1979 Begins: With Cable!

 "We'll have TWENTY-FIVE channels available immediately"

I've posted previously about the missing 1979 stacks. On my very first visit, they were in place, but on that trip, I was not exhaustively working through each paper and only focusing on the front page photos. 

When I returned, the 1979 pile was nowhere to be found. We checked and rechecked drawer after drawer, flipping through other years to see if perhaps they'd been laid in the wrong place. But no 1979. 

We repeated the search on every subsequent trip, always coming up empty. Marie said, "they'll turn up when we're looking for something else." 

This went on through three trips in 2014 as well as another two in 2015. But on my 2016 trip in April, while I was there, Marie was going through drawers all over the office looking for, of all things, a bank deposit bag and, voila!, she found them. There were just THERE. She came walking into the office where my gear was set up, carrying the whole stack to me saying, "I told you so!" 

So I went a little crazy and came away with nearly 250 scans from 1979 just in case they decided to disappear again. 

I've been parsing out the earlier years I'd newly scanned in April, and we've made our way back through 1975, 1976, and 1977. 

So we're skipping 1978, because it was just about the time I was going to start going back through 1978 when 1979 came bursting into the light and I spent the remainder of my time at the Leader offices going page by page. 

So, sorry, 1978. You've been covered pretty well in past pages of the blog.

With this post and through the rest of the year (with a break for larger Christmas posts next month) starts a deeper look at the South Belt news of 1979.

Hope you enjoy!