By Frank Brusca
In recent years, two long-time members of the SCA were facing end-of-life issues that included what to do with their lives’ work. Their time was coming to a close and they wanted to preserve their legacy, especially regarding their work with the SCA and the built environment.
Jim Seelen, aka The Motel King, had collected images of motels and other roadside businesses from around the world. Moreover, he had taken hundreds of original photographs that he had used to create beautiful roadside-themed artwork. Jim contacted the SCA and efforts were soon made to preserve Seelen’s digital work. I was asked to head up that effort with the goal of conserving materials that would ultimately live on the SCA’s web site. The new undertaking would be called Digital Collections.
When Jim’s hard drive arrived in the mail, I was stunned at what he sent. First was the breadth of his collection. There were close to 30,000 images, mainly from the United States and Canada, but also from 23 other countries. The second thing that struck me was how well Jim had organized his collection. He had come up with classification architecture and naming convention that made working with his files easy. As a retired IT professional with an eye for data organization, I appreciated the way Jim had organized his work.
I reviewed every single image in Seelen’s collection and many of the images brought back memories of childhood family road trips in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, there were many motels and restaurants documented in the collection that were places where we stopped.
It was a joy to work with Jim’s collection although it was quite a task to sort that many images into location and subject folders. I was sad when Jim passed in the middle of processing his collection. I knew he would be pleased to know his life’s work would live on.
Near the end of his life, founding SCA member Peter Richards also contacted us about preserving a portion of his life’s work. He had multiple collections, many of which were collections of ephemera and physical items. The SCA was able to help him find new homes for his physical collections and I worked with him to get a small sampling of his digital images identified and catalogued.
While Jim Seelen may have been The Motel King, Peter could easily have been The Diner King. He began photographing roadside entities in the 1970s and he focused on diners in New England and Georgia. I used all kinds of methods to identify Peter’s images including Google subject searches, Google Lens, as well as items in the photographs – tee shirt logos, taxi cabs, newspaper boxes, street signs, and car license plates. One image looked eerily familiar but remained unidentified until I performed a reverse image search on one of the buildings and learned it was a mall that I frequented when I was a teen. Whenever I hit a dead end identifying an image, I would consult with subject matter experts to see if they could identify the photograph. I had a few online sessions with diner expert Larry Cultrera and he was blown away by the historical record Peter had created. I agree with Larry’s assessment.
As with Jim Seelen’s collection, there were a handful of images of places my parents took us on family road trips. More than once I found myself reminiscing about trips from six decades ago.
Peter’s collection is smaller than Jim’s but is more focused on eateries.
If you have a collection that might be of interest for the SCA’s digital archives, we encourage you to contact us by email.