"I have just about seen it all," says Jessica Creasey, one of two women working quality-control one afternoon last week. While plenty of images of famous people have passed under her watchful eye, she notes, the most memorable images she's seen so far were some two-headed dogs. "That has to be it," she says, not having to think about it twice.
Standing amid the 25 file cabinets now stored in the Crowley warehouse, filled with negatives awaiting scanning, the sense of being a kid in a mass-media sandbox is almost overwhelming. Pulled at random from one drawer are a series of images, from 1946, of boxing great Joe Louis before the New York Boxing Commission. Another envelope is labeled "Winchester Apple Blossom Festival, May 1946."
A third envelope, labeled "Donna Reed in Saratoga, Calif.," contains several dozen negative strips, with two pictures per negative. Check out the Life pictures already available through Google, and there are two pictures posted from the June 1946 photo shoot, one of the actress hiking up her skirt as she wades across a stream, the other of her sitting pensively.
