“Some of the file headings on his folders were ‘A’ or ‘AA’ or ‘AAA’ and I was left to wonder, ‘OK, does ‘A’ mean it’s the most important, or is ‘AAA’ the most important?’” the executive director said. “And when I open one of those folders, I find another subset of folders — all with file headings that say, ‘A’ or ‘AA’ or ‘AAA’.”

I can hear Bob snickering in the background.