Why I Am an Old Soul
If you have gotten to know me over these mornings we spend together, you probably already know I am an old soul. There are a few reasons for that. For one, I was raised as an only child, and I grew up on a lot of the same things my parents grew up on. But the bigger reason is that I have always had a soft spot for nostalgia. The art, the history, the simplicity, the struggles, the emotions, the pain, the trials, the tribulations, the successes, you name it, I am drawn to it.
When you spend time with the past, you get to see what the people who came before us actually went through. You get a glimpse of what was trending on a day that is nothing like today. There is something so unique about chasing stories that already happened. It feels like uncovering a little piece of a world we will never get to visit again.
A Newspaper That Stopped My Scroll
That is exactly what happened to me recently while I was scrolling through social media. I follow an Evansville Facebook group, and someone had commented on a post with a photo of a newspaper from the 1850s. It stopped me in my tracks.
Newspapers hold so much value. They hold a story, quite literally, and they date things in a way that is almost hard to imagine now. As time keeps moving, those dates start to feel further and further away, until they almost slip out of our imagination entirely. So when I saw that someone had a photo of an actual 1850 newspaper, I knew I had to reach out and talk to him.
Meeting Kenny Main
That is how I met Kenny Main.
Kenny is a collector through and through. He has everything from radio station stickers to old Evansville newspapers, and I am talking hundreds of them, collected over the years and still growing. It is wild to think about how far we have come. Now we just pull out our phones to read the news. Seeing that evolution laid out right in front of you really puts things into perspective.
A Tribute to His Grandfather
Kenny told me that his collection of old papers actually started with his grandfather. When his grandfather passed away in 1999, those newspapers were passed down to Kenny. As he was telling me the story, he said it means a lot to him to have them. It is truly a tribute to his grandfather and a piece of his memory that Kenny gets to hold onto.
Looking for a Way to Share It
But Kenny is not just holding onto these papers for himself. He is hoping to find someone who would be willing to help him put together a display or a showing, so he can share his collection of historical papers and ephemera with the community. He wants other people to experience the same thing that hooked me, that feeling of stepping into a moment in time that would otherwise be forgotten…