The elder Puterbaugh — who worked for Parkmoor restaurants, Rike’s department store, Channel 2 TV and many other local businesses — saved everything he shot over a 65-year career. The collection includes everything from the clerks, waitresses, repairmen and “little people” of the Dayton area who did their jobs with pride to the many celebrities, including Liberace, who appeared on the old Phil Donahue show.
“I didn’t want to destroy them, but I didn’t have the time to go through all of them,” Rollie Puterbaugh said. Nor did he have the money to purchase a high-speed scanner for digitizing the photos. He has been able to post only a small portion of the collection to his Web site at public.fotki.com/Rollie08/.
In November, Puterbaugh was contacted by a local visitor to his Web site who had faced the same dilemma. Dennis Gray’s father, John Daniel Gray, had left behind some 1,300 negatives, none of them cataloged, from his high school years in the early 1940s when he shot trains, planes and automobiles all over the Dayton region.
Gray, 57, is donating his father’s collection to the archives at Wright State University, where he is getting help cataloging and preserving the photos and, more importantly, making them available to transportation buffs and historians. He suggested Puterbaugh do the same.
Puterbaugh, 58, didn’t hesitate.
“I feel the pictures belong to the people of Dayton,” he said.
Both collections are worthy additions to the special collections and archives at Wright State, said Dawne Dewey, who heads the program there. She said Wright State officials will work with Puterbaugh to determine who owns the copyrights to the old negatives — his father or the companies he worked for. Until then, Puterbaugh said, he couldn’t display the pictures in the Dayton Daily News.
Dewey encourages anyone in the Dayton region with interesting old photos, diaries, documents or scrapbooks to contact her department at (937) 225-2092. Even old family photos can contribute to documenting the social and cultural history of the region, she said.
Photographers may recognize Dennis Gray’s family name from its connection to GraLab darkroom timers. Dennis Gray’s grandfather founded the company, DimcoGray, that still manufactures the devices in Centerville. DimcoGray, then located in the Oregon District, was passed down to John Daniel Gray, who was president until the 1980s, when he sold the firm to his employees.
Gray’s father died two years ago, and his collection nearly disappeared with him. Gray said his father didn’t recognize the value of the shots and wanted to throw them away.
When the photos passed from father to son, Dennis Gray knew where to turn for help. He was familiar with the Wright State archive from his volunteer work with the St. Anne Hill Historic District and First Lutheran Church. What helped too was a high-speed scanner that his mother gave him this Christmas that can scan and digitize up to 24 negatives in an hour.
His father’s collection “was a treasure waiting to be unlocked, but the technology wasn’t there until just a few years ago,” he said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@Dayton DailyNews.com.
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