SITU files: status report on the "mess".

Hello folks. This is just a quick note on the state of the files now that another week+ of slinging has gone on. Physically, the boxes have amazingly vacated the entire middle of the garage, leaving one with an idea of what the "final product" will look like. [The garage/file room will look like a big square carpeted area ringed by shelving units. Through the middle of the "empty middle" will stand two sets of multi-units --- four six-shelf units backed by four more, and then another set of eight arranged the same back-to back way, forming little "library corridors" that you can walk down and "read the shelves".] With any luck, and culling out the non-SITU books which came with the library [--- apparently Warth's non-anomalistic books were all tossed together in a heap with the SITU ones], we should get the old library to fit. Those shelves would then contain all the books and the journals/newsletters, the latter in new journal boxes. The smaller amounts of "artifacts", tapes, casts, et al will have to wait until we can see what space we have to work with. I'm planning on gifting several things to the collection myself [Grover Krantz' bigfoot casts, a Gigantopithecus skull reproduction, models of Nessie, Yeti, Bigfoot, ET, and maybe even my Wasgo ceremonial mask, though I wince a little on that one]. Bottomline: it would be nice to have this stuff out for display somehow.

As to the contents: as I've mentioned before, we are fortunate in that most if not all of Ivan's notebook files have survived. We are also luxuriating in a much larger than expected SITU book and journal library. Now, having peeked into every box, I am still at sea as to whether we have anything like a complete set of the Bob Warth era files. There are a large number of boxes [hmmm...30-40???] which could be them. [and probably , mainly, are]. But they are a colossal nightmare. The typical one of these looks like a chaotic pile of of unconnected pieces of paper one after another --- often partially crumpled, and rarely with surrounding context. Placed in a file folder?? Ha!!! Surely you jest!!!. No one here but myself has any confidence that they can go down through these things and have much chance of properly sorting, culling, aggregating, and finally foldering the sharpened-up contents. It's on me, folks. Towards that end, I'm shipping ten medium-sized boxes of the stuff to Wheeling to grind through over the next nine weeks there.

The good news is that we'll be looking good on the library probably by October. The bad news is that I'll be dead and gone before the "Warth-era" files are sharpened up. Oh well. We do what we can and leave the rest to you youngsters.