In Redwood City, a trove of photos from a bygone newspaper

In one of its biggest single acquisitions ever, the San Mateo County Historical Association in Redwood City has acquired more than 30,000 newspaper photos from the long-gone San Mateo Times, spanning the 1940s to the 1980s. The association’s president, Mitch Postel, tells the San Mateo Daily Journal the photos were acquired from a collector for $2,500, adding that the collector “did us a favor on the price.” Now they’re looking for journalists and others with institutional memory to help sort through the photos and identify what they’ve got.

Noted: The Times was sold to Alameda Newspaper Group in 1996 and renamed the San Mateo County Times. (The photo shows the empty lot, and the newspaper sign—all that was left after the former Times building was demolished last year.) Today, like several other former stand-alone newspapers in the Bay Area owned by MediaNews Group, the San Mateo County Times publishes as an edition of the Mercury News.
Image: Dave Price/ San Francisco Peninsula Press Club