His and Her stories
For Mary Ellen Goddard her interest in history started when she and her husband lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Art Goddard, an aerospace engineer and project manager for Rockwell and later Boeing, was working there at the time. Mary Ellen was studying at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Nearby was the Beach School.
“It was just a one-room school house that belonged to my neighbor,” she said. “And I always wondered about it.”
She started up an independent-study project on it at school, dug into the city’s archives and eventually wrote a booklet on it, which became the basis of an effort that led to putting it on the national registry of historic places.
She was hooked on this history stuff.
Art, meanwhile, spent so much of his career working during the Cold War that he developed an interest in the Soviet Union. Eventually the two were able to visit Russia in 2000 and finally see how the other side lived. When he retired he started volunteering more to keep pace with Mary Ellen’s activities at the Costa Mesa Historical Society. Mary Ellen, who is also retired from her job working on the archives at UC Irvine, went on from Coe to earn a master’s degree in public history from Cal State Dominguez Hills.
“I realized how intereting local records and local history was,” from her experience researching the Beach School. “If you’re studying local history you can see all kinds of original documents. You don’t get that with other types of history because so few of the original documents survive.”
Soon the two will finish their book on Costa Mesa’s history up to 1939. It is expected to be published in March, and readers can also get historic Costa Mesa-themed postcards with it. Art says it’s probably the first history book on Costa Mesa in three decades, and this is no vanity project. It’s part of the Arcadia series of books on local histories. So it’ll be available in national chain stores and it’ll actually have an ISBN. The two worked on the book for six months.
There’s a flurry of activity going on over at the Costa Mesa Historic Society as Mary Ellen and Art go over some of the artifacts usually housed at the Estancia Adobe while it’s being re-roofed (as I chronicled in Wednesday’s edition of the Pilot). 
Art showed me how they use the computer to organize their materials and we slipped into a brief discussion about the digital age. They have digitally converted movie film, video, audio tapes and film slides.
“As time goes on we’re going to digitize everything,” Art Goddard said.
But what about local blogs, I wondered. They have the newspapers catalogued and saved, but a lot of material like this article here won’t be in the print edition so who will make it available for posterity 25 years from now? The Goddards weren’t sure as they said they still like to wake up in the morning and read the dead-tree edition of the paper with breakfast. But what about 20 years from now when a historian might want to chronicle how bloggers shaped local history? Will they know about superbloggers like Geoff West? I suspect so. Nothing ever really dies on the Internet. It’s the ultimate archive. The issue will be retrieval and search engines. But by then they should be very powerful and efficient. Already you can see a lot of indexed pages at the wayback machine. Try it sometime. The other day I plugged in Yahoo! in its index of old pages and it was amusing to see Yahoo’s home page eight years ago.
I’m sure a quarter-century from now there will be terrific folks like the Goddards around to maintain our history; they’ll just be spending a lot more time in front of a computer.
