FYI, we now have 76 of the original 165 "Dusting Off the Old Ones" stories online (in the History area). This is largely due to the efforts of David S., who has spent a large amount of time transcribing and contributing the results to MilesCity.com. He deserves many thanks.

For those who don't know, "Dusting Off the Old Ones" was a series of stories published by W.B. Clarke (of Clarke Insurance Agency) in the Miles City Star and on KATL back about the 1950's or so. Mr. Clarke deserves many kudos for creating such a wonderful legacy of information that is still appreciated today.

Regards, Larry
MilesCity.com Webmaster

[This message has been edited by Larry Antram (edited 12/19/2001).]

Hi Larry,
Would you please contact me at [email protected]? I have a couple of questions I would like to ask you.
Thank you
Linda Wolff

Hi Mr. Antram,

Thanks for referring me to "Dusting Off the Old Ones". This is absolutely wonderful material for me, since a lot of it pertains to the late 1800s and early 1900s, the period in which my historical novel is set. What a great service you did by posting these articles on the Miles City Web page! I can't wait to see the rest of them.

Many, many thanks for your good work!

Laura Jones
Corvallis, Oregon

Glad you enjoy them! David S. is the man to thank however. I started by posting several of the stories. Dave has been continuing to contribute the rest as he finds the time. I know from the ones I did it is a lot of work!

Regards, Larry
MilesCity.com Webmaster

Yes, it's very tedious. I scan the stories and use OCR software to convert the scanned image to text. The original book appears to be photocopies of work done on a manual typewriter -- including erasures, overtypes, the usual stuff you'd see on old typed pages. So the OCR software has a bit of trouble and it requires a lot of proofreading and fixing up. Just getting the pages aligned properly for scanning is a chore. A single page can take 3 or 4 scans to get the alignment right.... otherwise the text appears to be running uphill or downhill and the OCR software just can't figure that out at all.

Unfortunately, lately I've been spending a lot of my spare time in the crawl space of my house cleaning up the mess that a couple of rats made... so that means less time doing things like scanning in "Dusting Off the Old Ones". : (

- Dave

Sounds like it's time for one of those amazing folks that can type at warp speed.