Butler Eagle time capsule on display at Arts Center for limited time
One of the displays unveiled this past weekend at the Butler Art Center is intended to take people back in time.
On Sunday, Feb. 16, the Art Center opened the Butler Eagle Time Capsule display to the public, a wall showcasing a collage of historic photos from the Eagle’s past, which were brought back to life by former Eagle composing employee Ed Nebel.
Nebel started working for the Butler Eagle in 1990 in its prepress department, Eagle Graphics, which closed in 1996. After that, he moved upstairs, transitioning to the composing department of the paper, where he stayed until his retirement in 2018.
“(Eagle Graphics) was a prepress business that the Eagle owned, and it was in the basement of the old building,” said Nebel, referring to the Eagle’s old headquarters near the county courthouse. “They closed up Eagle Graphics, and they asked me if I wanted to come up into the newspaper. So I said sure.”
Around 2004, Nebel began embarking on a side project, scanning old negatives from the paper’s past and storing them on compact discs.
“Having worked with Eagle Graphics, I noticed that there was a lot of negatives downstairs,” Nebel said. “It started back in December of ’63 through the ’90s. I spent a lot of years compiling this, and then I gave the Eagle what I had.”
This eventually led to the weekly Butler Eagle time capsule, a feature comprised of a historical photograph from the paper’s archives, along with a brief description. These nostalgic visual memories became so popular the feature outgrew its Wednesday slot.
“We started the time capsules, and it was on Wednesdays,” Nebel said. “Then, they said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s do this two times a week.’ So then they would put it in Sunday’s paper too, because they were rather popular. Everybody wanted to see it.”
The time capsule since then has decreased its presence to once a week, publishing on Wednesdays in the Community section of the newspaper and website. The photos are shared on social media on Sundays.
Nebel says the time capsule exhibit at the Art Center comprises 106 photos, a fraction of the amount of negatives he scanned during his time at the old Eagle building. The bulk of the photos displayed at the Art Center are from the mid-to-late 1960s and are in black-and-white.
While Nebel scanned all of the photos for display, the man who actually took the bulk of them is Jack Bowman, who spent 29 years as a Butler Eagle photographer. The earlier photos were shot with a “medium format” camera, which shoots to 2.25-inch negatives.
“Two-and-a-quarter negatives is what Jack used originally,” Nebel said. “It was mostly in the ’70s when they started going to 35-millimeter. And now, everything’s digital.”
Many of the photos depict Butler’s Main Street, which drew the interest of several patrons who were old enough to see it when the photos were originally taken. In the photos, Main Street looks aesthetically similar to how it does now, but the shops — such as Woolworth’s, Kay Richard’s, Blatt’s, The Hub Clothing and Sun Drug Company — are long gone.
One of the three walls was dedicated to photos depicting high school sports and activities, such as baseball, basketball, cheerleading, gymnastics, track and field and especially football.
Larry Sassone was particularly fond of the photos showing bands and musical performances, such as one showing a concert at the former YMCA — now the Cubs Hall on South McKean Street.
“I love these old bands playing,” Sassone said. “I love looking at the crowd, the kids and these neighborhood night pictures. Those were fun times.”
One of the subjects of the recovered photos, Rosanne Natili, was present at the Arts Center nearly six decades later to see herself in not one, but two photos as a Butler High School sequinette. One photo shows Natili leading the Veterans Day parade down Main Street.
“I was cocaptain in my senior year of high school, and that was a picture of us marching up Main Street,” Natili said.
The time capsule exhibit will be available for public viewing at the Butler Arts Center for a week.
