Bob Blankman, curator for First American Title Company's extensive historical photograph collection, talks about organizing the company's collection of historical Orange County photographs, a collection he and his wife Barbara began arranging in the 1950s. Recorded at First American Title Company offices.
Transcript
Good afternoon, my name is Bob Blankman and I am the Company Historian for First American Corporation. Mainly what I deal in is pictures, old pictures of Orange County and throughout the State other Counties, other Countries even, but in the Orange County collection there is almost 13,000 pictures, all in albums that people can come in and browse thru the albums and get copies even if they wish.
Text: How did you get your start?
Well my wife Barbara went to work for Don Kennedy in the Title Company in 1954 so I've been around that long with the outfit and she started working with this Mr. Ted Parker who started the company who started the Library in the late 1950's. Among other things that she did with the company she also got work at working in with Ted on the historical picture part of it. Now she retired a couple a times from the company and then came back again and she retired finally in 1986 and was off 10 years and then came back as a volunteer to get all these pictures in these albums and we used to take just boxes of pictures home on weekends and just try to sort them out by towns and then we started with down in Capistrano giving the first numbers and then worked our way up thru the rest of the County. But as I said it is only by towns and cities and she worked at this until 2004 when she passed away. I jokingly came in to clean her desk out one day and the supervisor upstairs says "Why don't you just stay and take over the library? Well I said I don't have the history in my head like Barbara did, but I've got the routine down anyway, and so I stayed and I've been doing this since 2004.
Text: Organization of historical photographs
I'm sorry to say that it's only organized by towns or cities. Timeframe is nothing. The pictures as we got them we numbered and put into their respective books and so timeframe I can't... somebody might want something from the early 1950s which we probably have but I couldn't pinpoint it in any particular book.
Text: Ties to Orange County
And then of course Barb and I... she was a Santa Ana girl and I had no desire to go back to that cold weather in Niagara Falls and Buffalo so we just stayed right and started our family and making a living. Up till then we had rented places to live and then in 1950 we finally bought our home in Orange. It was called Palmyra Estates. Sounded great, but they put 42 houses in an orange grove and that was called Palmyra Estates. Now I'm still living there in the same house and I think I'm about the only original owner still there with the exception of some children of the other owners that still had their homes there. It's a nice place though, Orange is a real nice town. We've enjoyed it and I'm still enjoying it.
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