WSU archive gives a visual glance at area's past

Dennis Gray looks at a photographic negative from a box of his father's work. Gray has been converting the negatives shot by his father John Daniel Gray around Dayton and Cincinnati in the mid-1940s to digital files to contribute to the archive at Wright State University.

Jan Underwood Dennis Gray looks at a photographic negative from a box of his father's work. Gray has been converting the negatives shot by his father John Daniel Gray around Dayton and Cincinnati in the mid-1940s to digital files to contribute to the archive at Wright State University.

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By Jim DeBrosse, Staff Writer Updated 10:29 PM Sunday, January 3, 2010

Editor’s note: Wright State collects, preserves and makes available for research a wide variety of materials related to Dayton and the Miami Valley, including nearly 1 million photographs. Among its holdings are collections from Rike’s, the Wright brothers and the Patterson family as well as churches, businesses, clubs and arts organizations. If you’re interested in donating materials to the archive, call (937) 775-2092.

DAYTON — Like a lot of teenage boys, John Daniel Gray was fascinated with planes, trains and automobiles — a passion he combined with an early interest in photography.

Between 1945 and 1949, as a student at Colonel White and later Fairview high schools, he took some 1,300 shots in the Dayton region, from steam engines rumbling through its industrial corridor to sea planes parked at the old Cox Municipal Airport.

Gray never thought enough of the negatives to catalogue them and, prior to his death two years ago, wanted to throw them away.

But thanks to his son Dennis, who recognized the uniqueness of the collection, his father’s visual record of Dayton’s transportation history will soon find a proper home in the archives at Wright State University.

Gray’s donation inspired Rollie Puterbaugh to do the same with his father’s extensive collection. Rollyn Puterbaugh Sr. was a self-employed Dayton photographer who worked for numerous businesses in the 1950s and 1960s, including Parkmoor restaurants, Rike’s department store and Channel 2 TV.

“Both of these collections are an important part of the fabric of Dayton’s history,” said Dawne Dewey, head of special collections and archives at Wright State.

Too often, according to Dewey, families don’t recognize that their old letters, diaries, photographs, documents and scrapbooks have a wider value.

“They tell us about our city and region and what was important to us as a community,” she said.

“They give us a strong sense of place and a perspective that also connects us to the nation and world.”

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